City of Dust

by Anthony DePalma

  At about that same time Bush was meeting the Borjas, Joe Sexton, editor of the Metropolitan Section of The New York Times, was following a hunch. Sexton, a former sports reporter who had risen through the ranks of the newspaper on the strength of a sharp intellect and plenty of street smarts, was skeptical of Borja’s tale. The blend of strong pathos and weak science struck him as another example of a sloppy tabloid approach to the question of whether exposure to the trade center dust had caused any illnesses. Sexton’s skepticism had its roots in the newspaper’s early coverage of the disaster, when it had generally accepted statements about safety made by Christie Whitman and Rudy Giuliani, and downplayed the possibility that the dust had posed a widespread danger. The Times had gone out of its way to make the case that Whitman and Giuliani had differentiated between the air on the debris pile, which they had said was dangerous, and the air in the rest of Lower Manhattan, which EPA tests had indicated was not contaminated. Repeatedly, the Times pointed out that firefighters, police officers, construction workers and everyone else on the pile had been urged to wear respirators, but many had ignored the warnings. Thus, whatever happened—and the Times reported that adverse health effects ought to be relatively mild and only temporary—could be blamed in large measure on the workers for not taking steps to protect themselves after they were warned about the risks.

  Sexton assigned police reporter Al Baker and City Hall reporter Sewell Chan to look into Borja’s claims about his father’s work at ground zero. Chan had written an article about Caesar Borja’s Washington trip, the only mention of Borja’s quest that the Times had published. The article was a sympathetic look at Borja’s campaign to help his father, and it did not raise doubts about the severity of Borja’s illness or its link to ground zero dust. In fact, the article attributed to an unnamed congressional official a statement indicating that Borja’s acceptance into Mount Sinai’s treatment program, which was paying for virtually all of his medical care, was a tacit recognition that his condition was connected to his exposure to the dust.

  Baker and Chan were able to obtain pension records and other documents detailing Borja’s work schedule in the months after the attacks. Chan says the key break in the story came from Borja’s family, which openly shared with him Borja’s own log books. The books were revealing. The information contained there did not correspond to the accounts of Borja’s heroism that had been published in the Daily News and other newspapers. The records suggested that Borja had not rushed to ground zero on September 11. In fact, records showed that on September 11 he had reported to the police car pound in Queens, his usual duty. His memo book, in which he detailed his daily assignments, did not mention volunteering at ground zero at any time. He had been assigned to the outer perimeter around the debris pile, but there was no record of it until December 24. By then, however, the underground fires had been extinguished, and some degree of normalcy had returned to New York. Over the three months that had transpired since the attacks, repeated rain and brisk winds had substantially cleared the air, although dust could still be kicked up whenever a girder was hauled away.

  Sexton gave the reporters an exceptional canvas on which to tell their story. They produced a 2,849-word article that began on the front page and ran for a good portion of an entire page inside, a notable bit of newsprint.1 Professional sniping at a cross-town rival also may have been involved: The reporters raised doubts about the version of the story published by the New York Daily News, which was aggressively campaigning for a Pulitzer Prize for its 9/11 coverage. Baker and Chan quoted the officer’s wife saying that the account in the Daily News had not been accurate, but intimated that she had been reluctant or unable to correct it. The tale of Borja’s heroism had taken on a life of its own that not even his family could control.

  The Times article did not state categorically that Borja’s illness could not have been caused by exposure to the dust, but it minimized that possibility. The paper pointed out that Borja was close to retiring in 2001, and extra work over the Christmas holidays had bolstered his earnings for the year. That inflated his pension, which would be based in part on his income during his last years on the job. The placement of the story on page 1 and its length left the clear impression that the Times was comfortable claiming that the Borjas had not told the entire truth and that the exaggerated account had duped the Daily News, Senator Clinton, and even the president. Some of the Times staff also delighted in the notion of puncturing the Pulitzer hopes of the Daily News.

  The Times article created two separate sets of controversy, a regular pattern in ground zero issues. On one side were critics who lambasted the Daily News, Clinton, and the rest of the congressional delegation for being naive. They felt that the Borja saga was proof that responders were capable of attempting to bamboozle the government as they grabbed for assistance they didn’t truly deserve. Even though the Borja family had not sued the city, their story became another cautionary tale about a system that painted every responder as a hero and every government action as a deception. On the other side, the Times was criticized for dragging the honor of Officer Borja through the mud by intimating that he had engaged in deception. These critics insisted that Borja had put in two decades as a police officer and had spent time near ground zero while the cleanup was still ongoing. To them, his illness—which Mount Sinai’s doctors attributed to exposure to the dust despite the fact that he had once been a heavy smoker—underscored just how dangerous ground zero had become. In their eyes, Officer Borja had died from pulmonary fibrosis that he had gotten by working near the pile. Their underlying message was simple: If this could happen to someone who was there in December, imagine how dangerous the pile had been earlier.

