Some Kids Left Behind

A Survivor's Fight for Health Care in the Wake of 9/11

Lila Nordstrom

• Publisher: Apollo Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781948062633
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sostegno politico

For the 20th anniversary of 9/11 comes an awe-inspiring account of the schoolchildren poisoned by the toxic air left in the wake of the Twin Towers' destruction and the survivor who fought for health care for them in front of Congress and against the odds.

On September 11, 2001, high school senior Lila Nordstrom watched from her classroom's window as the Twin Towers, mere blocks away, fell. Weeks later, at the urging of local officials and assurance from the EPA, Lila and her three thousand classmates were returned to their school—even though the air was thick with toxic debris, dust, and smoke.

In this remarkable, empowering memoir, Lila shares how the illnesses and deaths of her classmates related to the effects of the 9/11 cleanup spurred her into action. She created StuyHealth and became involved in the fight for the Victim Compensation Fund, working alongside first responders and heavyweights like Jon Stewart, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, proving at every turn that her survivor community also deserves recognition and mental and physical health care and that her voice too deserves to be heard.

This timely tale reveals how tragedy lays bare the American health care system and how corruption and misinformation continue to fail victims of tragedies. An honest, at times humorous guide to advocating for one's self and one's community and navigating the cutthroat world of legislation and health care, Lila's story begs us to consider how we as a nation treat our vulnerable communities and how all victims of all disasters deserve care, truth, and respect. Also included is a section on the meaning of advocacy work, what it means to be an active citizen, and how to support a cause you believe in.

Chapter 1

New Shoes

Some of us had experience evacuating Stuyvesant High School before September 2001. In the fall of 1998, during my first semester there, an interesting ritual developed. Every day at a different time the fire alarm would go off and the entire school would vacate the premises. We’d stand up from our desks, filter out of the emergency exits, and loiter for a while in various designated fire zones only to be called back to class soon after with no explanation. We did this for days without any idea why until a rumor began to circulate that an unnamed freshman—one of us—was setting a fire in a different school bathroom every day. The fire starter was clearly somebody who hadn’t gotten the message, relayed repeatedly during our orientation, that if we didn’t get straight As and act like obedient tiny robots for the next four years, our adult lives would be a destroyed, starting with our inevitable rejection from Harvard, followed by an unsatisfying marriage to a below-average person, and culminating in a life of abject poverty and drudgery. (I may be an unreliable source on this. I was exactly the kind of obedient robot that would have read a threat to lifelong happiness into any casual comment about good behavior.)

The ritual went on and on, and as the bathroom fires continued, the evacuations became cumbersome for an administration straining to find time for actual instruction. There were, at times, multiple fires in one day or inconveniently timed fires that ran across periods. Every fire caused at least thirty minutes of wasted time between the movements of thousands of students, the enthusiastic speculation about the culprit, and the time it took for the smell of smoke to clear. Eventually the administration decided to split the difference between safety and education and made a change. A few days into the thrill of perma-emergency, we were informed that instead of instinctively leaving upon hearing the shrill wail of the alarm, we should wait for an announcement telling us which specific floors were going to evacuate. Everybody else was theoretically to remain in class, lessons uninterrupted.

In practice, this system of waiting it out was just as distracting and wasted just as much time as a complete evacuation. At least once, the floors below and above me were given orders to leave while I was instructed to stay put. (For the record, there is no way to lean into a meaningful class discussion about The Great Gatsby while a fire alarm blares and smoke seeps into the room, even if you’re assured that you aren’t in danger.) Periodically, we would smell the familiar scent of bathroom smoke and wait patiently only to be given no instructions whatsoever.

After a while we understood that the fires weren’t hazardous so much as annoying. The evacuations, which had created a frenzied atmosphere early on, began to feel more like very informal fire drills than actual emergencies. Anything becomes normal after a while. Soon many students were coming to school hoping to evacuate in that day’s fire—it was a time to catch up with friends, confer about test answers, and, for some, a way to abandon class after attendance had already been taken. The overambitious half of the Stuyvesant student body continued to freak out about missing class time, but for most of us the later days of the fire era were actually fun. They felt formative—so formative that in my memory this period lasted for months. In reality it was probably over within a few weeks and dealt with via the swift expulsion of the culprit. Either way, it was a bonding experience for my high school class, a hazing ritual that gave us the authority and experience to feel at home in the notorious pressure cooker that is Stuyvesant. By the end we knew every escape hatch. Every door that led to the outside. Every back stairwell. The building felt like home.

