WE DECIDE: AMERICA AT THE CROSSROADS with Jenna Flanagan
This Friday marks 25 years since the September 11th attacks, and this morning we're devoting much of our program to remembering that day and examining the lives and work it continues to shape a quarter-century later.
In our first hour, we're opening the WBAI archives.
September 11th, 2001, was a Tuesday and Primary Election Day in New York City. At 8:46 that morning, American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.
At the time, WBAI's studios were at 120 Wall Street, just blocks from the World Trade Center.
This morning, for the first time since 9/11, we're rebroadcasting part of WBAI's live coverage as then-News Director Jose Santiago and reporter Paul DeRienzo tried, in real time, to understand and report what was happening just outside the station.
Then, we turn to a part of the September 11th story that hasn't always received the same attention: the experiences of women.
I'll be joined by Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and a United Airlines flight attendant; Lila Nordstrom, who was a student at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11 and went on to become a healthcare advocate; retired FDNY EMS first responder and retiree advocate Marianne Pizzitola; and retired FDNY Captain Brenda Berkman, whose landmark sex-discrimination lawsuit helped open the FDNY's firefighting ranks to women.
Four women with very different connections to September 11th aviation, education, emergency response and firefighting on what they remember, what followed, and what America still needs to understand 25 years later.
Then in our second hour, we'll turn to organized labor.
In the C Block, WBAI News Director Rebecca Myles speaks with The Real News Network's Maximillian Alvarez about hundreds of union workers locked out of BP's refinery in Whiting, Indiana and a labor fight over jobs, safety and collective bargaining.
And in the D Block, Rebecca sits down with John Samuelsen, International President of the Transport Workers Union, for a wide-ranging conversation about organizing workers, affordability, healthcare, outsourcing and the challenges facing organized labor.
9/11 25 Years Later: Let's Hear from Women:
Jenna: This morning I want to examine that history through a particular lens: women whose lives and work intersected with September 11th in very different ways. So I'd like to introduce my special panel for today. Up first I have Sara Nelson, who's been a United Airlines flight attendant since 1996, and is now international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA, representing 55,000 flight attendants at 20 different airlines.
Sara, welcome to the show.
Sara Nelson: Thank you, Jenna. I appreciate being here.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Absolutely. Next, I'd like to welcome Lila Nordstrom, who was a senior at Stuyvesant High School on September 11th. She later founded Stuy Health to advocate for former students affected by the attacks and cleanup, and wrote her new book, Some Kids Left Behind, about that experience.
Leila, welcome.
Lila Nordstrom: Thanks so much for having me on.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Of course. And up next we have, welcoming back Mary Anne, uh, Pitt- Pizzutollo, a retired FDNY EMS first responder who has spent her retirement fighting for healthcare protections for EMS workers and New York City's public service retirees. Mary Anne, it is good to have you back on the show.
Marianne Pizzitola: Good to see you, Jenna. Thanks for having me back.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: And finally, but [00:18:00] certainly not least, I'd like to welcome Captain Brenda Berkman, who served 25 years in the FDNY after successfully challenging the department's discriminatory physical test, a case that helped clear the way for New York City's first women firefighters.
Captain Berkman, welcome to the show.
Captain Brenda Berkman: Thanks for having, having me, Jenna.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Absolutely. Nice to see
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Welcome, everyone.
Captain Brenda Berkman: long time. It's been a long time.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Uh, yes, it is, and it's really still, I mean, even for myself, hearing back that audio and remembering, uh, the news coverage of that day. Um, but that's actually the place where I want to start.
And for each one of you, I just want to get a sense of- Where were you on the morning of September 11th, and what was the first thing you remember realizing that indicated that today was absolutely not going to be an ordinary day? And Sarah, I'll start with you
Sara Nelson: Okay. So, uh, I was already a five-year flight attendant.
I was serving in my union in various capacities as national strike chair and, uh, local vice president. And that morning, I had landed in Chicago, um, because I was visiting a friend on the West Coast, and so took the all-nighter and, uh, went across to the Hilton before the union training was supposed to start, uh, because I knew that they had massage beds, and I thought I could lay down for a little bit, save a hotel room.