  In truth, the Daily News and Clinton’s office, with the help of the rest of the delegation, had invented a heroic role for Borja, a role his family had been either unable or unwilling to dispute. The Borjas felt betrayed by the Times article and the outrage it triggered. Ceasar Borja told other reporters that his mother had innocently believed that Chan was writing an upbeat article that would portray her husband positively. That’s why she had been so willing to open up his record books, even though she thought it was unusual for the reporter to have focused on such small details. She spent a considerable amount of time with Chan, but the only words attributed to her in the long article were “It’s not true,” referring to the account in the Daily News. Borja said he didn’t ever try to correct the misimpressions in the Daily News articles because he didn’t know firsthand what had happened at ground zero. His father had told him he’d worked on the pile, and Borja had believed him with the same conviction with which he would have believed in a sign from God.

  It is unlikely that the Borjas had tried to deceive anyone. By the time the original Daily News story was published, Borja was lying in a hospital bed at Mount Sinai, hooked up to tubes. The only journalist who had actually spoken to him was Edmund Silvestre, an editor and reporter at The Filipino Reporter, an ethnic paper where the younger Borja had once had a journalism internship. Silvestre had interviewed Borja before his condition had worsened for an article that was published January 5. This piece was not an attempt to make a hero out of Borja. In fact, the word hero never appeared in it. Instead, Silvestre portrayed Borja as a veteran cop who had become deathly ill after being assigned to ground zero and now needed a new set of lungs. He did make several errors of fact, most importantly in placing Borja at the pile immediately after the collapse. When asked about the discrepancies in the officer’s story,2 Silvestre explained that Borja had told him from his hospital bed that he had volunteered for duty at ground zero and had been there early enough to have retrieved human remains, including severed fingers. Silvestre said that Borja would not have recorded the time he had spent volunteering there in his memo book.

  But the details of his story were not as important as the symbol that Borja had become, and Silvestre’s article provided the raw material on which the tabloids, and several Capitol Hill offices, had co
nstructed the heroic image of Borja rushing down to ground zero. That version was retold—and continually embellished—right up to the meeting with President Bush.

  The other members of New York’s delegations had not been able to check out Borja’s story before Clinton invited him to Washington. To all of them, the Times article about Borja was embarrassing, but they insisted that it didn’t change the fact that Borja had worked in the contaminated zone and had come down with a serious respiratory illness that doctors at Mount Sinai linked to his work there. In other words, whether or not the dust actually caused the disease, Borja’s ground zero duty had exacerbated the damage to his lungs and led directly to his death. Even if Borja had been sick before 9/11, he wouldn’t have died when he had if the dust had not worsened his condition. Clinton continued to defend Borja, despite attacks from critics. Her office put out a statement that said she “knows that sacrifices were made by so many, whether it was in the hours, days, weeks, or months after the attacks of September 11th and believes that they all deserve our help.” The Filipino Reporter and the Borja family also refused to back down. But the Daily News admitted that it had gotten a number of facts wrong.

  A year after Borja’s death, his widow remained bitter about the way her husband’s memory had been tarnished. Again, Silvestre and the Filipino Reporter were the only ones the family opened up to, and she blamed the Daily News for building her husband up to be a hero, and the Times for tearing him down. She said that the Times had ignored many of the facts she had given Chan, including the information about Borja finding the body parts. “They just chose the facts that made us appear bad.” she told Silvestre. “But how are we going to fight a powerful press? I felt like my family was used as a pawn in a media war.”

  At about the same time Eva Borja was reliving her ordeal, Dr. Charles Hirsch’s office was completing its investigation of the circumstances surrounding Officer Borja’s demise. On his official death certificate, the cause of death was listed as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, without comment on what had triggered the disease.3 The manner of death, a critical classification for making a link to 9/11, was listed as natural, not as a homicide. The results were dutifully recorded by Hirsch’s office, and the Borja family did not attempt to challenge the findings or bring them to public attention.

  Officer Borja, like James Zadroga, had put a human face on the troubling issues swirling around ground zero, and for a time, he had managed to draw national attention to the condition of the rescue workers. The Bush administration had responded with money and a promise to do more. The Daily News’ ground zero campaign had proven embarrassing to Gov. George Pataki, who eventually gave in to the public scolding and pressed for changes to workers’ compensation laws and pension regulations that provided more advantages for ground zero workers. And despite the blowup over the Borja story, the Daily News went on to win the 2007 Pulitzer for its editorial campaign on 9/11 health issues. But the whiff of controversy and scandal had started to settle over ground zero the way the dust had initially filled the air, and eventually it would thicken into a wall of opposition that threatened to halt all ground zero aid.

