9/11 didn’t end in 2001 – ‘forgotten’ victims are still suffering and dying daily

Each September, Harold Delancey avoids the news and live television for two weeks. It’s too hard.

25 years ago, he was working for the New York Police Department when a plane hit one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. Within minutes, he was sent to respond in Lower Manhattan.

Like thousands of others, Harold, now 70, thought it was a freak accident. Then a second plane crashed into the South Tower. By 10am, the entirety of Manhattan was shrouded in darkness and dust after both buildings collapsed.

In the months that followed, the police officer worked in morgues around the city, opening body bags filled with toxic dust and helping to identify victims.

‘I try my best not to talk about it. It’s a bad month for me,’ Harold tells Metro from his home in North Carolina.

‘If someone asks me about that day, I’ll talk about it. But I don’t want to relive it.’

He pauses, takes a deep breath, and adds: ‘I don’t like being called a hero because it was my job. It was something that I signed up for, and I’d do it again if I had to.’

Harold’s work came at a price. He is one of thousands of first responders who went on to develop respiratory illnesses and cancers after working in and around Ground Zero as Downtown Manhattan became a no-go zone, littered with debris and filled with toxic smoke.

The day the world stood still

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It has been 25 years since 2977 people lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

The atrocity was the single deadliest peacetime attack on American soil – and the ramifications are still being felt.

Michael Barasch, 71, founder of Barasch & McGarry, a law firm representing thousands of 9/11 victims, witnessed the attacks just blocks away from Ground Zero. He had been doing a morning workout at his nearby gym and quickly went to his office to see what was happening.

He witnessed both towers being struck just blocks away. 25 years later, the pain is still fresh.

‘Since then, tens of thousands of people have developed respiratory illnesses. Over 52,000 people have now been certified with a 9/11 cancer,’ Barasch tells Metro.

‘Over 9,000 people have died of World Trade-related pulmonary illnesses and cancers, and it does not stop. 9/11 didn’t end on 9/11.

‘Losing all those people on the day was tragic, absolutely, but what’s just as tragic is that three times as many people have died of related illnesses since that day.’

The forgotten toll

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Two weeks after the towers fell, workers, schoolchildren and families began to return to Manhattan.

They were told it was okay; the air was safe to breathe. It wasn’t.

One of those workers, 61-year-old Frances Caulfield, was eager to return to work at the New York City Board of Education after the attacks and see the city she loved begin to heal.

‘I went the very first day I was allowed to return. I took the subway, but the minute I got out at the Wall Street stop, I couldn’t believe the air,’ she tells Metro.

‘It was horrible. Thick and smelly. I put a scarf over my nose and mouth and kept my sunglasses on. I got to the building as soon as I could. Even though the air was horrible and smelled so weird and chemical-like, I figured they must have tested it, and it was harmless. I just assumed it wasn’t dangerous.’

It wasn’t until the late 2000s that Frances started to suffer from complications and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Soon after, she began developing chronic skin cancer and has ‘lost count’ of how many surgeries she’s had to remove it.

Frances, her husband and two children relocated to a rural home in New Jersey years after the terror attacks.

For years, she didn’t think her cancers and her exposure to toxic fumes from Ground Zero were related. She only began making the link in the late 2010s.

Dana Cohen, 54, senior partner at Barasch & McGarry, was also in her Manhattan office that day and knows the horrors of 9/11 didn’t just end when the city began to open up again.

‘We were all sick, noses burning, eyes burning. I have clients who tell me they’d come to work and throw up. We knew it — it didn’t feel right. But they told us the air was safe, and we wanted to believe it, and we wanted New York City to get back to life, to recover,’ she tells Metro.

When the firefighters that Dana and Michael had represented before 9/11 began getting ill, the pair began working to file claims on behalf of the poorly first responders, but soon ran into an issue.

The pair discovered that if a sick first responder didn’t go to the hospital within 72 hours of becoming ill, they couldn’t get access to the Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), which provided compensation to those who died or were injured on 9/11.

However, there was no help for those who became ill after being exposed to toxins at and around Ground Zero.

Michael explains, ‘People still hadn’t connected the dots. Students came back to school. Little kids going back to kindergarten. All they did was smell this horrible dust while those buildings were still burning. They didn’t have a choice.’

Michael and Dana both stress that they knew the government was doing the best it could in the chaos.