And, um, it was the... Sometimes when I go back there- Mm-hmm ... I just need a second. Absolutely. So, uh, it was the, um, it was the workers at the Hilton who came in and woke me up and said, "Sarah, a train has, uh, a plane has flown into the World Trade Center. We thought you'd wanna know." Uh, so I got up and was, uh, watching the TV in the fitness center.
Um, the first reports, of course, were that it was this small plane, maybe a Cessna or whatever. Mm-hmm. And, um, I was looking at that thinking, "There's no way." Uh, and, uh, this is a terrible accident. And then, uh, 17 minutes later, United Flight 175 hit the South Tower. I didn't know at the time that it was United 175, but seen that image over and over again.
Many of us can see that image over and over again because, um, all of the cameras were trained on that site, um, after American Flight 11 hit the North Tower. And so immediately, I knew that this was not some freak accident, um, that there was, um, something horrific happening. And it wasn't long after that that they were saying that the first flight had been American.
Even though I was a United flight attendant, that was very close to home, and I knew I needed to [00:21:00] get to the union office right away, um, because we were going to have to have an emergency response. And, um, I also remember thinking that we're at war and everything is going to change. And, um, people did not have cell phones normally.
They didn't have immediate access to news. I was on that hotel van with other people who were just coming in for a business meeting or something and, uh, and, um, they had, uh, clearly had not seen anything yet. And I just remember, uh, I rem- I remember silently sobbing and thinking that life was never gonna be the same again.
And I got to the union office, and, um, no one in the union office knew that anything was going on. I said to turn on the TV. And the reason no one knew is because the company had already called the, uh, national officers over to the crisis center at United. And, uh, so we got busy setting up, um, setting up a command center there in the, in the union office- Mm-hmm
and we were getting 15-minute briefings about any new intelligence that we got. Um, those 15-minute briefings felt like three hours between them. Um, but- Of course ... Norman, uh, Transportation Sec- Secretary Norman Mineta had made the order for all of the planes to be on the ground. Um, and in the meantime, we had also heard that the Pentagon had been hit And which was definitely confirmation that this was an attack on America.
And, uh, so, uh, we were busy, um, trying to track where everyone was. The, um, flight lists have been pulled down. We didn't know, um... Well, we didn't know yet that it was even United involved. I remember one of those first briefings, um, that I went into the vice president's office, we were all standing around to get the latest news, and, uh, s- I remember, I remember them saying, "Flight 175."
And it was the flight that I worked quite often, and I knew everyone on it. And, um, I also had been bidding for my best friend. Um, she had moved to San Francisco, um, a- um, and, sh- I would bid West Kis- Coast trips to her, for her so that she could spend them there, and that was the normal flight that I had bid for her.
Okay. And so, uh, I didn't know for a while if she was on it, but what came to me immediately in a vision as actually I started to go dark was, um, a, a blonde woman in, sort of hovering in front of my face with her head cocked to the side and her big blue eyes like she always had, very reassuring, saying, "Sarah, we're okay.
We're all okay." And it was Amy King, and for a long time I felt very guilty about that. Why did she come to me? Her family needed her. So many people needed her. And then I realized, uh, later that day that she could be anywhere. So, um, [00:24:00] that's how I found out and what those initial moments were, and, uh, I immediately wanted to get to other crews that were in Boston and Chicago.
We jumped in in a rental car and drove back to Chicago as quickly as... or back to Boston as quickly as we could.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Okay. Well, uh, I'd like to pose that same question to Captain, uh, Berkman, who again served for 25 years in the FDNY. I mean, w- just what were your reflections of that morning?
Captain Brenda Berkman: So Jenna, I was off duty on 9/11.
I was at my apartment in Brooklyn when, 9:00 in the morning, my phone rang, and it was a friend from Kentucky, uh, saying, "Turn on your television." I turned on my television, and I saw the North Tower had been hit, and I immediately thought terrorism because looking at the television image, you could tell it was not a small plane or helicopter, so it couldn't have been an accident.
