Where were you on Sept. 11?
That’s the Kennedy question of a new generation. I was at the ATM machine and on the way to work in the morning when I heard someone mention it. Then I got to work and my colleagues were crowded into our conference room watching CNN. Someone told me, “A plane just ran into the World Trade Center,” and I dismissed it as exaggeration. Needless to say, I quickly realized the truth.
I went to New York a few weeks later, when the city was still a mess. Downtown people were wearing masks, there were signs everywhere for missing persons, there was grit and a hellish smell, and Ground Zero was still a gaping, smoking hole. The city was shut down. It was apocalyptic, and this was three weeks after Sept. 11. I talked to several police officers, residents and firefighters, and I thought, “How in the world do you live through something like this?”
Now the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has released a report with clinical guidelines (better late than never, I guess) about the impact of 9/11 on those who had to live through it—and perform their jobs immpecably—people who worked on or around the site. While the focus of the report is on respiratory health, it also updates the guidelines for the treatment of PTSD and related depression, as well as substance abuse.
The information in the report, however, should’t just be seen as applicable to 9/11. Katrina emergency workers (and especially first responders) will likely suffer similar mental health problems. Let’s hope it doesn’t take five years to figure out how to address them.
NYC Releases Long-Awaited 9/11 Health Guidelines -
liz | 2:03 PM | Uncategorized
I was awakened by the radio saying, “All U.S. airports are closed.” This was the first thing I heard when I opened my eyes. I said, “What?????” and went and turned on the TV and saw the tower come down.
I got a phone call my ex husbands friend and turned on the tv. Then I called my dad who was at his travel agency and said “Are we under attack?”
And he said “No, the planes are coming up with the code word for hijacked on them.”
I was working for a friend at the time and we went to Fergies and drank. They don’t have tvs there.
I was driving to a computer class when I first heard about it. It was early morning in California, and the fog still hadn’t lifted. Driving through the fog, I turned on the radio and heard two guys talking about some obviously important breaking news. One of them said the two World Trade Center towers were “gone”, and I couldn’t figure out what “gone” meant. Then one of them said something about the Capitol in Washington being on security lockdown, or something like that. It made me wonder if some protester had gone on some kind of shooting spree there, as had happened once before. Then they said something about planes being grounded all across the U.S., and I realized it was all part of one big story. When one of them said something about a plane flying into a WTC tower, I briefly thought it might have been a small private plane crashing into a tower by accident – I know something like that had happened to the Empire State Building about 60 years ago. By the time I got to school I had heard the whole story, and I just sat there in the parking lot listening to the radio for 15 or 20 minutes.
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