But when it came to air quality, Michael adds: ‘We naively thought our government would never lie to us – and if the Environmental Protection Agency say the air is safe, companies have to reopen and tell people to come back. That’s what everybody did.

‘300,000 office workers in Lower Manhattan returned to their jobs, 50,000 students and teachers went back to the classroom, and 35,000 downtown residents went home – all around two weeks after the towers fell.’

By then, first responders had already developed what was called the ‘World Trade Center Cough’, but it took years for officials to link the exposure to a plethora of conditions, from respiratory issues to deadly cancers.

One victim was Macy Borders, who became known as the 9/11 ‘dust lady’ after a picture captured her covered with deadly ash and debris after she had escaped the 81st floor of the North Tower.

When the legal assistant was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2014, she and many experts firmly believed it had been caused by the toxic cloud of dust. Just a year later, Macy passed away at 41.

‘We were all exposed to the same toxins,’ Michael tells Metro. ‘Not surprisingly, we’re all getting the same illnesses. We’re all dying of the same illnesses.’

The Victim Compensation Fund

In early 2002, Michael began working with the US government to expand the VCF to help New Yorkers who had been in Manhattan that autumn day and became ill afterwards.

Congress permanently extended both the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides free medical treatment for 9/11-linked conditions, and the Victim Compensation Fund until 2090.

However, many survivors are still facing issues in accessing compensation and healthcare, while research on 9/11-linked illnesses has stalled after Elon Musk and the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE) fired dozens of doctors and nurses in May 2025 as part of a vow to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.

Frances tells Metro that it was not until 2020, when she saw a commercial from a law firm explaining she was entitled to compensation for working downtown in the aftermath of the attacks, that she considered applying – even then, it was a difficult decision to make.

‘On the first call I said I felt a little ashamed and guilty,’ she remembers. ‘I just don’t feel I can compare my situation to the extent of loss that first responders, victims and their families experienced, and still experience.

‘Everyone had at least one friend who lost someone. If you didn’t lose someone yourself, or someone you knew was injured, you were one person removed from it.’

Frances jokes that she’s become a ‘professional patient’, having beaten cancer and continuing to battle ongoing skin cancer. But, she admits, she’s ‘one of the lucky ones’.

The ‘lucky’ ones

Harold tells Metro that he retired three years after 9/11. Within a decade, he developed the long-term lung condition chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and was later diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2023. He still suffers from PTSD.

Something that still bothers Harold is the lack of precaution given to first responders in the days after the attacks.

‘I knew on my first day at Ground Zero that it should have been a hazmat area,’ he says.

‘For them to tell us the air was clean and that it was safe to work, it was ridiculous. A friend of mine was sent to look for bodies, and when he was sent back to command, he was told not to wash his uniform – but to throw it away. ‘That should tell you something: that area was contaminated.

‘Lower Manhattan was in total darkness at 10am. Then you factor in the fire at Ground Zero that burned until February. There was no way on God’s earth that the air wasn’t poison. But I had a job to do.’

In 2013, Harold moved to a small town in North Carolina. These days, he spends time with his children and grandchildren.

‘My grandkids have mentioned 9/11, but have yet to come to me and ask, ‘Grandad, how was it? What happened? Can you tell me about it?’ I don’t know if they discuss it in school,’ he adds.

Harold also meets with other retired members of the NYPD and NYFD in North Carolina multiple times a year. He reaches out to those who are sick and can’t leave their homes, and helps file paperwork for his friends who died from 9/11-related illnesses so their families can get help.

In 2016, he was diagnosed with PTSD after suffering for years with nightmares. It wasn’t until he sought out therapy on his own that he realised how lacking the mental health support was for first responders. The VCF now helps Harold pay for therapy, as well as treatment for his ongoing health issues.

He still suffers from a lower quality of life from his ongoing illnesses, but also believes he’s one of the luckier ones.

‘I’ve lost a lot of friends over the last four years. Quite a few have passed away from 9/11 related injuries,’ he says quietly. ‘People are dying left and right, and I don’t think it’s being publicised, and a lot of people don’t know. They just think it happened and the next day, everything’s normal.’

This year, moments of silence will be held across America, as the names of victims are read out. Ceremonies will be held at Ground Zero.

Meanwhile, the number of 9/11 casualties continues to rise. Michael and Dana say that every day they are still losing clients.

‘Multiple families call daily to tell us their loved one died,’ explains Dana.

‘How can we preserve the testimony of those who are dying each day about who they were with, what they did, who they saw?’

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