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Twenty-five years after the 9/11 attacks, many New York City residents are still grappling with complicated health conditions related to exposure to the toxic air and debris around ground zero.

“We were digging through the pile and using rakes to spread out all the debris to look for anyone’s remains,” says retired New York City firefighter Brenda Berkman. “We were working alongside really heavy equipment, as time went on, that picked up big loads of debris and dumped it, creating a cloud. This went on for 10 months. And at first, there was no proper decontamination at all.”

“EMS personnel were told, ‘Oh, you couldn’t be getting sick. You’re not a firefighter. So don’t worry. Just go back to work,’” says retired New York City EMT Marianne Pizzitola. “Moving into the years right after, … we started to find consistent diagnoses at our retiree meetings.”

Author and public health advocate Lila Nordstrom recounts how students at her school, Stuyvesant High School, located just three blocks away from ground zero, were also misled by officials after the attacks.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

For 25 Years, the War on Terror Has Turbocharged Surveillance and Imperialism

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by a roundtable of guests in our New York studio and beyond.

Bob Hennelly, award-winning investigative journalist, broadcast and print reporter for more than 40 years, general manager of WBAI Pacifica Radio here in New York, host of What’s Going On! Labor Monday, he broadcast live during the 9/11 attacks a quarter of a century ago and has been covering the 9/11 developments since then.

Lila Nordstrom is with us. She was a high school student at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11, the closest school to the World Trade Center. She’s a writer, a public health advocate, founder of the advocacy group StuyHealth, author of the memoir Some Kids Left Behind: An Activist’s Account of Beating Bureaucracy and Building a Movement, which came out in paperback last week.

Marianne Pizzitola is with us, retired EMT, emergency medical technician, for the New York City Fire Department. After the 9/11 attacks, she founded FDNY EMS Retirees Association, has since founded and is president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees association.

Sara Nelson is the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO. She’s now serving her fourth term in that role. She’s been a union flight attendant since she was hired by United Airlines in 1996, now representing 55,000 aviation first responders from 20 airlines.

And we’re joined by Captain Brenda Berkman, a retired firefighter here in New York City. Brenda is the vice president of Monumental Women.

And, Brenda, we’re going to begin with you. Talk about what you were doing 25 years ago, what you understood to be the case in safety for the firefighters, and for you, as a firefighting woman, what that has meant. Who has been left out from being cared for today, 25 years later?

BRENDA BERKMAN: Well, good morning, Amy and Juan, and thank you very much for having us on here today. Excuse me.

Yeah, so, on 9/11, I was off duty, but I responded off duty to the World Trade Center, and I had a group of my own off-duty firefighters with me. It’s a long story. We got there right as the second tower, the north tower, collapsed. So, the air was completely full of dust and debris. And because we were off duty, we came down there without any protective equipment, no respiratory protection, no radios to communicate with, really no real tools. And we were — you know, we had to do what firefighters do — namely, look for anyone who might still be alive in the pile of rubble, and stretch hoses to put out the the fires, get water out of the Hudson because the water mains in Lower Manhattan had been disrupted when the towers fell down. It was really complete — a disaster beyond what anyone could possibly had imagined. But in those early days, we did what we had to do despite the lack of protective equipment, because we believed people to........

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