Um- And I, just to condense everything, I got to a firehouse in Brooklyn I had worked in. I picked up some gear of, uh, a guy that worked there that was his spare set of gear. It was about my size. And with other off-duty firefighters, we got a cop to drive us into Manhattan, uh, across the Brooklyn Bridge, which was empty on the inbound side when we started across because they'd cleared it for emergency vehicles, and the other side was, uh, wall-to-wall people, four lanes of traffic walking across the bridge, many of them covered in dust.
By the time we got to Manhattan, the second plane had hit the South Tower, and the South Tower had fallen. We saw... We watched it, uh, fall on television while we were waiting for the cop to come pick us up.
Captain Brenda Berkman: And just as we [00:26:00] got across the Brooklyn Bridge, the North Tower fell down. And so we were immediately enveloped in this cloud of dust that was, you couldn't see out at all.
We told the cop to stop. We all hopped out, and I went over to a fire chief who was covered in dust standing on Broadway and said, "Chief, give me an assignment." He asked me, "Do I have any firefighters?" I said... I started to say no, and then I looked right there on Broadway was a group of my own off-duty firefighters from my own firehouse, and we went to the Trade Center.
And, uh, we, we walked. It was unimaginable what was, what we were looking at. Every building was on fire from top to bottom. Of the seven buildings that were, five of which were left, the towers had fallen. All the surrounding buildings were on fire and damaged, uh, that were facing the World Trade Center. And I honestly thought it was a high probability I was gonna lose my life that day, but we had w- 'cause I was very senior.
I had 20, almost 20 years on the job, and- Mm-hmm ... I'd seen a lot of bad stuff. This was beyond anything I could have imagined. And we went to work. We started looking for people, and we did that. Uh, and then we started stretching lines, hose lines with, to put water on the fire from the Hudson River, which if you know, the Trade Center is nowhere near the World Trade Center, but we were...
The water mains had all broken when the towers fell. So- That went on about, until about midnight. Wow. Then I made a command decision. We had no equipment because all of us had come down there, all the equipment from our firehouses had already been sent there, and all the on-duty members from [00:28:00] our firehouses had already been sent there.
So, uh, we lost five guys from my firehouse, including the battalion chief and his aide, the on-duty lieutenant in my f- in my company, my rank, two of my firefighters, and then the guy whose spare gear I had borrowed lost his life. I mean, I worked with about 250 of the 343 firefighters w- that were killed that day.
And it just went on from there. Wow. I mean, all the days thereafter, and I spent the entire month of April down there looking for remains. Um, you know, initially we had no real, uh, hazardous materials or, uh, or breathing protection. Uh, certainly not on 9/11. We had, we had nothing. The group that I was with, we didn't have radios to communicate with.
We didn't have any breathing protection. We didn't have any real tools. Uh, so it was all hand and buck- and construction buckets for a while.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Yeah. Um, well with, especially with, uh, everything that Captain Berkman just said, especially when it comes to, you know, people covered in dust and not having any, you know, breathing protection or anything else like that, Mary Anne, I wanna bring you in because of course I know that working on the long-term health impact has been something that was, th- that's just really become, uh, your mission now.
But-
Marianne Pizzitola: Right ...
Jenna Flanagan, Host: for your recollections of that day
Marianne Pizzitola: I was at fire headquarters- As an
Jenna Flanagan, Host: EMS, yeah
Marianne Pizzitola: I was at fire headquarters in Brooklyn, and we were assigned there to work in the Bureau of Health Services. So there's TVs in the waiting room for all of the members of service, fire, and EMS, and when they were watch- their news programs, 'cause they always used to watch Maury Povich for some crazy reason.
Um, but when, when this happened, they broke into the news, and then basically everyone that was in the waiting area left, um, left the, um, the waiting room and flew out of the building. Um, they had tried to get into, uh, the nearest firehouses and the EMS commands to get down to Ground Zero. Some of them just ran over the bridge, others we had commandeered buses to get over.
Um, I ended up staying in World Trade Center for four straight days. I did not go home because the trains were not running, and I lived in Long Island, so I would stay- sleep at work and go right back. But it was like a 24/7 cycle, my recollection, for those four days because we would go down to Ground Zero and come back, and we were all covered in dust.
