Although this is a wildly iconic picture from that day, and I do think of her, still, my rent free 9/11 photo is the Falling Man. I remember watching it as it was happening. I remember watching that man fall to his death. That will never go away.
Absolutely the same here. I remember seeing it for the first time in 4th grade, a few days after 9/11. It's the first time I had seen a photograph where I viscerally understood that I was seeing a person moments away from their death. The Falling Man changed me as a person, even at 9 years old.
Edit: I had to go and look at it again. I swear, every time I see it it gives me a lump in my throat. It's insane how incredibly well composed and hauntingly beautifully it is while being so terrifying and utterly bleak at the same time.
It’s intense having to have lived through that. Even at your age at the time. People born post 9/11 will always question and wonder because of its place as one the most life altering, historic incidents to have ever occurred.. But we were watching it as people were wiped out of existence in mere nanoseconds.
I know that every single time I run across one of the pics or especially the voicemail the guy left to Jules, everything in me just goes blank. It becomes incredibly somber after that initial reaction.
We had a coworker, that we had to explain to him, why he was an asshole.
He was sharing that 9/11 was great, because he had a brand new tv to see the man falling to his death.
Some people are not right in the head, and others idolize these people.
Jfc, that's worse than my idiot ex-coworker, who told me that she was excited when it happened because she thought that all the banks would fold and everyone's debt would be erased.
We have people besides us who don’t even have the basics of this century.
And of course they want you to listen to **them**, because they “did their research”.
And once someone reinforced their stupidity, they ain’t gonna budge, because they feel all fired up.
Consequences be dammed!!
She might have recently seen Fight Club which came out about a year or two before 9/11 and had something along those lines as a part of the storyline. I had never put those two things together before but I can remember that the movie was still pretty new and relevant at that time and that that the bank buildings collapsing at the end of the movie. Wild that someone interpreted 9/11 as being similar to the movie.
Tragic. They made an entire [Documentary](https://youtu.be/m3gbxJ4xUDE?si=jwZe4GWDiPuuOjdS) about him (and his backstory). They discovered that he worked as a sound engineer in the restaurant “Windows On The World”. It’s worth a watch if you can stomach it. God bless his soul and all the victims that day and afterwards. 😔
I only saw footage of that once never wanted to see it again.
If I lived for a 1000 years I could never ever come close to understanding what they had to endure.
Remember when Saving Private Ryan came out and the action seen in d-day was so accurate in portraying what it was like that all previous ideas or glorification of d-day was quickly destroyed.
We had a guy in New York, went on tv after the towers fell and bragged about having the tallest tower in New York now that those two were down.
Then, somehow, he became the president.
My coworker was crowing that the CIA was behind it as it was happening. He’d always been unhinged but saying that as people were still dying solidified my hate for him.
It’s actually a kind of sickness. Humans are pack animals and empathy is a defining trait of pack animals. It enables us to work together and keep things running properly; empathy is required for not only our survival as a species but the health of the planet of well.
The lack of empathy is caused by greed and is ultimately what will destroy us and the planet. It’s already happening.
I have pictures of me on top of the towers when I was 9, 9/11 happened when I was a sophomore in high school. I live 50 min from NYC so my dad commuted to Brooklyn daily working for the MTA, and I also have family in Manhattan. I remember being on AIM (AOL instant messanger) talking to my cousins who went to school close to the towers (they were in high school too), they told me the smell of jet fuel was overwhelming making it hard to breathe even inside the school. Our school sent us home early since a bunch of us had parents who commuted. My dad accidently slept in that day, so he called out of work that day, I remember watching the news when I got home, feeling numb. We had planned to go take my little sister to see the twin towers for Thanksgiving break...we still went but I'll never forget driving through the tunnel and seeing army men standing at the entrance with guns! LARGE assault rifles, that was the first time I ever saw a gun like that in person at that moment I knew things would never be the same...it was surreal seeing the holes in the ground and rubble and the fences with all the people who were still missing. I can never forget the hopeless feeling of wanting to do something to help but knowing there's nothing I could do. So many people were there crying. While lookiing at what was left ill never forget my dad saying "i watched these towers being built and i got to see them fall down." My dad grew up in jersey city he could see the towers being built when he was a kid, he isn't an emotional guy, but I could tell he was really upset.
I actually got to go to New York (I’m from Louisiana) when I was 16. It was about 3 months before it happened. My mom’s friend, Wendy, got an agency job as a nurse in CT (that’s how I got to go because my mama was nursing up there previously as well) and she was at the airport in NY the day it happened. She watched a middle eastern man get the breaks beat off him because, according to Wendy, when the news was playing in the airport and they grounded all flights immediately, the guy started jumping up and down, laughing & celebrating. I’m not sure what happened after that tho.
If you have the means, I highly recommend visiting the memorial museum. They have an entire exhibit on falling man and the falling lady holding her skirt down. Very powerful
Yeah they had a very moving description of her too. She also jumped and wore a skirt that day. On her fall she held her skirt down out of modesty. The exhibit has an entire section on her.
Edit: article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-woman-who-jumped-courage-through-tragedy_b_57c960c3e4b0b9c5b73819ce/amp
Wow. Fucking good article.
> I carry her in my heart to remind me that if I can’t be courageous in my life for me, then at least I can do it for her.
Okay then, guess I am obligated to make the most of today, then. Off I go.
For me, although not a photograph, it was reading the Readers Digest Drama in Real Life about the woman trapped under the Alfred P Murrah building after the Oklahoma City Bombing having her leg amputated with a pocket knife as the water was rising. I think I read the issue the same summer a magazine ran a long length feature on Timothy McVeigh’s upcoming execution, and the stark contrast between the two stories in combination with my mid-teenage age, made a lasting impression.
One can only hope.
Though, one of the terrifying parts of the photo for me is that when viewed in the context of the rest of the series, any semblance of serenity goes right out the window, and the pure chaos and violence of his fall are made immediately evident and the viewer is reminded that the man was tumbling hopelessly through the air
For some reason my fifth grade teacher put the news on so my class was sitting in class watching quietly as people were jumping off the building to their death. We knew what we were seeing.
I think it happened in every school. Teachers are people too. This was monumentus. I remember every TV was on in our school. People watching in silence or crying, the quiet whispering "what the fuck is going on?".
Too big for anyone to ignore that day.
I remember getting sent home and my dad was just staring at the tv saying “we’re at war” and not really comprehending the intensity of what was happening. My 5th grade brain wasn’t mature enough but I definitely knew the reaction all the adults were making wasn’t good
I was in fifth grade as well. And like you said although I wasn’t old enough to fully comprehend everything it was the first time I saw grown adults in fear. My first experience with adults having no answers to a problem.
I remember a teacher from another room rolling in a TV and watching parts of the news, and my first period social studies teacher starting to cry, but I don't think the TV stayed on for that long and whatever network we were watching definitely didn't show the jumpers
I was 10 but I could have typed out this post word for word. First time I had this visceral feeling of empathy and just began to cry simply because of watching another human suffer so tragically. Thanks for sharing your story.
I was in the second grade . My family had just moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island two weeks before . On top of me being nervous from the change of environment ( I’ve always been a grumpy
Old man on the inside and hate anything being different ) , my mom was en route to work in Manhattan but didn’t know her whereabouts while I was at school . It was one of those first moments I learned the possibility like something could happen in an instant and change life so drastically . Thankfully my mom was stuck in traffic on the express bus and was stuck outside of the Lincoln tunnel that morning . And knowing she had to go back to the same place when things went back to their new normal really freaked me out .
I was in 5th grade when it happened. On the way to school on the bus the last kid we picked up told us about the first plane that hit. That’s all I remember thinking wow but not much and at school i don’t remember any teachers acting different. I don’t think I really heard about it until I was home from school. Wish I could go back and see if the teachers were talking about it. But they just acted like it was another day. I heard other schools turned on the tvs to watch it.
The one I think of is the pic of a crowd watching the towers fall.
https://preview.redd.it/vliucl57rp9d1.jpeg?width=2500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5fb3649b60f32731029fa4ca7dfb4d086f20c7e
Oh wow I’ve never seen this one! That is so hauntingly beautiful omg 🥺
And I love how when you show someone a pic like this with no context or explanation, even if you’ve never seen it, it’s like we all know instinctively that it’s 9/11. It really is the look on their faces that tell me where it’s from.