  The Borja story set the stage for a confrontation based not on science, but on perception, and would highlight a most nettlesome aspect of the 9/11 aftermath. Until then, it had been sufficient for editorial writers and reporters to simply write believed after a responder’s name to connect an illness or a symptom to the dust. But the two sides of the issue were hardening. Those who doubted the dust was dangerous refused to willingly suspend their disbelief; while those who believed refused to willingly accept any doubt. Asking for hard evidence meant risking repudiation. John Feal, who became one of the most outspoken advocates for injured responders after half his foot was sliced off while working on the pile, wagged a pious finger at doubters. “Shame on everybody who opposes helping us,” he declared more than once.4

  But doubts persisted, and with time they increased. In at least one way, it was inevitable. With the exception of the fire department and its baseline medical records, almost every other bit of information was self-reported. Workers told doctors at Mount Sinai and researchers at the trade center registry how they felt and when the symptoms had started. There was little downside to claiming to be a 9/11 victim, and the lack of scientific evidence made it possible to include just about every illness, common or rare, in the list of reactions. But the Borja story raised the question of whether anything that was self-reported could be trusted. Thus, the self-reporting that had started as an unavoidable weakness of much clinical research grew into a discomfiting contest between science and the truth itself. And the Daily News was not alone in exaggerating the impact of the dust.

  Within five years of the attacks, there was a steady outpouring of heroes-turned-victims. A platoon of people who had spent any time at ground zero and become sick with any illness or ailment freely told their stories to reporters, TV correspondents, and movie producers from around the world. The cycle of 9/11 anniversaries created a great appetite for new ways to keep the story going year after year, and the volatile mix of alleged government misdeeds in withholding information from responders, along with the truly tragic conditions many workers found themselves in, became a journalistic trap few editors or reporters could avoid.

  These news stories often turned out to be a blend of science and health, with a strong dose of gumshoe whodunit. Reporters latched on to vague theories and searched for experts to advance scientific-sounding scenarios that explained how exposure to the dust had, in a few years, triggered diseases that usually took decades to develop. Or they simply allowed the responders to link their illnesses to the dust, as though there could be no doubt. Formal science lagged behind those spot stories and had no definitive answers, but researchers put out tantalizing clues that were easily manipulated. Although epidemiology is based on long-term observations, several studies had already been produced by the fifth anniversary in 2006 indicating that the negative health effects of being exposed to the dust were lasting longer than expected and, in some cases, were more serious than initially anticipated. Although the studies focused on different groups—some looked at residents, some at pregnant women, some at recovery workers themselves—they consistently showed that those who had been exposed to the dust plumes in the moment of the towers’ destruction suffered from the most serious symptoms.

  The studies were consistent in one other important way. As mentioned earlier, with the exception of research coming out of the fire department, the work on ground zero responders was based on self-reported data. The people being studied provided their own testimony about the state of their health before 9/11 and what had happened to them since. There were no baseline reference points like those Dr. Prezant had started with, based on the department’s yearly physicals. Most studies were built on personal recollection, which can be spotty. Without an individual’s documented medical history, screening doctors could not know whether asthmalike conditions had just begun or were the recurrence of earlier bouts that patients had forgotten or misremembered. And as sympathetic coverage in the media continued, it was not surprising that more people came forward to claim that they, too, had been hurt by the dust.

  Other factors also cut into the credibility of the studies. One is known as selection bias. Tens of thousands of recovery workers had come from the uniformed services and the building trades, which expected their employees to be in good physical condition. This gave them a particular perspective in responding to questions about their health prior to 9/11. Iron workers, operating engineers, and even police officers and detectives, tended to think of themselves as being in great shape, even when they weren’t. Their inaccurate recollections would skew post 9/11 studies. At the same time, because most of the studies were voluntary, they did not necessarily cover a scientifically valid sample of responders. Instead, it was expected that those who were having health problems would have been among the first to come in for screening, while those who felt fine might be inc
lined to stay home, stacking the numbers in a way that showed a higher prevalence of disease. The authors of the studies usually reflected these drawbacks and acknowledged the possibility that this could distort their results. Certainly, these phenomena were not unique to 9/11 studies, and they did not completely invalidate the data. But they were important factors to consider.

  Because the complete universe of responders was unknown, there was no easy way to get a representative sample of those who had worked at ground zero. Were there 40,000 responders, or 80,000? Eventually, Mount Sinai settled on 60,000 as the best estimate. Combining the fire department personnel with the 26,000 who had been screened at Mount Sinai generated a sample of about two-thirds of the total, which Dr. Philip Landrigan of Mount Sinai came to believe was large enough to counter any selection bias.

  Critics said some of the 9/11 studies were unreliable because they had been conducted by institutions seeking funds to treat the very illnesses they claimed to be uncovering. This is not an uncommon complaint, but no evidence suggested that the data was being manipulated in that way. Such an effort would have required a master plan, and there never was one. The research effort had been pieced together over time, the unavoidable result of the stop-and-go funding and the reluctance of the labor unions to be used as “lab rats.”