And I remember when I would go sleep on the floor in my cubicle at headquarters, um, there was a trail of [00:31:00] dust coming in from the building through the carpets, uh, up through the elevators, into each of the office floors, and then wherever a member of service collapsed into their chair was, like, another puff of dust.
And I remember people were gracious to support what we were doing because they knew what we were living and sleeping at work and not going anywhere. We were just working, trying to take a breather, try to take a nap, and then go right back to work. For me, being at headquarters, 'cause I was assigned there after leaving the Bronx just a couple months before, it had taken a toll because I was not used to working in that kind of an office setting in fire headquarters But the members were coming back there because it was an easy location for them to come back to, walking over the bridge, and we would all congregate in the lobby.
And we also made us a, um, we had companies like Modell's at the time that had brought us clothes 'cause they knew we weren't going home- Mm ... and would bring us toiletries and changes of clothes. 'Cause I didn't have clothes with me. For four days I slept in headquarters. I mean, you're working, you're sweating, you're stinky, you're covered in dust, and some of these companies were so gracious to help us out so that at least we could wash down and change our underwear and put on a T-shirt.
And we didn't care what we looked like, we just had clothes on and, and we just kept on going back to look for our friends. It was a hard, um, definite, um, experience for many people, uh, both civilians, I remember civilians that had gone down from their offices with their ch- with a chief that worked, that came back that was suffering from severe mental stress.
And because we had originally been part of a cr- um, a sh- uh, a PTSD team with EMS, we tried to help them initially. But it was way bigger in scale than anybody had ever imagined, and very [00:33:00] quickly overwhelmed all resources from fire and EMS sides put together. So that was, those were my first four days.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Okay. All right. And of course, I do wanna point out that when it comes to all of that dust and breathing apparatuses, et cetera, uh, at the time, the EPA did say that the air was safe just days after, uh, the towers collapsed. Leela, I left you last because you were amongst the demographic that unfortunately perhaps got overlooked a lot in the retelling of the story of 9/11, and that, those were the kids who were in school, um, so close to the World Trade Center.
So again, for yourself, where were you that day, and how did the school handle it? When did you know that no, no, no, no, no, this is completely different and this is just a life-changing moment that's taking place?
Lila Nordstrom: Um, I was a student at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11. And I'll note also that, like, there's, there's sort of the students and then there's also, there were just kids in the community, there were people who lived in the community, there were people who were just at work at regular jobs in the community.
And all of us were left to kind of evacuate in this chaotic scene, um, without any real guidance or training or anything. Um, but so I was a s- Stuyvesant High School is about three blocks from the World Trade Center. It overlooked the Twin Towers. And so we were in class when the first plane hit. And I actually, I've always wondered, they made an announcement at my school that a small propeller plane had hit the World Trade Center, and I never
Because we weren't, you know, we were in school, so we weren't listening to the radio at the time, I never knew where that information had come from. But I guess it was all over the radio at the time. Um, and then of course, that was before the second plane hit and we learned that these were commercial airliners that were hitting the towers, not [00:35:00] small propeller planes.
But we did have a small moment of, "Oh, what a sad, small accident. I wonder why this enormous fireball has, uh, engulfed the North Tower." But so, um, my teacher taught through the collapse of the first building. He had been there in '93 when there had been a bombing at the World Trade Center, and at the time we hadn't evacuated the school, or they hadn't evacuated the school.
And so he just assumed that we wouldn't evacuate and that he should keep us calm by continuing to teach. But it was impossible, 'cause we were on the 10th floor of Stuyvesant overlooking the scene with no, nowhere else to really look. Um, and so kids started kind of running into our classroom and reporting what was going on according to the television, 'cause they had turned on the TV.
And finally, when the first tower collapsed, Stuyvesant was sort of on the northern end of where the dust cloud reached, and so this huge dust cloud, we watched it just come rush towards the building. And I am a lifelong asthmatic, and I was like, "I should not be here right now." And so I decided to unilaterally, uh, invite myself to the nurse's office that was on the other side of the building and closer to the exit, just to get away from the dust.