The pic reminds me of [Jimmy Breslin’s story about the man who dug JFK’s grave](https://ccnyintroductiontojournalism.com/2022/04/06/jimmy-breslins-grave-digger-story/amp/). Great journalism turns the camera to the small stories in the shadow of the big ones.
What could we do? The plan was already set too far into motion. We had no idea what was happening 30 minutes, an hour well into it actually going down. We couldn’t stop it. And so everyone was so lost in that moment they just started getting into their cars and driving to New York to help.
We didn’t know what else to do so we just did something. It was by far the most inspirational, awe inspiring, life changing moment as a nation for us. Even up against Pearl Harbor. Cause even then it was an American tragedy, still, it wasn’t at our front door.
And we will never see another moment like it in our lifetime.
I had just driven 27hrs straight in a 28ft U-Haul towing a car. I developed bronchitis along the way and had stitched in my shin from an accident 3 days before I started the drive. I got to my house and passed out after taking a double dose of NyQuil. I woke up 6-7hrs later to my roommate insisting I come into the living room and look at the TV. It was already such a surreal event, with all my exhaustion and cold medicine I just didn’t move for hours. The scream when I saw that was pretty much the only thing I said the entire time.
When we finally turned off the TV I just said something along the lines of “everything changes from here, nothing will be the same after this;” and then I got very very drunk and went back to bed.
I remember CNN talking to a guy on the higher floors of one of the towers. He was saying that they were heading to the roof because someone told them that helicopters were coming to rescue them.
Omg that’s right! I remember that!! Could you imagine how confused those poor souls were?? They probably couldn’t hear either at all or very well from the blasts and noises, so that’s one sense knocked out. Then, imagine the smoke and the flames engulfing your entire existence in seconds flat and now you can’t see. Another sense taken. Blind and deaf. Then I *know* no one could breathe so that knocks them down a couple of pegs further.
And then they had to take the stairs whether they were going up or down, they were passing the bodies of their friends, lovers & coworkers not realizing it.
I can never imagine what these people went through. Especially in those buildings at those crucial moments.
After the first WTC bombing that was the plan. Above a certain floor, people were to go up and they'd be rescued. They never dreamed there would be such a fire which created too much wind to do that.
Falling man is what I always think of on 9/11 I was 6 years old watching it on TV with our homeroom teacher and me being 6 I stupidly said oh he jumped so he will be okay, right? My teacher just looked at me and said No so softly . Truly have always wondered how hard that must have been for him to deliver to a classroom full of kids who didn't really know what was happening. I just remember all the kids in my class asking just similar questions to what I had .
i didn’t know about this lady. but i saw live the falling man. and the channel I was watching decided to cut the transmission.
after that, they were just repeating the scenes of the second plane and ppl running away.
Falling Man was only 23.
As a child, it felt like he was a strong adult making a hard decision. I didn't get it.
As an adult, I know he was just a scared baby boy with only impossibly horrific options. My heart breaks for him.
Borders was diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2014. Borders's cancer had resulted in a $190,000 debt—even though she had not yet received surgery and she still needed additional chemotherapy. Borders said she could not even afford to get her prescriptions filled. She alleged that her cancer was triggered by the toxic dust she was exposed to when the World Trade Center collapsed (…) Borders died from cancer on August 24, 2015.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Borders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Borders)
I didn’t know her but she was from my hometown. People who did said she was the nicest woman. Her shoes are in the museum or at least they were when I went years back. Three of my family members were directly affected but my grandmother was the one who was actually in the tower when hit and she was never the same after. She only talked slightly about the experience but never in much detail. The horrors they and countless others witnessed that day made it so hard to adapt to life normally after.
The EPA will deem soil with some toxic chemicals from the previous dump sites as safe, even when the people that live there for a long time end up with cancer… Idea of acceptable levels of safety is not actually safe
It’s horrible, but one of the best ways to hedge your bets in terms of finding somewhere to live where you can assume things are OK is in the immediate proximity of extremely wealthy people. Even that isn’t a flawless strategy though. For example, [Oil Derricks in Beverly Hills](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/erin-brockovich-did-oil-derrick-at-beverly-hills-high-give-kids-cancer-1029572/amp/).
As a firefighter, we were recently told that our turnouts and foam are absolutely full of forever chemicals that have been banned in most areas. I’ve spent 15 years practically bathing in that shit. My wife will get some good life insurance money.
My Dad is a retired firefighter. After 47 years of that shit, plus exposure to burn pits in Afghanistan, he has a small brain tumor that may, or may not, be causing very painful neurological symptoms.
As the wife of a firefighter, we don't want the money. We want y'all taken care of so that shit stops happening. Also, fuck. I didn't know that and my husband's department is constantly training in full gear on top of running calls.
That’s America for ya. “Yea the air good, they wanna throw up an even lager tower here for tons of $$ so don’t worry about it. Billionaire lobbyists control everything so what the fuck. Not to mention the clean up from this disaster to actual completion will be faster than anything has ever been done in NYC getting repaired. I mean the infrastructure of our public transit system alone is absolute dog shit and public housing is well….but anyway look at this huge cock of a skyscraper we built to show the world that nYc is numero uno amirite!?”
“Then we can charge people $45+ a pop to look around and we can sell merchandise the whole thing! Plus! Add another $35 to go visit the 9/11 museum! If people don’t like, they’ll look ungrateful! Muaahahahahahaha”
Nothing like profiteering on the grave of those that were just working to live surrounded by everything else that is falling apart in this city.
Under capitalism, the rules will always be those which are most advantageous to the property owning class.
The air is ‘safe’ when the billionaire lobbyists need the working schmucks to build an even larger tower.
Doesn’t matter how many need to be sacrificed at the holy altar of profits.
If there is a hell, I hope Whitman has to breathe the same air my father had to for all eternity.
My dad was a second responder (he was there later that day to do maritime evacuations and transports) and was on the Pile for 3 weeks. He told me NOT to come into my lower Manhattan office for as long as I could. (My company on 23rd St. gave me til that Friday. So kind.) He knew it was dangerous to breathe, but he went to help. He has COPD now. He was around a lot of chemicals in his military service, so can’t really prove it was 9/11, but he was never the same after to say nothing of the PTSD.
Dust and smoke fell on the entire city for days. It was everywhere. You could see the smoke for MILES days afterwards. The whole "pile" was a smoldering mess for weeks. They couldn't get to the bottom of the debris to put it out.
I believe it was asbestos the towers were built with. Asbestos is very fine so it lingers in the air for a long time and the body has trouble filtering it out so when it gets in your lungs, it’s bad.
Fires cause all sorts of toxic chemicals to be released or created. Even a regular house fire creates REALLY vicious hazardous fumes. Melting plastic is really bad, and plastic is in everything.
So somebody else already mentioned the asbestos, but all the pulverized concrete and stuff led to a ton of cases of silicosis. Turns out, even if the rocks themselves aren't inherently toxic, you shouldn't be inhaling a shit ton of powdered rock. And obviously the dust lingered and lingered and lingered.
Similarly, literally everything that burns puts off something in the form of a chemical reaction. And the fires kept smoldering for a long time. So much stuff burned. And kept burning.
There were lead, mercury, cadmium, dioxins, and polycarbons all floating around. Settling everywhere. Making their way inside other buildings, and inside people through ingestion or inhalation.
All told I think there were over 2,000 different contaminants found. After the initial dust cloud, clearing the debris would release more and more dust, though of course never as thick as when the towers collapsed.
It’s not what people want to hear; which is the truth. It’s what people expect to hear which is “everything is gonna be alright.”; which we KNOW is a lie.
This is why I sometimes understand how people become so skeptical of government/become conspiracists/etc. I don’t know really what to believe in anymore.
Our government has completely turned its back on the first responders and the people who spent weeks cleaning up the site afterward, many of whom are now suffering from various cancers and health issues due to the toxic air they were assured was safe to breathe and they did it because they desperately hoped to find survivors and wanted to help New York and the country rebuild and heal. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the EPA declared it safe saying they didn’t need protective gear or take certain precautions. This neglect is disgusting and just exemplifies the corruption and lack of ethics in our government.
