About a month after Sept. 11, 2001, documentarian and journalist Lisa Katzman went back to her apartment in Lower Manhattan. Although her home had been cleaned, the windows were open and there was …
About a month after Sept. 11, 2001, documentarian and journalist Lisa Katzman went back to her apartment in Lower Manhattan. Although her home had been cleaned, the windows were open and there was still dust in the air as hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers still labored tirelessly at Ground Zero and the surrounding streets as part of the recovery and cleanup mission after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
Anyone working at Ground Zero was most in harm’s way by sheer proximity and lack of proper protective resources, but the spiderweb of danger spread out across the city as the government said the air was safe to breathe, reopening select lower Manhattan businesses just days after Sept. 11 and sending children back to schools in the area less than a month later. It didn’t take long for survivors, first responders and many others to start getting sick.
In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, there was a “surge of patriotism,” she acknowledges, that drew many to come out to Ground Zero from other boroughs and other states. Those people were moved and motivated “to act on behalf of the common good — and the common good dictated, you go and you search in the rubble for the dead first and then you begin to clear. They’re in a different state, and they’re not thinking about their own survival.
“The monitoring station monitors that were set up were clogged. So, when I say cynical, this is a perfect example because what did the EPA post on their website? That they couldn’t get a reading — but of course not because the monitors were clogged. That’s how bad it was,” Katzman says. “It requires governmental oversight.
Katzman spent months traveling to Washington, D.C. to film what was happening with the bill, which is named for former NYPD officer Zadroga, the first officer whose death was attributed to his exposure to the toxins at Ground Zero. She often shared space with the documentarians behind “No Responders Left Behind,” which also follows Feal and activist-comedian Jon Stewart in their fight for first responders’ health rights.
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