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9/11 Cleaning Workers Battle Illness
Gil, a Colombian immigrant, worked 12- and 14-hour shifts for $60 a day, sweeping away heaps of dust by hand in apartments, offices, restaurants and schools, protected by nothing more than a thin paper mask. Six years later, she has asthma, chronic pain in her nose, ears, head and chest, and painfully itchy skin. She says she is unable to work more than one day a week, and is surviving largely on the generosity of friends. “It's a terrible situation,” Gil said. “Everyone I know who did this work is sick. Everyone I know has to take medicine.” But even as public attention has focused on the plight of sick firefighters and other first responders, little mention is made of the thousands of cleaning workers like Gil who also were injured and enfeebled by their work. Exposure Some of those workers were members of the Local 78 Asbestos, Lead and Hazardous Waste Workers Union, mostly Polish, Ukrainian and Latin American immigrants. Others were unskilled day laborers, many undocumented, who learned through friends and advertisements in Spanish-language media that there was work to be had Downtown. Teams of these cleaners working for dozens of companies removed tons of dust from Lower Manhattan buildings. The dust was extremely corrosive. “About 60 percent of it was pulverized concrete, which is very alkaline, like lye,” said Philip Landrigan, professor of medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital who oversees the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program. “It’s been described as pulverized Drano. When it hit the wet membranes of the nose, throat and lungs, it caused intense inflammation, which resulted in scarring and decreased lung volume.” Countless microscopic shards of window-glass in the dust exacerbated the inflammation and scarring. In the five years since the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program was instituted, it has examined about 22,000 people. The most common symptoms exhibited by those screened by the program are psychological and respiratory, Landrigan said. Diminished lung function caused by pulmonary fibrosis is especially common, as is new-onset asthma and a hypersensitivity to odors, air pollution and allergens, called reactive airways disease. Health Lawsuit In August of 2005, cleaning workers filed hundreds of related suits in federal district court against virtually every property owner and manager in Lower Manhattan, claiming that the defendants broke the law by failing to ensure worker safety during the clean-up of their property in the aftermath of Sept. 11. The claims are brought under New York Labor Law, which holds “owners and contractors and their agents” responsible for providing “reasonable and adequate protection and safety to the persons employed” in their buildings.
According to Cannata, he only took on clients with significant health problems. “None of my clients are working now,” he said. “They’re all getting medical treatment. They have thyroid cancer, kidney cancer, esophageal cancer, lung nodules, scar tissue in their lungs, GERD [a reflux disorder]. One of my clients, when he was tested in 2003 at age 52, had the lungs of a 103-year-old. These guys are ill.” It is difficult to tally how previous suits of this kind have fared, but Annette Guarino, Depute General Counsel for the Battery Park City Authority, said that of 50 similar cases filed in the past two years, 43 have been settled or dismissed. The BPCA is named in 375 new cases, making it the largest off-site defendant in the case. Cannata said he does not expect the cases ever to go to trial. With roughly 700 workers filing suit and each case listing 10 to 15 defendants, thousands of depositions and millions of dollars in legal fees confront the insurance companies, building owners and management companies if they refuse a settlement. “It will be cheaper for them to settle,” Cannata said. He hopes the defendants will agree to create a fund for the clean-up workers like the $7 billion Victim Compensation Fund created for relatives of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001. But the suits do not represent all cleaning workers. Robert Grochow, another lawyer representing sick cleaning workers, said most of the plaintiffs in the cases are union members. For the most part, the unskilled cleaning workers have not signed on to the suit, though he said they are eligible to do so. “It’s a very difficult community to contact,” he said. “It may also be because the legal status of many of them makes them reluctant to come forward.” Day Laborers After Sept. 11