And so I immediately left the room and, you know- Went and, and waited with a bunch of, um, with a bunch of aides. And, you know, there's a program at Stuyvesant that, um, is for physically disabled students, and so they were all in the nurse's office. Their aides were there. We were listening to the radio then, and we heard that, like, every plane in the sky was headed for a building in Manhattan somewhere, and we should all just watch out.
And then they just announced we should all just leave and run north. And so I just got up. I was by myself because I had left my class , and so I just got up and was one of the first students out of the building. Um, but when I... Because of that, when I stepped out of the building, the second tower started to collapse.
Most of the students at Stuyvesant were still inside when that happened. And so I ended up in this, like, stampede of office workers who were all running really fast at my back, and I kinda turned around and watched the antenna fall straight down and then started to run for as long as an asthmatic child can run.
Um, and then, uh, when I ran out of breath, which was fairly quickly, I ran into a teacher from Stuyvesant, and we started walking uptown together, kind of gathered students. I mean, at least I was a senior, but there were students at Stuyvesant who this was their third day of school. They'd come from the outer boroughs.
They had never really been into the city by themselves prior to this and suddenly were, like, left to walk aimlessly north with no subway access. And so we gathered a group of students. We- I finally found a friend, and because I grew up in Chelsea and had heard that a plane was gonna hit the Empire State Building, I decided it was not safe to go home.
And so I ended up walking 10 miles to Astoria to spend the night at a friend's house in Queens. And then the story of Stuyvesant really it's a, it's a traumatic evacuation, but we also returned to the area much earlier than a lot of the other schools. And so we were back on October 9th, which means that we were also present for the entire cleanup, and the, uh, cleanup operation was using a barge moored next to our school as where, you know, as the, as the site where they were dumping all of the debris from the site to bring it to Fresh Kills.
And so we actually ended up next to, like, an active environmental, you know, catastrophe for the next, you know, eight months or so while we were in school in a building that had not been adequately cleaned, and that is really where a lot of the health consequences that Stuyvesant students and other students in the area are experiencing came from.
Many of us were not caught in the dust cloud. We got out just before the dust cloud reached where we, you know, reached the school. But, um, almost all of us spent months exposed to continual recontamination at the site because we were attending school in, like, an active environmental waste , you know, dump site, basically
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Wow.
Wow. Okay. Well, first of all, I wanna thank everyone for giving their just unvarnished and just pure, raw recollections of that morning, 'cause that is such a critical and important part of history. But, um, as we go forward with the conversation, I do wanna ask that we all try to keep our... And I understand these are big questions, but our answers are as succinct as possible, just to make sure we get through as much as we can.
And so with that, uh, Sara, I wanna go back to you. And as we reflect on, uh, 25 years since 9/11, of course, there's, you know, the EMS workers, the FDNY, the NYPD, um, who get a lot of the, uh, most of the attention, and rightfully so. I don't wanna take away from that. But you often call flight attendants aviation's first responders, and so what do you want people to understand about, uh, the crews on planes, and especially the people who were aboard those planes?
Sara Nelson: Yes. Thank, thanks for that question, um, because this has been my life's work. It's turned into my life's work. Um, but, uh, my handbook is in the 9/11 Museum. It's open to the page of the instruction for flight attendants when there's a hijacking. Uh, the instruction that we had was to appease the hijackers, to keep everyone calm.
It was the exact wrong instruction for that day. Um, so I, I... When I think about my friends who were on the flight, I know exactly where they were working. Um, I know how they cared for each other, what they would've been doing. Um, uh, three of the flight attendants had only been flying for eight months. One was a retired police officer from New Mexico.
And, um, I, I often wonder, um, if they challenged in their own minds, uh, the in- the training that they had and what they should be doing in that moment. But what they definitely did was, um, get on the airphone. My friend Robert Fangman, um, gave critical information that day. Of [00:41:00] course, um, everyone is very familiar with Betty Ong calling from, uh, Flight 11, um, to let us know what was actually happening on board the aircraft.
And, um, so, uh, that information actually made it to our friends on Flight 93, uh, uh, that was, that left from Newark and, uh, was headed to either the Capitol or the White House, um, most likely the Capitol. Um, and though that was a crew, uh, many of the pilots, um, were the first to die. Um, I, uh, the flight attendants were among the first to be stabbed and hurt and, and, and potentially die as well.
