Lila Nordstrom was a senior at storied Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan when"we saw a huge fireball engulf the first tower" of the World Trade Center back in 2001.They’re two of the thousands of children who were at school in lower Manhattan on the day of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, many of whom are now grappling with the fact that they may face life-long, potentially fatal diseases as a result of their proximity to ground zero, much like the first responders.
"After the second tower was hit, [the firefighters who were gearing up] started to tell me messages to give their loved ones," he said."It was a lot of different people and a lot of different names and a lot of different messages and of course, being four, it was hard to account for all of them." Peters says he evacuated the scene with his mom when the towers started to collapse, running north through the dust cloud.
The students returned to their school, a public high school regularly ranked among the best in the country, just weeks later on Oct. 9, 2001. Education Week reported at the time that the school system worked with the Environmental Protection Agency and city health and environmental officials to conduct the tests. On top of that, former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said at the time that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe, a comment she apologized for, although she said they did the best they could at the time with the information they had.
ABC News could not reach a representative at Stuyvesant High School after repeated calls for comment. "They're not making that connection, that they're entitled to free healthcare -- let alone compensation --and that's now free healthcare for the next 70 years. It’s compensation if they ever get cancer for the next 70 years," Barasch said of the young adults who were children in the area at the time.
For Nordstrom, the prospect that her health could be impacted didn’t really hit her until NYPD Det. James Zadroga died in 2006. Zadroga was the first NYPD officer whose death was tied to exposure of the toxins at Ground Zero, and the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund is named after him. "Ultimately I think, we're never going to know because we don’t really know what was in the air," she said."There weren’t even measurements of the PAHs in the air until 10 days after."
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