One of them is Alberto Melo, a Jackson Heights resident who worked for several cleaning contractors over three months after Sept. 11. A few days after the attack, Melo joined hundreds of other day laborers lining up at Bowling Green, looking for work advertised on Spanish-language television and radio. “The contractors would pick us up and take us to different work sites. They didn’t give us any protection,” Melo said. “No masks, no gloves. There was so much dust that when we got water there was dust on our lips. When we ate sandwiches there was dust on our hands. Everything was contaminated. No matter what time of day, if we were working or resting or eating, we were always exposed to the dust.” Melo said he and his co-workers knew from the beginning that the dust posed a health hazard. “We were coughing from the start,” he said. “I knew I shouldn’t be exposed to that stuff, but because of the money I took the job anyway. We went to the companies and brought it up. We said ‘This can’t be good.’ They ignored us. They said, ‘It’s fine.’ They didn’t care. They didn’t take the people’s health into account.” Steven Markovitz, a professor of medicine at Queens College who ran a mobile health center for the workers in early 2002, said stories like Melo’s are common. “These people were getting nothing at the time—they were given a mop and a bag,” Markovitz said. “Some people told us that they brought their own respirators with them, but their bosses told them not to wear them because they would scare the others.” (Adding insult to injury, many cleaning workers say they were never paid overtime for their long shifts. Last month nine of them filed what they hope to make a class action suit against their former employers.) Former Downtown cleaning workers said many companies—including New York contractors Maxon Restoration, Milro Services and Crystal Restoration Enterprises and Texas-based BMS Catastrophe Services—provided them only with paper masks or no protection at all. Reached by phone, Teri Hill, a spokesman for BMS Catastrophe Services, which worked on 42 projects in Lower Manhattan in 2001 and 2002, refused to discuss the company’s employment policies or safety precautions. The other companies did not respond to repeated phone calls seeking comment for this story. Blanca Neri Duque Castaño, another cleaner, said that after two months of working without protective masks, the Red Cross donated respirators to her employer, Maxon. “Then my boss sold us the masks for $25 each,” she said. “I bought one, because after two months I was already feeling sick.” Six years later, poor health continues to afflict many cleaning workers. Alberto Melo, who used to work 14-hour days, said he is now unable to work more than five hours at a time due to his difficulty breathing. Mercedes Burgos, another Columbian cleaner whose worksites included the Deutsche Bank building, said she cannot work at all because of her chronic asthma, frequent bloody noses and depression.
“I’m working now because I don’t have a choice,” Duque said. “I am not well enough to work, but I am working as much as I can.” Workers interviewed said they came to the U.S. to find work and to send money home to their families now find themselves relying on their families at home and friends here for financial support. Julian Felipe Fernandez, a Mexican cleaner suffering from asthma, dizziness and watery eyes, depends on the money his son sends him from Mexico. “Without my son, I couldn’t make rent,” Fernandez said. “But I worry, because right now he’s a bachelor. If he gets married, he won’t be able to help me anymore.” Equally frightening to the workers is the possibility that their health will further deteriorate. “We just don’t know what’s going to happen over time—people could get better. People could get worse. People could stay the same,” Landrigan said. “The fact is, no one in the medical community has ever seen anything like this before, so all we can do is monitor it and treat symptoms as they arise.” Cause For Hope, Continued Fear But continued monitoring and treatment will be expensive. U.S. Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Carolyn Maloney and Vito Fossella, all of New York City, have sponsored legislation to re-open the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund and to expand eligibility to those who have suffered harm during their rescue, recovery or clean-up work. The bill has languished in previous Congressional sessions, and is expected to meet resistance from legislators who view the fund as a government hand-out. Last month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the city would not wait for federal aid, and pledged $100 million to Sept. 11 health programs. The announced money includes nearly $50 million for the expansion of Bellevue Hospital’s WTC Environmental Health Center, where many of the clean-up workers receive care. But Gil said she is still fearful of the future. A friend of hers who did the same kind of clean-up work recently died of lung cancer that was diagnosed a few years after their work. “She had a young daughter back in Colombia just like me who she was sending money back to. I also have dreams for my daughter,” Gil said through tears. “I would like to go back to her in Colombia, but I don’t know if I could get the same kind of health care there. And who knows what will happen to my health in the future?” Tamara Rodriguez Reichberg translated for Spanish-speakers interviewed in this article.
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