Um, but when that information got to Flight 93, the flight deck had already been taken over, it was locked. Um, and, um, the passengers and the five women who were the crew members there, and I, I really wanna point this out, there were Black and white and Latino and Asian, [00:42:00] um, uh, passengers. Um, all of the crew, flight attendant crew members were women of, of various, um, seniorities and experience in doing our jobs.
Um, there was a pregnant mother, there was a gay rugby player fighting for marriage equality, and obviously there were Democrats and Republicans and Independents. Of course. Um, but once they knew the truth, they just acted with unity. And, uh, they, they very quickly, uh, tried to fight back and tried to save their own lives and used the liquor cart to try to break in and find other weapons, um- To send messages, um, saying goodbye to their loved ones, and fought back and tried to save their own lives.
But, um, in that, in those moments, um, they were not only first responders, they were aviation's last line of defense, which is what we are today as well. And they were successful in making sure that that plane didn't hurt anyone else on the ground, um, and, um, that that plane did not make it to the Capitol.
Mm-hmm. Um, so I think it's really important for people to know that flight attendants, pilots, the crews were among the first to die that day. They were among the first responders. Uh, they are oftentimes, uh, forgotten. Um, but we, um, we worked th- very, very hard to try to minimize the impact of that day. And from there, the only l- final point I'll just make, and I can expand on it later if we have time, but- Mm-hmm
um, in that moment, we were grieving our friends and trying to figure out what was going on here, and there were crisis capitalists planning right in that moment. As, as the first responders, as, as, as Brenda and Marianne a- Marianne were rushing to try to help their friends, there were crisis capitalists deciding that they were going to use this moment to redefine the value of a flight attendant, a pilot, a mechanic, to outsource the kitchens, to outsource the baggage handlers, to pay them the lowest wages with no benefits, to strip people of their pensions, um, and their [00:44:00] healthcare, their retiree healthcare, Marianne.
And, um, and, and that is what was happening that day when the rest of us and working people were trying to save other people, were trying to do our best to try to recover. And in the worst case, recover the m- remains so that people could mourn and bury their loved ones and try to, try to move on. But it has been a fight every single day ever since then.
There was a sign on our union door that said, "Never forget," and I remember th- thinking, "Who in the hell is ever gonna forget this?" But they do. They do if we don't do this. And I, I really believe that through our unions, um, and through the commitment of people like Lila, we are the ones who keep the memory alive.
We're the ones who demand the highest standards of safety and health, and have to keep fighting for basic benefits that should be given to people. But without that check on capitalism will always extract everything from all of us, and use these issues as an excuse to go to war over [issues like oil, not over issues of national security.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Well, Captain Berkman, I wanna turn to you, because of course you fought so hard to make sure that women could be, uh, firefighters. I'm wondering how the FDNY, uh, for the women who were part of the department at the time- How much it acknowledged the unique ways in which, uh, working in those cleanup, uh, piles and, uh, s- doing the searching, et cetera, might have differently impacted, uh, the women firefighters?
And I'm talking about the ki- everything from the kind of health screenings that were needed to, uh, perhaps... Well, actually, you know what? I don't actually know, so if you could sort of tell us, like, was the FDNY prepared for that?
Captain Brenda Berkman: So thanks for asking that question, Jenna, because, uh, one of the things I've dedicated myself to after 9/11 is to make people aware of the contributions of women [00:46:00] at the World Trade Center and the ma- and the Pentagon and Shanksville and all the many days thereafter, and the continuing issues.
Because initially, a lot of the cancers, the health conditions that are considered unique to women were not covered by the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program. Leila and Mary Anne certainly know this. I think Suz- Sarah also knows this. Um, just to get a plug in, the organization, the nonprofit that I volunteer with, Monumental Women, has been putting up social media posts, uh, for weeks now every day highlighting the stories of women, including flight attendants, including, uh, you know, not, women who are not part of the uniformed services, but certainly women from the uniformed services, the women at Ground Zero.