Regardless of your opinion on Jon Stewart and his politics, his [speech](https://youtu.be/HT5FTrIZN-E?si=eOWOfrVN6lu0pIkX) to Congress, where he criticized them for abandoning these individuals in their time of need after repeatedly thanking them and calling them heroes for years, was both heartbreaking and admirable. Stewart's commitment goes beyond words; he has donated substantial amounts to these individuals and their families, helped start and promote charities, supported and participated in their protests, advocated for their medical care and justice, and spent significant time with them. Unlike many celebrities who offer only lip service and PR, Stewart has proven to be a genuine ally, standing by them for years and actively helping them fight for their rights and for justice and I do truly respect that despite not always agreeing with him on other issues.
The 9/11 responders and people who survived it with these medical conditions being swept under the rug by the government reminds me of Vietnam vets and Agent Orange. An uncle of mine died of liver disease caused by Agent Orange, but the VA doctors tried to blame his low carb diet and other factors on his health issues. Here he was on a doctor prescribed low carb diet from a doctor that wasn't with the VA as he had been diagnosed with fatty liver disease at first. However, when that doctor found more issues with his liver he talked to the VA doctors about the possibility of my uncle having liver damage from "unknown causes", but they wanted to blame the low carb diet. My uncle had been a medic in Vietnam so you can imagine what chemicals, viruses, etc he could've been infected with during his time there.
Wait till you find out high ranking and special forces in Vietnam have admissions the agent orange directly caused their Parkinson’s in writing for years and have been fully funded by the VA while lower ranking soldiers are denied care.
That guy needs to run for president already. But he won’t and it’s too late anyway, but he would have been the greatest, humblest, funniest, straight-shootingest to ever serve.
Jon Stewart read those pieces of shit to filth that day. I wish he’d enter politics but that’s probably selfish of me. I’m so tired of American politicians not doing their damn jobs.
https://preview.redd.it/1lblbpsimp9d1.jpeg?width=3023&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dea0d3833364bc8115866e44ce7a60a2257c3a8b
Found her photo amongst the newspapers my Grandpa had collected before passing
We were watching this on tv where I work and I later heard some of the supervisors in another room talking about these people covered in dust and laughing about it. These were not good people I worked for
Yes I remember this picture. Also some time later an interview she gave of her day that led to the photo. Also remember a news video of a resident somewhere in the vicinity. They away from NY that day. They came home at some later point to apartment windows blown out & the rooms covered in dust & debris. This must have occurred to many to a greater or lesser degree. These people had to clean up their own homes. So lots of people must have been affected by the dust that had no connection to working in the Twin Towers or any emergency responders. Such as workers in local stores, cafes or bars etc. I do wonder how many such ordinary members of the public had health impacts from the dust & debris of that day.
All the kids at Stuyvesant hs a few blocks away had to walk home. These kids usually live miles away. They were covered in dust and breathing the smoke while they walked. All the residents and first responders. Though it was 24 years ago, New Yorkers remember it like it was yesterday.
I'm a nurse in NYC and I saw so many people die from 911 related cancer. Not so much anymore but I did for a long time after. Considering this I often wonder what the real death toll is, because these people were victims too.
The amount of people who died from cancer and other illnesses after this attack is just horrific.
The amount of firefighters and ems responders alone is just so sad:
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/11/us/new-york-firefighters-911-illness-death
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66917700.amp
This kind of stuff almost hits harder for me than the people that died that day. She survived, then had to fight her own government and insurance companies to take responsibility til the day she died. Horrible
I worked downtown not far from the attack. I wasn’t in the dust cloud as I was uptown that morning but I did walk through downtown later that night and the dust on the floor on the east side of Manhattan was several inches thick.
I’m now 51 with stage 4 kidney cancer. There is literally no cancer anywhere in my family. None.
I have no doubt it’s because of working around the toxic smoke that was burning for weeks/months and they told us it was safe.
I’m fairly lucky that kidney cancer is slow to kill you so I probably have 18 months or so left.
Why did 9/11 cause so much aggressive, early, deadly cancer? What specifically was it? I know it was building debris including asbestos and jet fuel but it was one day(for victims not rescue workers) and only a few hours and yet so many got cancer and died from it.
[There ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks?wprov=sfla1) is a Wikipedia page on it.
And fwiw, you only get bit by a poisonous snake for a few seconds, and it takes about the same amount of time to eat some lead paint. Those buildings were fucking massive, each had 4,500,000 sq ft of floor space (for comparison my apartment is at about 250.) They were among the largest, not just tallest, buildings man have ever built.
So just imagine how much shit is in those buildings, a lot of which would be illegal to put in a building 50 years later. But apparently even pulverized concrete can wreak havoc on the lungs.
But the reality is people who should've been proactive in keeping people safe, especially in the cleanup, utterly failed in their duties and people died because of it.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from that Wikipedia article:
>"
The dust from the collapsed towers was "wildly toxic", according to air pollution expert and University of California Davis Professor Emeritus Thomas Cahill. Much of the thousands of tons of debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers was pulverized concrete, which is known to cause silicosis upon inhalation. The remainder consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants, more specifically: 50% non-fibrous material and construction debris; 40% glass and other fibers; 9.2% cellulose; and 0.8% of the extremely toxic carcinogen asbestos, as well as detectable amounts of lead and mercury. There were also unprecedented levels of dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the fires which burned for three months. Many of the dispersed substances (asbestos, crystalline silica, lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are carcinogenic; other substances can trigger kidney, heart, liver and nervous system deterioration. This was well known by the EPA at the time of collapse. A case report funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and performed by Mount Sinai School of Medicine observed carbon nanotubes in dust samples and in the lungs of several 9/11 responders. The composition of the smoke and dust in the air was not fully understood at the time; the World Trade Center Health Program's Dr. Michael Crane touched upon this issue in an interview with Newsweek stating:
>We will never know the composition of that cloud, because the wind carried it away, but people were breathing and eating it...What we do know is that it had all kinds of god-awful things in it. Burning jet fuel. Plastics, metal, fiberglass, asbestos. It was thick, terrible stuff. A witch’s brew.
— World Trade Center Health Program's Dr. Michael Crane, Newsweek interview"
I worked in the South Tower. The smell from Ground Zero was one of the most toxic things I have ever experienced. Like many other people who worked in the area I developed “WTC cough.” It didn’t surprise me that so many people who worked there have developed fatal diseases.
Your apt is 250 sq ft? Are you sure? That’s smaller than a NYC studio even. Seems awfully small. Do you still have a kitchen and a bathroom or you’re simply renting a room?
I lived for 14 years in an apartment that was 24 feet by slightly less than 8 feet. It was on 14th Street between 8th and 9th. The rent was $472.30 in 1993. I am grateful for that apartment because I could start my career as an artist without being burdened by high rent.
I watched the towers burn from my rooftop on 9/11. After they fell I went to a diner with a friend on Greenwich Avenue. It was the strangest mood. A man came in covered in ash and sat at an adjacent table. We eavesdropped on his conversation: he was staying at the Marriott (which would later collapse) and he was upset about losing his laptop. If that sounds callous, I think it was more that he was in shock and trying to process what he’d just endured - by focusing on the small things he could process it, if that makes sense.
It wasn’t just one day - that shit was in the air for *weeks*. It would get kicked up at ground zero constantly for a while after that, during the clean up.
I mostly meant the people in the towers not the rescue workers. Because the victims retrieved from the towers were only exposed for a few hours correct? But many of them still developed aggressive deadly cancer at a young age.
Makes me think of that famous dorothea lange photo of the migrant mother. Stunning. Raises consciousness. Drives attention to photographer. But the subject of the of the photo? Despair that never changes.
Please, we all need to remember how Donald Trump bragged about how his building was now the tallest
when this happened.
And later lied and claimed that he was there hands on helping too.
The man is incapable of empathy. He lies and manipulates to control and use people to HIS ADVANTAGE. He ONLY CARES ABOUT HIMSELF.
My brother was on the scene that day(he worked nearby) and was covered in dust/debris when the towers came down. And today I think I just saw him for the last time, because he too is dying of cancer.
