Jaquelin Febrillet was 26 and working two blocks from the World Trade Center in New York when planes hijacked by jihadists crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 in New York.
In 2016, fifteen years after the deadliest attacks in history, this professional trade unionist, who became a mother of three children, was diagnosed with metastatic cancer. With only one logical explanation: the cloud of ash and toxic debris she found herself trapped in on the day of the disaster.
Richard Fahrer, 37 years old today, worked frequently at the tip of Manhattan as a surveyor from 2001 to 2003.
18 months ago, after stomach pains, this young father was detected with aggressive colon cancer, which usually strikes much older men and for which he had no predisposition.
Well beyond the nearly 3,000 people killed and more than 6,000 injured in the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse, New York continues to count people with cancer and other serious illnesses, including cancer. lung, linked to the toxic cloud that hovered for weeks over lower Manhattan.
Not just rescuers
The tens of thousands of firefighters and volunteers mobilized on the WTC site were the first to be affected: in 2011, a study published in the scientific journal The Lancet showed that they were at increased risk of cancer.
Some 10,000 of them have been identified as having cancer by the WTC Health Program, a federal care program reserved for survivors of the attacks.
Jaquelin Febrillet and Richard Fahrer are among the “ordinary” people, working or living in southern Manhattan in the wake of the disaster, a category of patients that continues to increase.
At the end of June 2019, more than 21,000 of them were registered in the care program – twice as many as in June 2016.
And of those 21,000, nearly 4,000 have been diagnosed with cancer, with prostate, breast or skin cancer being the most common.
While it is “impossible, for a specific individual, to determine the exact cause (of cancer) because no blood test returns stamped WTC”, several studies have shown that “the rate of cancer has increased between 10 and 30% in people exposed ”, explains to AFP David Prezant, chief physician of the New York firefighters, at the origin of reference studies on the subject.
And that rate is expected to increase further in the future, he says, due to the aging of those exposed and the nature of certain cancers, such as lung cancer or mesothelioma, which take 20 to 30 years to develop.
“No one could predict”
It is in this context that Donald Trump ratified at the end of July a law pushing back from 2020 to 2090 the deadline by which claims can be filed with a special federal compensation fund.
It will thus be regularly replenished, after having exhausted its initial envelope of 7.3 billion dollars, with an average compensation of 240,000 dollars per patient and 682,000 dollars for a deceased person.
After pushing back the fund’s deadline several times, Congress recognized that it was necessary to be able to cover “a person who was a baby (during the attacks) until the end of his life,” explains lawyer Matthew Baione, who represents Ms. Febrillet and Mr. Fahrer in their compensation proceedings.
“There has never been an attack comparable to September 11,” he said. “No one could predict what would happen with billions of tonnes of building materials burning over 99 days,” which released unprecedented amounts of chemicals into the air, including dioxins, asbestos and other carcinogenic substances.
While waiting to know all the consequences for the health of the tragedy, Jaquelin Febrillet and Richard Fahrer deplore that the city of New York did not do more, after the attacks, to protect the residents of the neighborhood.
“There could have been more effort to limit the exposure of healthy adults and prevent them from entering the disaster area,” says Fahrer.
The priority was for “the city to return to normal, the New York Stock Exchange reopened after a few days”, but “we were never told that something could happen”, regrets Ms. Febrillet.
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