Twenty-five years after 9/11, Americans still live with the legacy — and the questions
By Maria Tsvetkova and Dan Fastenberg
NEW YORK, Sept. 7 (Reuters) — Scott Larsen was 4 years old when his father, the New York City firefighter he was named after, was killed in the collapse of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
His father, then 35, had been temporarily assigned to Lower Manhattan from his usual firehouse in Woodside, Queens, when two jetliners hijacked by al Qaeda militants crashed into the Twin Towers. He was one of 343 members of the New York City Fire Department — the FDNY — who died that morning.
The attacks killed about 3,000 people: at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought the hijackers. The assault, just eight months into George W. Bush’s presidency, reshaped the United States in ways that reached nearly every corner of public life.
Washington created the Department of Homeland Security, rewrote airport security and surveillance rules, and launched long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those conflicts, by research estimates, have killed more than 900,000 people. Less visibly, 9/11 changed the ordinary arc of individual lives: some children of victims chose to put on uniforms, others went into medicine or public service. Many responders, survivors and families are still carrying what that day left behind.
Here are three of those stories.
‘HIS MEMORY COMES UP EVERY DAY’
Scott Larsen felt the pull toward his father’s firehouse early. He joined the FDNY and eventually sought out the same Woodside firehouse where his father had served. “It was something in me. I just always wanted to go here,” Larsen, now 29, said during an interview at the firehouse.
He is one of 58 children of FDNY firefighters killed on 9/11 who have since joined the department, according to data collected by the International Association of Firefighters.
The reminders are everywhere. His father’s name is on a memorial plaque and painted on a fire truck. His photograph hangs in the kitchen and the break room.
“His memory comes up every day, honestly,” Larsen said. “There is never a day I come here and I don’t look at him.”
Firefighting runs through his family. His younger brother, born two days after the attacks, has passed the FDNY entrance exam and hopes to join the department next year.
“Hopefully, when I have a son or a daughter, either one, they’ll continue on the legacy,” Larsen said.
‘THIS WAS PERSONAL’
Dr. Michael Crane, now 74, spent the weeks and months after 9/11 trying to protect the people who kept returning to the wreckage at Ground Zero. As medical director for the New York electric utility Con Edison, his job was to make sure rescue and cleanup crews were properly equipped, including with respiratory protection.
Keeping the respirators supplied proved to be the easy part. The masks clogged quickly with dust, and many workers simply stopped wearing them. In the early days of the recovery effort, a young worker came to Crane with a severe cough after working on the pile — the roughly five-story mountain of pulverized steel and concrete left by the towers’ collapse. Crane told him to take time off and get treatment. The man refused. A member of his family, Crane recalled, was buried somewhere beneath the rubble.
“At that moment I realized this was not just some type of national thing or state thing, this was personal,” said Crane, who now serves as medical director of the World Trade Center Health Program at Mount Sinai Hospital. “This was personal to a lot of these guys who had lost people down there.”
The federal program he helps lead now provides health care to more than 150,000 responders and survivors — rescue and recovery workers, along with people who lived, worked or studied near the World Trade Center site — according to data collected through June 30 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People in the program have received roughly 85,000 certifications for 9/11-related health conditions. About half were linked to inhaling or swallowing toxic dust, and about 30% were cancer. More than 9,000 responders tracked by the program have died since 9/11, though officials say it is difficult to know how much of a role the attacks played in those deaths.
What stays with Crane is what he has seen in the workers themselves.
“You fall in love with these people,” he said. “They are amazing, just resilient, funny, a little bit crazy. And even, despite what they’ve been through, really mentally tough and proud of what they did.”
‘I DIDN’T LISTEN TO MY GUT’
Michael Tuohey, now 80 and retired, carries a different part of the story. He was working in airline customer service in Portland, Maine, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two men arrived at his counter at Portland International Jetport: Mohammad Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari.
They came about 30 minutes before their flight. Tuohey did what the rules then required. He scanned their paper tickets to see whether they had been bought recently or paid for in cash — both red flags. These tickets had been purchased weeks in advance with a credit card, and they were for first class.
Still, something felt off. Tuohey remembered being struck by what he called “a vibe from the older, shorter guy that he didn’t like being there.” He figured it was just the hour. “I’m thinking: it’s 5:30 in the morning. Nobody wants to get up at 5:30 in the morning,” he said.
The two men were at the start of a journey that ended when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. In the aftermath, investigators would spend years dissecting the intelligence failures that let the plot move forward. New security agencies were built, airport check-ins changed forever, and the country’s approach to terrorism was rewritten.
None of that arrived in time for the people on those flights. Tuohey still lives with the question of whether he could have done something.
“My gut instinct was good but there were laws, there were laws against profiling people,” he said. “I didn’t listen to my gut. And it turned out to be an awful thing. But it wasn’t that I was right. It’s just that it could have changed something. Not that it would have, but it could have. Who knows?”
A quarter-century later, 9/11 is no longer only the place where the towers once stood. It exists in the way airports are watched, in the health clinics treating first responders, in families built after loss, and in the quiet calculations of people like Tuohey, who will always wonder whether one small decision might have made a difference.
(Additional reporting by Brian Snyder and Erica Stapleton; writing by Scott Malone; editing by Paul Thomasch and Deepa Babington)