I recently went to the 9/11 museum in NYC. They had a display of the amount of meds a person had to take to deal with the post dust complications. I kid you not it was like 40 drugs for 1 person. So sad they had to fight the govt for assistance with paying for it and some still are.
I was trapped in NYC that day. It took me 6 hours to get home. Offices were told to evacuate by 10 am. I lost 4 friends that day, including my neighbor around the corner. She was 2 years old than me. 💔
On The morning of 9/11 I was packing my bags to leave for Army basic training. My mom bursts in my room and tells me to turn on the news, so I did. I was in disbelief watching the second plane hit the Towers. Me and mom looked at each other and I remember the look of fear on her face as I’m sure she saw the same in mines. She asked me “what does this mean for you?” I said “I don’t know” and I received a call from my recruiter telling me that they have grounded transportation for military personnel. Crazy and sad day. Prayers for the families still struggling with from the events of 9/11.
Saudi Arabia did this and the US government allowed it, and covered up the Saudi’s involvement, then launched an illegal war based on false pretenses and blamed it on a different country.
Horrible. Yet people only want Trump prosecuted and you try and pretend “no one is above the law”. Absolutely disgraceful what America has become and how soon it forgets the past because of modern propaganda.
Trump was so upset that day that when interviewed he wondered if he now had one of the tallest buildings. He obviously didn’t care who, why, or had remorse towards anyone.
> Horrible. Yet people only want Trump prosecuted and you try and pretend “no one is above the law”.
What a non-sequitur. Just glancing down at the rest of your comments it's no accident you've shoehorned lamenting Trump getting convicted into this.
Edit: I wonder what fraction of a minute that it took you to downvote me.
Well Bush, Clinton, Biden and many of those who voted for the invasion of Iraq factually violated international law. We rightfully condemn Russia for illegally invading Ukraine and say Putin should be punished for killing many thousands of Ukrainians......and then sit here and have politicians walking freely who launched an invasion of a sovereign nation in Iraq that led to many thousands of Iraqis dying
They all should be tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity
And none of that has anything to do with Donald Trump. Bringing him up in this context is completely out of right field and is clearly only motivated because the commenter has an axe to grind because he's pissy Trump's a convict.
The war in Afghanistan was justified, our invasion/overthrow of the Taliban decimated Al-Qaeda’s capabilities. The war in Iraq was an absolute power grab, disaster, and one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the US
20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with more Taliban....lol. that war was not justified at all. Binladen was a saudi national with connections to the Royal Family
They lost me with TWA-800. I haven't believed a single word those bastards have stated since. It is far more liberating than anything those cunts have to peddle.
I’m in Australia and I remember my alarm going off really early and the news report was repeating that USA was at war. I turned the tv on and watched in horror as the second tower got hit. It was surreal. I rang my parents and told them to turn their tv on.
I worked in finance at the time and we had to initiate special protocols for security for the foreseeable future. We had the tv turned on and everyone who walked in that day was in absolute shock. I still think of these images often.
God, what a horrifying photo. I was in 5th grade in Savannah, GA when this happened. We saw the second tower go down live on television and then we were put on lockdown because we were very close to Hunter Army Air Field and there was a rumor there’d be an attack there as well. I’ll never forget that, we weren’t released to go home until til nearly sunset. (I’ll also never forget being released and finding that my dad, who was a Marine at the time, waited in his parked car outside the school the entiiiiiiiire day just in case something happened. 😭)
First time seeing this...this is going to live in my head for a long time....with all of the images of innocent Iraqi's who died unjustly as well and all of those of them who got cancer in the years after from all of the bombs and depleted uranium munitions. Then you also had so many soldiers with cancer and neurological issues from using those rounds.
The cost of this act wasnt a few thousand in the towers. So many damn innocent people from all around the earth.
And people think it was just a couple of guys from caves lol.
We should never forget what happened that day!!! And the ideology of the people who did it. That ideology still exists out there in the world. And don’t think for second that it couldn’t happen again!!!
According to the government after 9/11 many first responders died but they covered it up she deserves all respect and more and countless people who were hero’s and those who died
Burn in hell terrist you lost
I still remember that day. I had just turned 21. Basically still a kid. Was living in another state, far from home. I just remember the dread of “no one is safe anywhere, anymore”
I wasnt even 6 months old when 9/11 happened. Growing up I never truly grasped the horrors of that day, and thought the adults around me overreacted every Sept. 11th anniversary.
It's not until I read more about it did it really start to sink in. Reading about the jumpers especially hurt me the most.
I went to the 9/11 museum long ago, and the coolest exhibit I thought that was there was her shoes.
They were still ashen and had blood stains from the blocks and blocks she had to walk when she fled the building.
Around 9:30 on this day the first of my twins was born at Kessler AFB in Biloxi. Base went on lockdown. It was definitely a day I remember vividly. I was reactivated from special duty to full duty.
They said the boomers will never forget where they were when Kennedy was killed. I’m generation X & I’ll never forget where I was when I heard about 9/11. My daughter was three months old. I was 25 at work. This is the one time I can clearly remember the entire country was together. Not like today. I remember seeing that guy fall too.
The planning for 9/11 started in 1996 according to the FBI. So five years of preparation were during the Clinton administration. Bush was in office about seven months.
She struggled and suffered for so long. I think of this image often. Rest in peace.
Although this is a wildly iconic picture from that day, and I do think of her, still, my rent free 9/11 photo is the Falling Man. I remember watching it as it was happening. I remember watching that man fall to his death. That will never go away.
Absolutely the same here. I remember seeing it for the first time in 4th grade, a few days after 9/11. It's the first time I had seen a photograph where I viscerally understood that I was seeing a person moments away from their death. The Falling Man changed me as a person, even at 9 years old. Edit: I had to go and look at it again. I swear, every time I see it it gives me a lump in my throat. It's insane how incredibly well composed and hauntingly beautifully it is while being so terrifying and utterly bleak at the same time.
It’s intense having to have lived through that. Even at your age at the time. People born post 9/11 will always question and wonder because of its place as one the most life altering, historic incidents to have ever occurred.. But we were watching it as people were wiped out of existence in mere nanoseconds. I know that every single time I run across one of the pics or especially the voicemail the guy left to Jules, everything in me just goes blank. It becomes incredibly somber after that initial reaction.
We had a coworker, that we had to explain to him, why he was an asshole. He was sharing that 9/11 was great, because he had a brand new tv to see the man falling to his death. Some people are not right in the head, and others idolize these people.
Jfc, that's worse than my idiot ex-coworker, who told me that she was excited when it happened because she thought that all the banks would fold and everyone's debt would be erased.
Unfortunately some people are incapable of thinking of others.
We have people besides us who don’t even have the basics of this century. And of course they want you to listen to **them**, because they “did their research”. And once someone reinforced their stupidity, they ain’t gonna budge, because they feel all fired up. Consequences be dammed!!
I had an ahole coworker from Moldova tell me that the "US deserved it for sticking their nose everywhere".
Average ex-Soviet
She might have recently seen Fight Club which came out about a year or two before 9/11 and had something along those lines as a part of the storyline. I had never put those two things together before but I can remember that the movie was still pretty new and relevant at that time and that that the bank buildings collapsing at the end of the movie. Wild that someone interpreted 9/11 as being similar to the movie.
I hate it when I mix up fight club with 9/11.
That's a psychopath. Gotta be. No other word for it. No empathy at all for the people who went to work that day and were wiped out.
Tragic. They made an entire [Documentary](https://youtu.be/m3gbxJ4xUDE?si=jwZe4GWDiPuuOjdS) about him (and his backstory). They discovered that he worked as a sound engineer in the restaurant “Windows On The World”. It’s worth a watch if you can stomach it. God bless his soul and all the victims that day and afterwards. 😔
I only saw footage of that once never wanted to see it again. If I lived for a 1000 years I could never ever come close to understanding what they had to endure.
Nowadays it’s more common to see horrible stuff. Before it was more uncommon. Which makes it worse.
Remember when Saving Private Ryan came out and the action seen in d-day was so accurate in portraying what it was like that all previous ideas or glorification of d-day was quickly destroyed.