There's a book, by the way, called The Women at Ground Zero.
Captain Brenda Berkman: Because we want to educate the public about the role of women on 9/11 and the days thereafter, because a lot of the media was not covering anything having to do with women. Um, and so people got the impression that women weren't even involved, that they weren't down there, that they weren't performing exactly the same things that men were doing.
Not taking away anything from the men- Of course not, yeah ... but just making people aware, because these media reports then become our history, and this becomes what is taught to kids about the, uh, you know, about the events of 9/11, which is not, um, complete, and we need the complete history.
And we need people to realize that women have been left out of the coverage of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program, that their [00:48:00] contributions have been ignored, and this has very real consequences going out into the future.
Wow. So that's, you know, that's what I'd like to make people really aware of right now, and I know that Leila and Mary Anne can both speak to this. Well- Because they weren't even telling women who worked in the area, you know, the civil servants- Mm-hmm ... the, the people, the women who worked on Wall Street, the people who worked on Wall Street, they weren't telling these people- That they were eligible to be monitored by the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program.
Until very recently, many people still don't know.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Well, Marianne, I mean, we've, uh, ha- of course we've spoken to you before on the show. But again, um, with the unique health challenges of breathing in what was told to, everyone was told about "safe air" by the EPA, um, but subsequently created all of these health challenges.
Just can you one more time go over for us specifically how that [00:49:00] impacted the numerous women who were either first responders, civilians, uh, kids we're gonna talk about. But just tell us a little bit about that.
Marianne Pizzitola: So thanks Jenna for the question, and Brenda and Sara are both right. In the early days of this, even at the FDNY, when we started developing immediate, uh, respiratory issues or skin issues, and this is immediate, even the FDNY was telling EMS people, or EMS workers, EMTs, and paramedics, that we could definitely not be i- have i- illnesses like the firefighters were.
I remember fighting the nurses at the Bureau of Health Services desk, and David Prezant, and Kerry Kelly. And I will tell you, I was down at Ground Zero with David Prezant and Kerry Kelly, and yet Kerry came back to headquarters covered in dust like the rest of us, and still were denying that we could be equally sick as a firefighter.
And I blew my mind, Jenna, because we were there side by side. And here it is 25 years later, we're suffering from cancers, we're suffering from skin cancers, from brain cancers, breast cancers, men suffering from breast cancers, autoimmune disorders that are not covered, cardiac issues, cognitive impairments that are still not covered.
And these are studies that keep coming on and that we keep having to fight for. And then, of course, as a New York City retiree, a retired unionist my entire life, I am still fighting the city of New York, and unfortunately, the two largest unions of the city with the New York State AFL-CIO and AFSCME, literally lobbying against my legislation that would protect a retired unionist healthcare in retirement.
Like, this makes no sense. We endured a city that lied to us about the air quality, put us in harm's way, didn't give us the respiratory equipment or the equipment that we needed, told us to go back to work, told students to go back to school, told civilians to go back to their apartments. We got sick, and what was the Harding memo, the memo of the deputy mayor, M- Deputy Mayor Harding?
Well, they were more worried about potential litigation and negligence or liability than they were about the lives of the workers, of the workers that they employed. So we became collateral damage, and here I am 25 years later, raising millions of dollars, running an organization to protect my healthcare in retirement when the same city put me in this position, tried to charge me for my healthcare, tried to strip me from my, of my healthcare in retirement.
And I'm not supposed to be angry And I'm still fighting this, and I can't even get the mayor to talk to me. So yes, to all of these women, because I think we actually need to, we need to put all of the ladies on this chat right here. We need to, to amplify our voices that this should never happen again.
And if they wanna say never forget, never forget is about remembering the people here that are on this show, Jenna, that have, have paid the ultimate sacrifice, that paid with their life, that paid with their health, and still suffering 25 years later, and yet they're still [00:52:00] fighting for what we thought we already earned and was promised to us.
