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u/ThreeHourRiverMan 18h ago
I wonder how many, if any, of these first responders are still with us, with what we know now about inhaling all this debris.
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u/BigDog_Nick 17h ago
Some stats for you in this article. https://abc17news.com/news/remembering-9-11/2026/09/10/25-years-later-the-health-toll-of-9-11-still-follows-first-responders/
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u/circlesofhelvetica 13h ago
" The World Trade Center Health Program reports more than 9,000 first responders have died from illnesses related to the attacks."
That's out of the 56,299 first responders that enrolled in the program - so about 16% of them. Worth noting that the health program was established by Obama in Jan 2011 so that figure doesn't include any first responder deaths during the first decade after 9/11.
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u/BigDog_Nick 13h ago
Take the award and thanks for doing what my lazy ass didn’t. 😬
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u/circlesofhelvetica 12h ago
Well I would have been too lazy to go look up an article if it hadn't already been there, so team work makes the dream work!! But thank you!
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u/Yakabelly 17h ago
First responders? How about everyone who wasn't able to outrun that asbestos cloud?
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u/godspareme 14h ago
First responders worked in the dusty rubble for weeks after increasing their exposure level far greater than just the initial cloud.
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u/coupdelune 13h ago
When I worked in home health a few years ago I had a patient who was a paramedic in NYC on 9/11. He suffered from so many different health problems due to the exposure to dust and asbestos. Sadly he passed away at the age of 55 from stomach cancer.
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u/Specialist_in_hope30 16h ago
I cannot fathom the courage of these men and women. The best among us.
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u/fathertitojones 8h ago
I think it really highlighted how courage and bravery is something you find in the moment. That in an event that was beyond unexpected, people stood up to the hard thing to help others. Part of me wonders if it would look the same today with how self centered the country has become.
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u/blakhawk12 1h ago
“How can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?”
“That is the only time a man can be brave.”
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u/dogtalkgameshow 11h ago
The news video that haunts me is a few minutes after the tower collapses, and CNN finally connects to the crew on the ground and the camera person is walking through a street covered in dust and the alarms from fallen firefighters are going off everywhere.
They explain the alarms go off when a FF doesn’t move for a period of time so they can be found and pulled out of a fire.
No fire. No help. Just beeps. This was soon after the famous video of the lady in the suit looking vacant and walking down the street away from world trade. It was in that moment the gravity settled on me. We couldn’t see dead people, but they were loud enough to hear.
Having seen people jump to their deaths minutes before was a verse of the song and now we were experiencing the apocryphal refrain… no one could help. America was buried under a pile. The size of which was more than an inch, but possibly miles thick and inside the tomb, the familiar now lies.
The beeps. Each one a human helper. Stopped dead in their tracks as they tried to do the job that defies instinct. It meant I f the help can’t arrive, we are now in perdition. And we were.
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u/drunkpharmacystudent 8h ago
It’s called a personal alert safety system (PASS). The audio of the PASS alarms all going off and sounding like a nighttime wave of crickets meshing into one solid blare is bloodcurdling
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u/ShantyLady 8h ago
For me, the most haunting footage I've come across from then until now has been a clip where a person had a camera (I don't remember if it was another first responder or a news crew) and watching the colour drain from the Fire Fighter's faces as every thud heard from above them was another person they couldn't save. So with every dull thunk, they paused their planning to take a moment, and at this point of the time line, it was not a rare occurrence.
That's the clip of the day that will forever stick with me.
I was 12 or 13 when it happened, and I don't live in the US. At that point, your understanding of the world starts to become more tangible and concrete within the conceptualization of just...shapes on paper. So my first experience of the wider world and recognizing the repercussions there in was watching the world burn, and I haven't stopped watching it burn since.
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u/humunguswot 10h ago
I mean this with all due respect, do you have a link? It’s something I’d like to share with my teenage daughter who just “doesn’t get it”.
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u/dogtalkgameshow 10h ago
I tried to post a direct response but clearly I’m old https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/bcBQWi50pt
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u/dogtalkgameshow 10h ago
I tried. I honestly am not a conspiracy person but I could not find footage of this despite KNOWING I saw it. I even commented about it on a picture of the woman who is famous to those of us who were watching. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/LO7Pm2dlCQ
The closest I found is a video that is heavily favored by the search SEO like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/911archive/s/TDWC1g461j
I am not hallucinating. I’m outraged that I can’t link what I’m talking about because all of us know this was what we saw.
For your daughter, I watched the 9-11 doc on Netflix that just came out and it’s more relevant to our kids’ generation. But it lacks the raw emotion.
I bought every newspaper in my area the next day. I have newspapers from Dallas, Denton, and UNT in their entirety, as well as the time magazine from that week - describing to my 20-year old kid how I have a box in the closet that holds the record of the day my life changed is hard to understand. But he was really interested in a receipt from blockbuster video in it, and the fact that the university newspaper had classifieds.
Handing him a stack of newspapers I kept all this time, while letting the rest of my history live in vibes seemed to help. But my youngest can’t even see COVID as a life changer yet. Maybe give her some time and know they won’t experience it like us - trust they will experience your retelling of the history.
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u/dogtalkgameshow 9h ago
So this makes sense because my reply to a comment ended up a top level comment https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/0YWwHCTSoy
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u/adamtnewman 2h ago
It's comparable to us not really understanding the impact of the great depression or the two world wars.
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u/peace2calm 19h ago
I was sleeping at home when the attack took place. Someone woke me up and I went to TV and first scene I saw was one of the towers collapsing. I still cannot recall if it was happening live or a replay of the collapse.
Terrible times...
RIP.
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u/popdivtweet 4h ago
And to think the Republicans time and again dragged their feet when it came to healthcare for these folks. Shame, eternal shame.
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u/pineappledumdum 39m ago
And our government did nothing for any of them and conservatives actually voted AGAINST doing anything for them.
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u/Cheeseitfool 28m ago
Can we start putting all the 9/11 posts in a USA sub instead of the general ones. I don't need 5 days of posts over this everywhere.
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u/kidkrush 3h ago
https://youtu.be/_uYpDC3SRpM?is=MSrIIU4PUg29bbGF
John Stewart is a national treasure to continue to fight for those that survived after
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u/bstkeptsecret89 14h ago
A lady in my mom’s church was a first responder at 9/11. She died due to all the asbestos she inhaled as it swirled with dust and debris raining down on people’s faces. Breathing in particles of crystalline fibers that destroyed her lungs. She spent days at Ground Zero finding her fellow colleagues and helping dig up bodies and put out the ever burning fires because she felt a loyalty to her city and that they would take care of her.
She eventually retired and moved to Florida. That’s how my mom met her. She died a few years later. It wasn’t an easy death. It was hard. And painful.
She spent so long fighting and come to find out the government knew how bad the air was. The whole damn time.