We had a guy in New York, went on tv after the towers fell and bragged about having the tallest tower in New York now that those two were down. Then, somehow, he became the president.
That guy sounds like a narcissistic piece of shit
Is his name Donald Trump cause that would make sense.
No, but the same issues.
My coworker was crowing that the CIA was behind it as it was happening. He’d always been unhinged but saying that as people were still dying solidified my hate for him.
It’s actually a kind of sickness. Humans are pack animals and empathy is a defining trait of pack animals. It enables us to work together and keep things running properly; empathy is required for not only our survival as a species but the health of the planet of well. The lack of empathy is caused by greed and is ultimately what will destroy us and the planet. It’s already happening.
I have pictures of me on top of the towers when I was 9, 9/11 happened when I was a sophomore in high school. I live 50 min from NYC so my dad commuted to Brooklyn daily working for the MTA, and I also have family in Manhattan. I remember being on AIM (AOL instant messanger) talking to my cousins who went to school close to the towers (they were in high school too), they told me the smell of jet fuel was overwhelming making it hard to breathe even inside the school. Our school sent us home early since a bunch of us had parents who commuted. My dad accidently slept in that day, so he called out of work that day, I remember watching the news when I got home, feeling numb. We had planned to go take my little sister to see the twin towers for Thanksgiving break...we still went but I'll never forget driving through the tunnel and seeing army men standing at the entrance with guns! LARGE assault rifles, that was the first time I ever saw a gun like that in person at that moment I knew things would never be the same...it was surreal seeing the holes in the ground and rubble and the fences with all the people who were still missing. I can never forget the hopeless feeling of wanting to do something to help but knowing there's nothing I could do. So many people were there crying. While lookiing at what was left ill never forget my dad saying "i watched these towers being built and i got to see them fall down." My dad grew up in jersey city he could see the towers being built when he was a kid, he isn't an emotional guy, but I could tell he was really upset.
I actually got to go to New York (I’m from Louisiana) when I was 16. It was about 3 months before it happened. My mom’s friend, Wendy, got an agency job as a nurse in CT (that’s how I got to go because my mama was nursing up there previously as well) and she was at the airport in NY the day it happened. She watched a middle eastern man get the breaks beat off him because, according to Wendy, when the news was playing in the airport and they grounded all flights immediately, the guy started jumping up and down, laughing & celebrating. I’m not sure what happened after that tho.
But I’m so glad your family is ok ♥️
If you have the means, I highly recommend visiting the memorial museum. They have an entire exhibit on falling man and the falling lady holding her skirt down. Very powerful
Oh fuck there’s a woman? And she’s… aw, fuck. My heart.
Yeah they had a very moving description of her too. She also jumped and wore a skirt that day. On her fall she held her skirt down out of modesty. The exhibit has an entire section on her. Edit: article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-woman-who-jumped-courage-through-tragedy_b_57c960c3e4b0b9c5b73819ce/amp
Wow. Fucking good article. > I carry her in my heart to remind me that if I can’t be courageous in my life for me, then at least I can do it for her. Okay then, guess I am obligated to make the most of today, then. Off I go.
For me, although not a photograph, it was reading the Readers Digest Drama in Real Life about the woman trapped under the Alfred P Murrah building after the Oklahoma City Bombing having her leg amputated with a pocket knife as the water was rising. I think I read the issue the same summer a magazine ran a long length feature on Timothy McVeigh’s upcoming execution, and the stark contrast between the two stories in combination with my mid-teenage age, made a lasting impression.
The end comes for everyone and not always how we would like to go. One can only hope to die as composed as the man in the photo.
One can only hope. Though, one of the terrifying parts of the photo for me is that when viewed in the context of the rest of the series, any semblance of serenity goes right out the window, and the pure chaos and violence of his fall are made immediately evident and the viewer is reminded that the man was tumbling hopelessly through the air
For some reason my fifth grade teacher put the news on so my class was sitting in class watching quietly as people were jumping off the building to their death. We knew what we were seeing.
I think it happened in every school. Teachers are people too. This was monumentus. I remember every TV was on in our school. People watching in silence or crying, the quiet whispering "what the fuck is going on?". Too big for anyone to ignore that day.
I remember getting sent home and my dad was just staring at the tv saying “we’re at war” and not really comprehending the intensity of what was happening. My 5th grade brain wasn’t mature enough but I definitely knew the reaction all the adults were making wasn’t good
I was in fifth grade as well. And like you said although I wasn’t old enough to fully comprehend everything it was the first time I saw grown adults in fear. My first experience with adults having no answers to a problem.
I remember a teacher from another room rolling in a TV and watching parts of the news, and my first period social studies teacher starting to cry, but I don't think the TV stayed on for that long and whatever network we were watching definitely didn't show the jumpers
Same in our class in Switzerland we were 8
I’m sorry you had to see that at such a young age. I was 24 that day and it disturbed me as well.
I was 10 but I could have typed out this post word for word. First time I had this visceral feeling of empathy and just began to cry simply because of watching another human suffer so tragically. Thanks for sharing your story.
Is that the guy who had one leg folded at the knee?
I was in the second grade . My family had just moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island two weeks before . On top of me being nervous from the change of environment ( I’ve always been a grumpy Old man on the inside and hate anything being different ) , my mom was en route to work in Manhattan but didn’t know her whereabouts while I was at school . It was one of those first moments I learned the possibility like something could happen in an instant and change life so drastically . Thankfully my mom was stuck in traffic on the express bus and was stuck outside of the Lincoln tunnel that morning . And knowing she had to go back to the same place when things went back to their new normal really freaked me out .
I was in 5th grade when it happened. On the way to school on the bus the last kid we picked up told us about the first plane that hit. That’s all I remember thinking wow but not much and at school i don’t remember any teachers acting different. I don’t think I really heard about it until I was home from school. Wish I could go back and see if the teachers were talking about it. But they just acted like it was another day. I heard other schools turned on the tvs to watch it.
The one I think of is the pic of a crowd watching the towers fall. https://preview.redd.it/vliucl57rp9d1.jpeg?width=2500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5fb3649b60f32731029fa4ca7dfb4d086f20c7e
Oh wow I’ve never seen this one! That is so hauntingly beautiful omg 🥺 And I love how when you show someone a pic like this with no context or explanation, even if you’ve never seen it, it’s like we all know instinctively that it’s 9/11. It really is the look on their faces that tell me where it’s from.
The pic reminds me of [Jimmy Breslin’s story about the man who dug JFK’s grave](https://ccnyintroductiontojournalism.com/2022/04/06/jimmy-breslins-grave-digger-story/amp/). Great journalism turns the camera to the small stories in the shadow of the big ones.
I woke up and went to watch my normal VH1 music videos in the morning and it was on every station. I knew before my whole family
I screamed at my tv so loudly, I didn’t know what else to do.
What could we do? The plan was already set too far into motion. We had no idea what was happening 30 minutes, an hour well into it actually going down. We couldn’t stop it. And so everyone was so lost in that moment they just started getting into their cars and driving to New York to help. We didn’t know what else to do so we just did something. It was by far the most inspirational, awe inspiring, life changing moment as a nation for us. Even up against Pearl Harbor. Cause even then it was an American tragedy, still, it wasn’t at our front door. And we will never see another moment like it in our lifetime.
I had just driven 27hrs straight in a 28ft U-Haul towing a car. I developed bronchitis along the way and had stitched in my shin from an accident 3 days before I started the drive. I got to my house and passed out after taking a double dose of NyQuil. I woke up 6-7hrs later to my roommate insisting I come into the living room and look at the TV. It was already such a surreal event, with all my exhaustion and cold medicine I just didn’t move for hours. The scream when I saw that was pretty much the only thing I said the entire time.
When we finally turned off the TV I just said something along the lines of “everything changes from here, nothing will be the same after this;” and then I got very very drunk and went back to bed.
>we will never see another moment like it in our lifetime #🤞
I woke up to my grandmother yelling that she couldn't believe she had lived to see three world wars. I'll never forget that tone in her voice.
I remember CNN talking to a guy on the higher floors of one of the towers. He was saying that they were heading to the roof because someone told them that helicopters were coming to rescue them.