That's never forget. I was so disturbed to res- to read Harry Siegel from Brooklyn this week, his article in Vital City saying that the city forgot and maybe it should. No. The city should never forget, and we're never forgetting, and we are going to keep reminding them.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Well, with all of that in mind, Lila, uh, again, I have to imagine, 'cause as you already stated, you guys were teenagers next to an active environmental, uh, I guess, catastrophe, um, being cleaned up, and that's of course after having, uh, been exposed to the dust from the towers that had fallen, et cetera.
Tell us about the health challenges that the... And again, I mean, yes, teenagers, you guys were, you know, able to drive and maybe some of you were old enough to vote, but those are still kids. Those were still developing bodies, and yet you guys were all [00:53:00] exposed to some seriously toxic air
Lila Nordstrom: Yeah, and also, no, in New York City we weren't old enough to drive.
We were still- Oh, okay ... just a little young to drive in New York City. Um, no, I, I think one thing that I want to say to kind of compound what everyone's been talking about is that one of the obstacles that we face, like, more broadly when we talk about women's healthcare and also developmental healthcare in the World Trade Center Health Program, and just in World Trade Center research in general, is that members of the survivor community, and this is a community of 300,000 people, do not have proactive monitoring.
They are being monitored when they are sick. You have to be sick to be monitored in the World Trade Center Health Program as a civilian survivor, and that means that the major population that has repr- a representative sample of women is not getting proactively monitored. That means that conditions that are more likely to appear in women are not showing up in data around World Trade Center research.
It means that we are only getting covered for conditions that first responders are seeing in their own health.
and that means that we are- [00:55:00] able to maybe, um, assume some of the health consequences that young people will experience based on other research.
But there's not a lot of research on this in general, and the, the, the, the situation is even worse when it comes to women's health. And I think the, the conversation around uterine cancer is the perfect example, where the World Trade Center health program was very late to add uterine cancer to its list of covered conditions.
It was covering basically every other cancer but uterine cancer up until a couple years ago. When that conversation happened, there's a, there's a kind of scientific body that, of doctors and community advocates that are, you know, that kind of discusses these, uh, these petitions for new conditions. One of the things that kept coming up is that there was almost no research on uterine cancer anywhere and environmental exposures.
And so there was no way to link uter- environmental exposures to uterine cancer because already there's so little health data on w- uh, s- health data on women. There was no health data on the first responder community that could be representative enough to stand in for the widespread [00:56:00] exposure that women in general in the community had to, you know, these environmental toxins and the health consequences that resulted from that.
And so for years, we went back and forth about the addition of this one reproductive cancer in women that was exclusively in the conversation because there's no- data on it anywhere. Mm-hmm. And that happened, that's kind of the issue that a lot of, that women are having when, in, in the survivor community, but also I think, you know, that, that responders are having, women who are responders are having in, on the responder side as well, where the, in order to get adequate care for the conditions that we all experienced after 9/11, there has to be some sort of scientific impetus to add it to the health program that we very, you know, that, that we're very lucky to have.
Um, and, and a lot of the time, because there's not enough data on women's health, those conditions don't get added, and we don't get to follow up on them over the years. That, you know, we're having this conversation about autoimmune disorders that seems to go on forever. Autoimmune disorders affect women [00:57:00] at significantly higher rates, and there are not enough women in the proactive research that's being done to monitor 9/11 populations to justify its addition.
But it's happening everywhere in the survivor community. No one's talking about it.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Um- Yeah. Um, I'm so sor- I cannot believe the clock is absolutely merciless, but we're going to have to leave it there. First and foremost, I do wanna, A, thank all of my guests for joining me, but also to say that we will be continuing this conversation.
'Cause as you all know and as listeners can tell, we have only scratched the surface here. So, thank you so much to Sara Nelson, International President of the Association of Flight Attendants CWA, author and, uh, STY Health founder, uh, Leila Nordstrom, retired FDNY EMS first responder and public service retiree advocate Maryann, uh, Pizzitola, and retired FDNY captain Brenda Berkman.
Thank you all so much for helping us remember and understand, uh, September 11th and its impact of what [00:58:00] happened that day. So thank you so much for joining us on We Decide.
Sara Nelson: Thank you for bringing us together, Jenna. Thanks, Jenna. Thank you so much.
Jenna Flanagan, Host: Thank you. And we will continue this conversation.