Through the lens of my evacuation on the third day of my senior year, the fire era seems cute and quaint. A lot of people are surprised to hear that the prior classes had no such memory of school-wide evacuation—the day that Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring over a thousand, students at Stuyvesant stayed put and continued class.4 The attack was an appropriate welcome to the neighborhood, nonetheless. Stuyvesant High School was founded in 1904 but was somehow never witness to a single terrorist attack until it outgrew its original home on East 15th Street and moved to its current building, a sleek new ten-story tower on Chambers Street, in 1992.5 Since the move, there have been three major attacks within blocks of the school: the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, 9/11, and a 2017 Halloween truck rampage that ended right outside the school building, killing eight people and forcing the staff to answer questions about the previous terrorist incident.6

In 2001, however, thanks to the fire era, approximately eight hundred of us had a working knowledge of the school’s complicated evacuation procedures, one probably rivaled only by whoever is in charge of designing those routes for the city. None of us got to put that knowledge to much use, though, because on the day the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001, there was not an orderly evacuation by floor or class as much as an open door to the West Side Highway and a vague instruction to run north and not turn back. What a waste of good training.

September 11, 2001, was our third day of school. It was also an election day. When I woke up that morning the radio was, as usual, blasting the news so that it could be heard above the noise of horns and chatter bleeding in through our open windows. Yearbook photos were taking place all week and, having made plans to sneakily redo my shots, I spent extra time getting ready, trying to figure out what a person—any person—is supposed to do with hair. The unnecessary primping gave me time to soak in the latest about that day’s Democratic mayoral primary. I wanted to be a good dinnertime pundit, especially since this was the last year that I wouldn’t be old enough to vote, to actually be a part of the process. It felt especially cruel that I’d be turning eighteen just after the general election in November, missing the chance to vote for mayor by only days.

I love Election Day. I love voting. I love speculating about the outcome all day, then obsessively following election results at night. It’s my version of sports. Election returns are all thrills and drama and heartbreak. The stakes are real and very present. The competitors, having spent months and sometimes years training for this very moment, are desperate to win.

I come by this electoral obsession honestly. Friends and relatives have joked that I was a “red diaper baby,” a term that Cold War–era curmudgeons and radical-politics neophytes throw around to describe the children of the radical left. In reality, my family could be more accurately stationed on an outpost of the regular left. You could certainly get approving nods by mentioning socialism at our house, but when I was growing up, my parents were mostly ornery Democrats with union backgrounds whose marriage was largely premised on a shared love of discussing politics. My mother is a force of nature, and my father is the kind of guy who graduated early from every school he ever attended. He can handle having forces of nature in his life. All three of us prefer to shout our agreement over calmly acknowledging it. Of course, I learned the term “red diaper baby” when my parents let me and a school friend go on a trip to Cuba by ourselves at age sixteen, so do with that what you will.

The mayoral race of 2001 had been pretty exciting so far. New York City’s public advocate, a showboating political veteran named Mark Green, was running for the Democratic nomination against Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, Speaker of the City Council Peter Vallone Jr., and City Comptroller Alan Hevesi.7 It had been a dirty contest so far, complete with racialized caricatures coming out of Green’s camp and the looming specter of billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a former Democrat running as a Republican, the monetary and political force to be reckoned with for whoever became the eventual Democratic candidate.8 I’d been following with interest and disgust and horror and loving every moment of it.

I left for school with my head full of polling figures. School started at 8:00 a.m. with the dreaded “0 period,” a time slot that was held exclusively for the unlucky and overly committed before school’s official start at 8:45. If you planned your schedule right, you could make up a class during 0 period and leave at 2:15, but in reality, we all had to fill our college applications with extracurriculars or risk . . . I’m not sure what exactly, dying in the gutter? Missing 0 period or taking 0 period and ducking out early never happened. It was mostly an early wake-up obligation, and I’ve never been a morning person.

I am, however, an early person. I consistently feel a strong urge to leave my house thirty minutes before it’s reasonable and, on the off chance that I am legitimately running late, the trains manage to run faster or traffic is light or everybody else arrives late and I still get there first. On September 11, I arrived at school at 7:30 a.m., as usual, and sank into a spot on the floor to wait. My chronic earliness means I spend a lot of time waiting around, and when that happens first thing in the morning I find myself calculating how many minutes of sleep I’ve lost out on in the process of being early. I’m still helpless to do anything about it. Because of this tendency I generally shy away from early morning obligations, but I’d agreed to the 8:00 a.m. class schedule because the subject was something I loved—architecture.

Stuyvesant was founded as a technical school, and all of us students had numerous shop requirements to fulfill as part of the curriculum. Some of our shop classes were famously challenging, but you could satisfy the requirement with less onerous ones like graphic design, which mostly involved easy art projects. Architecture was one of the most challenging of the shop offerings, but I’d always been interested in the subject, so after talking my way into honors drafting my sophomore year (the “honor” was based more on my gift of gab than my drafting skills), I’d decided to complete my final shop requirement by taking a double period of what was essentially advanced drafting with one of the department’s most feared instructors.

Alphonse Scotti, a longtime teacher who’d seen retirement age come and go, hadn’t much noticed me until my mother mentioned at parent-teacher night that I’d been carrying around graph paper pads and drawing floor plans for fun since I was a kid. By senior year he’d easily become one of my favorite teachers. I enjoyed his strict instruction and, w...