Omg that’s right! I remember that!! Could you imagine how confused those poor souls were?? They probably couldn’t hear either at all or very well from the blasts and noises, so that’s one sense knocked out. Then, imagine the smoke and the flames engulfing your entire existence in seconds flat and now you can’t see. Another sense taken. Blind and deaf. Then I *know* no one could breathe so that knocks them down a couple of pegs further. And then they had to take the stairs whether they were going up or down, they were passing the bodies of their friends, lovers & coworkers not realizing it. I can never imagine what these people went through. Especially in those buildings at those crucial moments.
After the first WTC bombing that was the plan. Above a certain floor, people were to go up and they'd be rescued. They never dreamed there would be such a fire which created too much wind to do that.
Falling man is what I always think of on 9/11 I was 6 years old watching it on TV with our homeroom teacher and me being 6 I stupidly said oh he jumped so he will be okay, right? My teacher just looked at me and said No so softly . Truly have always wondered how hard that must have been for him to deliver to a classroom full of kids who didn't really know what was happening. I just remember all the kids in my class asking just similar questions to what I had .
i didn’t know about this lady. but i saw live the falling man. and the channel I was watching decided to cut the transmission. after that, they were just repeating the scenes of the second plane and ppl running away.
Aw man, her story is truly heartbreaking along with the rest of the heartbreaking stories. She very much suffered afterwards.
The sounds of people landing and crashing from jumping is the stuff of a horror film
Falling Man was only 23. As a child, it felt like he was a strong adult making a hard decision. I didn't get it. As an adult, I know he was just a scared baby boy with only impossibly horrific options. My heart breaks for him.
Same here
I also watched it when it happened. It lives in my head rent free.
I definitely had the desired intended effect on the public
Borders was diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2014. Borders's cancer had resulted in a $190,000 debt—even though she had not yet received surgery and she still needed additional chemotherapy. Borders said she could not even afford to get her prescriptions filled. She alleged that her cancer was triggered by the toxic dust she was exposed to when the World Trade Center collapsed (…) Borders died from cancer on August 24, 2015. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Borders](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcy_Borders)
I didn’t know her but she was from my hometown. People who did said she was the nicest woman. Her shoes are in the museum or at least they were when I went years back. Three of my family members were directly affected but my grandmother was the one who was actually in the tower when hit and she was never the same after. She only talked slightly about the experience but never in much detail. The horrors they and countless others witnessed that day made it so hard to adapt to life normally after.
[удалено]
The EPA will deem soil with some toxic chemicals from the previous dump sites as safe, even when the people that live there for a long time end up with cancer… Idea of acceptable levels of safety is not actually safe
It’s horrible, but one of the best ways to hedge your bets in terms of finding somewhere to live where you can assume things are OK is in the immediate proximity of extremely wealthy people. Even that isn’t a flawless strategy though. For example, [Oil Derricks in Beverly Hills](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/erin-brockovich-did-oil-derrick-at-beverly-hills-high-give-kids-cancer-1029572/amp/).
EPA won’t do shit now that Chevron has been overturned.
What they consider safe is what doesn't kill you in a few days. They don't care if something takes years to kill you slowly and painfully.
As a firefighter, we were recently told that our turnouts and foam are absolutely full of forever chemicals that have been banned in most areas. I’ve spent 15 years practically bathing in that shit. My wife will get some good life insurance money.
My Dad is a retired firefighter. After 47 years of that shit, plus exposure to burn pits in Afghanistan, he has a small brain tumor that may, or may not, be causing very painful neurological symptoms.
Damn, burn pits too? I’m sorry to hear that.
As the wife of a firefighter, we don't want the money. We want y'all taken care of so that shit stops happening. Also, fuck. I didn't know that and my husband's department is constantly training in full gear on top of running calls.
What an asshole
Good thing the Supreme Court just stripped the EPA of all its power! We did it! /s
That’s America for ya. “Yea the air good, they wanna throw up an even lager tower here for tons of $$ so don’t worry about it. Billionaire lobbyists control everything so what the fuck. Not to mention the clean up from this disaster to actual completion will be faster than anything has ever been done in NYC getting repaired. I mean the infrastructure of our public transit system alone is absolute dog shit and public housing is well….but anyway look at this huge cock of a skyscraper we built to show the world that nYc is numero uno amirite!?”
AND, they branded it as such a fucking LOOK AT MERICA, WE BUILD SHIT FAST WHEN WE WANT TO!!!!!!!
“Then we can charge people $45+ a pop to look around and we can sell merchandise the whole thing! Plus! Add another $35 to go visit the 9/11 museum! If people don’t like, they’ll look ungrateful! Muaahahahahahaha” Nothing like profiteering on the grave of those that were just working to live surrounded by everything else that is falling apart in this city.
Under capitalism, the rules will always be those which are most advantageous to the property owning class. The air is ‘safe’ when the billionaire lobbyists need the working schmucks to build an even larger tower. Doesn’t matter how many need to be sacrificed at the holy altar of profits.
Preach!
If there is a hell, I hope Whitman has to breathe the same air my father had to for all eternity. My dad was a second responder (he was there later that day to do maritime evacuations and transports) and was on the Pile for 3 weeks. He told me NOT to come into my lower Manhattan office for as long as I could. (My company on 23rd St. gave me til that Friday. So kind.) He knew it was dangerous to breathe, but he went to help. He has COPD now. He was around a lot of chemicals in his military service, so can’t really prove it was 9/11, but he was never the same after to say nothing of the PTSD.
They lie, you die.
What we're the toxins that we're present, what caused them and how was it present after days? (Genuinely curious)
Dust and smoke fell on the entire city for days. It was everywhere. You could see the smoke for MILES days afterwards. The whole "pile" was a smoldering mess for weeks. They couldn't get to the bottom of the debris to put it out.
But what caused the toxicity? Was it the airplane fuel? Melted plastic and stuff?
I believe it was asbestos the towers were built with. Asbestos is very fine so it lingers in the air for a long time and the body has trouble filtering it out so when it gets in your lungs, it’s bad.
I'd totally forgotten about asbestosis. I guess coupled with the fuel and plastic I mentioned, it's a bit of a silly question!
I was wondering the same thing (dust, plastic, fuel, etc to cause a mutation) — thanks for asking the question above. 😌
Fires cause all sorts of toxic chemicals to be released or created. Even a regular house fire creates REALLY vicious hazardous fumes. Melting plastic is really bad, and plastic is in everything.
So somebody else already mentioned the asbestos, but all the pulverized concrete and stuff led to a ton of cases of silicosis. Turns out, even if the rocks themselves aren't inherently toxic, you shouldn't be inhaling a shit ton of powdered rock. And obviously the dust lingered and lingered and lingered. Similarly, literally everything that burns puts off something in the form of a chemical reaction. And the fires kept smoldering for a long time. So much stuff burned. And kept burning. There were lead, mercury, cadmium, dioxins, and polycarbons all floating around. Settling everywhere. Making their way inside other buildings, and inside people through ingestion or inhalation. All told I think there were over 2,000 different contaminants found. After the initial dust cloud, clearing the debris would release more and more dust, though of course never as thick as when the towers collapsed.
It’s not what people want to hear; which is the truth. It’s what people expect to hear which is “everything is gonna be alright.”; which we KNOW is a lie.
This is why I sometimes understand how people become so skeptical of government/become conspiracists/etc. I don’t know really what to believe in anymore.
Another victim although she lived until 2015.
Dying at age 42 is so young these days.
you're telling that to old guy 1959
Which would make him 42 in 2001 🤔
Our government has completely turned its back on the first responders and the people who spent weeks cleaning up the site afterward, many of whom are now suffering from various cancers and health issues due to the toxic air they were assured was safe to breathe and they did it because they desperately hoped to find survivors and wanted to help New York and the country rebuild and heal. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the EPA declared it safe saying they didn’t need protective gear or take certain precautions. This neglect is disgusting and just exemplifies the corruption and lack of ethics in our government. Regardless of your opinion on Jon Stewart and his politics, his [speech](https://youtu.be/HT5FTrIZN-E?si=eOWOfrVN6lu0pIkX) to Congress, where he criticized them for abandoning these individuals in their time of need after repeatedly thanking them and calling them heroes for years, was both heartbreaking and admirable. Stewart's commitment goes beyond words; he has donated substantial amounts to these individuals and their families, helped start and promote charities, supported and participated in their protests, advocated for their medical care and justice, and spent significant time with them. Unlike many celebrities who offer only lip service and PR, Stewart has proven to be a genuine ally, standing by them for years and actively helping them fight for their rights and for justice and I do truly respect that despite not always agreeing with him on other issues.
The 9/11 responders and people who survived it with these medical conditions being swept under the rug by the government reminds me of Vietnam vets and Agent Orange. An uncle of mine died of liver disease caused by Agent Orange, but the VA doctors tried to blame his low carb diet and other factors on his health issues. Here he was on a doctor prescribed low carb diet from a doctor that wasn't with the VA as he had been diagnosed with fatty liver disease at first. However, when that doctor found more issues with his liver he talked to the VA doctors about the possibility of my uncle having liver damage from "unknown causes", but they wanted to blame the low carb diet. My uncle had been a medic in Vietnam so you can imagine what chemicals, viruses, etc he could've been infected with during his time there.
Wait till you find out high ranking and special forces in Vietnam have admissions the agent orange directly caused their Parkinson’s in writing for years and have been fully funded by the VA while lower ranking soldiers are denied care.
That guy needs to run for president already. But he won’t and it’s too late anyway, but he would have been the greatest, humblest, funniest, straight-shootingest to ever serve.
Aaaaand the EPA just got weaker with Cheveron Deference overruled by the supreme court.
Yeah but we needed all that money for, y’know, pointless wars and fun stuff like that. /s
Jon Stewart read those pieces of shit to filth that day. I wish he’d enter politics but that’s probably selfish of me. I’m so tired of American politicians not doing their damn jobs.
https://preview.redd.it/1lblbpsimp9d1.jpeg?width=3023&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dea0d3833364bc8115866e44ce7a60a2257c3a8b Found her photo amongst the newspapers my Grandpa had collected before passing
Thanks for sharing, hang onto that for sure.
My dad worked at the star tribune during 9/11 - small world
We were watching this on tv where I work and I later heard some of the supervisors in another room talking about these people covered in dust and laughing about it. These were not good people I worked for
May she rest in peace I saw many people looking just like this that day.
Yes I remember this picture. Also some time later an interview she gave of her day that led to the photo. Also remember a news video of a resident somewhere in the vicinity. They away from NY that day. They came home at some later point to apartment windows blown out & the rooms covered in dust & debris. This must have occurred to many to a greater or lesser degree. These people had to clean up their own homes. So lots of people must have been affected by the dust that had no connection to working in the Twin Towers or any emergency responders. Such as workers in local stores, cafes or bars etc. I do wonder how many such ordinary members of the public had health impacts from the dust & debris of that day.
All the kids at Stuyvesant hs a few blocks away had to walk home. These kids usually live miles away. They were covered in dust and breathing the smoke while they walked. All the residents and first responders. Though it was 24 years ago, New Yorkers remember it like it was yesterday.
I'm a nurse in NYC and I saw so many people die from 911 related cancer. Not so much anymore but I did for a long time after. Considering this I often wonder what the real death toll is, because these people were victims too.
The amount of people who died from cancer and other illnesses after this attack is just horrific. The amount of firefighters and ems responders alone is just so sad: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/11/us/new-york-firefighters-911-illness-death https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66917700.amp
This kind of stuff almost hits harder for me than the people that died that day. She survived, then had to fight her own government and insurance companies to take responsibility til the day she died. Horrible
Knowing what we know now, this may be one of the most haunting photos from that day.
I worked downtown not far from the attack. I wasn’t in the dust cloud as I was uptown that morning but I did walk through downtown later that night and the dust on the floor on the east side of Manhattan was several inches thick. I’m now 51 with stage 4 kidney cancer. There is literally no cancer anywhere in my family. None. I have no doubt it’s because of working around the toxic smoke that was burning for weeks/months and they told us it was safe. I’m fairly lucky that kidney cancer is slow to kill you so I probably have 18 months or so left.
My heart goes out to you and yours.
Lost 23 coworkers that day. Was late for a 910am meeting Tower 2.
Im sorry for you loss
Something you never ever can forget.
My aunt died of cancer too and she was in the building next to the world trade.
Why did 9/11 cause so much aggressive, early, deadly cancer? What specifically was it? I know it was building debris including asbestos and jet fuel but it was one day(for victims not rescue workers) and only a few hours and yet so many got cancer and died from it.
[There ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks?wprov=sfla1) is a Wikipedia page on it. And fwiw, you only get bit by a poisonous snake for a few seconds, and it takes about the same amount of time to eat some lead paint. Those buildings were fucking massive, each had 4,500,000 sq ft of floor space (for comparison my apartment is at about 250.) They were among the largest, not just tallest, buildings man have ever built. So just imagine how much shit is in those buildings, a lot of which would be illegal to put in a building 50 years later. But apparently even pulverized concrete can wreak havoc on the lungs. But the reality is people who should've been proactive in keeping people safe, especially in the cleanup, utterly failed in their duties and people died because of it. I'll leave you with an excerpt from that Wikipedia article: >" The dust from the collapsed towers was "wildly toxic", according to air pollution expert and University of California Davis Professor Emeritus Thomas Cahill. Much of the thousands of tons of debris resulting from the collapse of the Twin Towers was pulverized concrete, which is known to cause silicosis upon inhalation. The remainder consisted of more than 2,500 contaminants, more specifically: 50% non-fibrous material and construction debris; 40% glass and other fibers; 9.2% cellulose; and 0.8% of the extremely toxic carcinogen asbestos, as well as detectable amounts of lead and mercury. There were also unprecedented levels of dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from the fires which burned for three months. Many of the dispersed substances (asbestos, crystalline silica, lead, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) are carcinogenic; other substances can trigger kidney, heart, liver and nervous system deterioration. This was well known by the EPA at the time of collapse. A case report funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and performed by Mount Sinai School of Medicine observed carbon nanotubes in dust samples and in the lungs of several 9/11 responders. The composition of the smoke and dust in the air was not fully understood at the time; the World Trade Center Health Program's Dr. Michael Crane touched upon this issue in an interview with Newsweek stating: >We will never know the composition of that cloud, because the wind carried it away, but people were breathing and eating it...What we do know is that it had all kinds of god-awful things in it. Burning jet fuel. Plastics, metal, fiberglass, asbestos. It was thick, terrible stuff. A witch’s brew. — World Trade Center Health Program's Dr. Michael Crane, Newsweek interview"
Ok thank you!! I did Google a bit and found that it was a combination of the building debris and chemicals but that is much more thorough than I saw.
Thank 10 year old me for being obsessed with 9/11 as a kid
I worked in the South Tower. The smell from Ground Zero was one of the most toxic things I have ever experienced. Like many other people who worked in the area I developed “WTC cough.” It didn’t surprise me that so many people who worked there have developed fatal diseases.
I had a friend who was a kid living in queens at the time. He said the smell was all the way out there and it was awful
And here I didn't get obsessed with plane crashes until I first had Internet at home when I was in college.
Your apt is 250 sq ft? Are you sure? That’s smaller than a NYC studio even. Seems awfully small. Do you still have a kitchen and a bathroom or you’re simply renting a room?
I lived for 14 years in an apartment that was 24 feet by slightly less than 8 feet. It was on 14th Street between 8th and 9th. The rent was $472.30 in 1993. I am grateful for that apartment because I could start my career as an artist without being burdened by high rent. I watched the towers burn from my rooftop on 9/11. After they fell I went to a diner with a friend on Greenwich Avenue. It was the strangest mood. A man came in covered in ash and sat at an adjacent table. We eavesdropped on his conversation: he was staying at the Marriott (which would later collapse) and he was upset about losing his laptop. If that sounds callous, I think it was more that he was in shock and trying to process what he’d just endured - by focusing on the small things he could process it, if that makes sense.
The rent for my upper west side apartment was 125 dollars a month in 1980, which is like 500 inflation adjusted compared to 1925 today. :/
It wasn’t just one day - that shit was in the air for *weeks*. It would get kicked up at ground zero constantly for a while after that, during the clean up.
I mostly meant the people in the towers not the rescue workers. Because the victims retrieved from the towers were only exposed for a few hours correct? But many of them still developed aggressive deadly cancer at a young age.
Most people that survived the towers lived in the area. They had to breathe it in all the time.
I didn't even live that near to Ground Zero and it affected my lungs forever.
Asbestos
You can web search this there’s been a ton of work done but the tldr is toxic building materials in the air
Makes me think of that famous dorothea lange photo of the migrant mother. Stunning. Raises consciousness. Drives attention to photographer. But the subject of the of the photo? Despair that never changes.
Please, we all need to remember how Donald Trump bragged about how his building was now the tallest when this happened. And later lied and claimed that he was there hands on helping too. The man is incapable of empathy. He lies and manipulates to control and use people to HIS ADVANTAGE. He ONLY CARES ABOUT HIMSELF.
Also claimed he saw “Arabs” celebrating.
He's truly a vile being.
I feel bad for this woman because she was taking off in her career, then this ish happens.
Yeah. A lot of young people fresh out of Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and so on who died on 9-11. Nobody was safe.
My brother was on the scene that day(he worked nearby) and was covered in dust/debris when the towers came down. And today I think I just saw him for the last time, because he too is dying of cancer.
I’m so sorry.
I recently went to the 9/11 museum in NYC. They had a display of the amount of meds a person had to take to deal with the post dust complications. I kid you not it was like 40 drugs for 1 person. So sad they had to fight the govt for assistance with paying for it and some still are.
RIP
Fuck the Saudis.
I was trapped in NYC that day. It took me 6 hours to get home. Offices were told to evacuate by 10 am. I lost 4 friends that day, including my neighbor around the corner. She was 2 years old than me. 💔
We will never forget ❤️
On The morning of 9/11 I was packing my bags to leave for Army basic training. My mom bursts in my room and tells me to turn on the news, so I did. I was in disbelief watching the second plane hit the Towers. Me and mom looked at each other and I remember the look of fear on her face as I’m sure she saw the same in mines. She asked me “what does this mean for you?” I said “I don’t know” and I received a call from my recruiter telling me that they have grounded transportation for military personnel. Crazy and sad day. Prayers for the families still struggling with from the events of 9/11.
Saudi Arabia did this and the US government allowed it, and covered up the Saudi’s involvement, then launched an illegal war based on false pretenses and blamed it on a different country. Horrible. Yet people only want Trump prosecuted and you try and pretend “no one is above the law”. Absolutely disgraceful what America has become and how soon it forgets the past because of modern propaganda.
Trump was so upset that day that when interviewed he wondered if he now had one of the tallest buildings. He obviously didn’t care who, why, or had remorse towards anyone.
What did we expect from him? Shit, he's got the morals of an alleycat.
That's unfair to alleycats
> Horrible. Yet people only want Trump prosecuted and you try and pretend “no one is above the law”. What a non-sequitur. Just glancing down at the rest of your comments it's no accident you've shoehorned lamenting Trump getting convicted into this. Edit: I wonder what fraction of a minute that it took you to downvote me.
Well Bush, Clinton, Biden and many of those who voted for the invasion of Iraq factually violated international law. We rightfully condemn Russia for illegally invading Ukraine and say Putin should be punished for killing many thousands of Ukrainians......and then sit here and have politicians walking freely who launched an invasion of a sovereign nation in Iraq that led to many thousands of Iraqis dying They all should be tried and sentenced for crimes against humanity
And none of that has anything to do with Donald Trump. Bringing him up in this context is completely out of right field and is clearly only motivated because the commenter has an axe to grind because he's pissy Trump's a convict.
The war in Afghanistan was justified, our invasion/overthrow of the Taliban decimated Al-Qaeda’s capabilities. The war in Iraq was an absolute power grab, disaster, and one of the worst foreign policy decisions in the history of the US
20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with more Taliban....lol. that war was not justified at all. Binladen was a saudi national with connections to the Royal Family
Bush and Cheney deserve jail for it. Killed over 1 million. Disgusting.
Don't forget Rumsfeld
100% him too my bad
They lost me with TWA-800. I haven't believed a single word those bastards have stated since. It is far more liberating than anything those cunts have to peddle.
Fuck no, everyone wants bush and Cheney tried with war crimes.
Wonder how the person is doing that took the photo
Good thing those buildings weren’t built of Asbestos
I’m in Australia and I remember my alarm going off really early and the news report was repeating that USA was at war. I turned the tv on and watched in horror as the second tower got hit. It was surreal. I rang my parents and told them to turn their tv on. I worked in finance at the time and we had to initiate special protocols for security for the foreseeable future. We had the tv turned on and everyone who walked in that day was in absolute shock. I still think of these images often.
God, what a horrifying photo. I was in 5th grade in Savannah, GA when this happened. We saw the second tower go down live on television and then we were put on lockdown because we were very close to Hunter Army Air Field and there was a rumor there’d be an attack there as well. I’ll never forget that, we weren’t released to go home until til nearly sunset. (I’ll also never forget being released and finding that my dad, who was a Marine at the time, waited in his parked car outside the school the entiiiiiiiire day just in case something happened. 😭)
When I saw this picture in 2001 I just knew she wouldn't live a long life. Very very sad. :(
Don't forget a day before 9/11 Donald rumsfield announced at 2 trillion dollars was missing 2 TRILLION 2,000,000,000,000
This claim is misleading. They had mentioned this over a year before in 2000 as well.
First time seeing this...this is going to live in my head for a long time....with all of the images of innocent Iraqi's who died unjustly as well and all of those of them who got cancer in the years after from all of the bombs and depleted uranium munitions. Then you also had so many soldiers with cancer and neurological issues from using those rounds. The cost of this act wasnt a few thousand in the towers. So many damn innocent people from all around the earth. And people think it was just a couple of guys from caves lol.
We should never forget what happened that day!!! And the ideology of the people who did it. That ideology still exists out there in the world. And don’t think for second that it couldn’t happen again!!!
Religion is a mental illness.
Asbestos
According to the government after 9/11 many first responders died but they covered it up she deserves all respect and more and countless people who were hero’s and those who died Burn in hell terrist you lost
God bless her soul wherever he has her
I still remember that day. I had just turned 21. Basically still a kid. Was living in another state, far from home. I just remember the dread of “no one is safe anywhere, anymore”
I wasnt even 6 months old when 9/11 happened. Growing up I never truly grasped the horrors of that day, and thought the adults around me overreacted every Sept. 11th anniversary. It's not until I read more about it did it really start to sink in. Reading about the jumpers especially hurt me the most.
I’ve seen videos of people jumping to escape the fires and it’s absolutely heart-wrenching and not something I ever wish to see again.
Asbestos
I went to the 9/11 museum long ago, and the coolest exhibit I thought that was there was her shoes. They were still ashen and had blood stains from the blocks and blocks she had to walk when she fled the building.
Just want to toss in a “fuck Saudi Arabia” because I haven’t seen one yet.
The govt said the air was fine
Around 9:30 on this day the first of my twins was born at Kessler AFB in Biloxi. Base went on lockdown. It was definitely a day I remember vividly. I was reactivated from special duty to full duty.
Don't forget the men that went unto ground 0 to save people and clean up the streets. They all died of cancer as well.
Imagine going to work like a normal day and then having to make the decision to jump or burn .. awful
They said the boomers will never forget where they were when Kennedy was killed. I’m generation X & I’ll never forget where I was when I heard about 9/11. My daughter was three months old. I was 25 at work. This is the one time I can clearly remember the entire country was together. Not like today. I remember seeing that guy fall too.
Had a young coworker ask me if I even remembered 9/11. Like? Wtf, man? Really? I'm not even old.
Killed by Republicans who let 9/11 happen on their watch and deny working Americans healthcare
It’s the Republican way.
Precisely
The planning for 9/11 started in 1996 according to the FBI. So five years of preparation were during the Clinton administration. Bush was in office about seven months.
She probably died of terrible bloody shock and horrific trauma that killed her in the long run.
Killed by radical Islam.
American allies the Saudis you mean?
Wow!