WNYC 9/11 Specials

The days after September 11th are mostly remembered as a time when the country came together, where our grief turned to unity around a common cause. Parts of these memories are tainted by the rosiness of our shared identities. When people face an external threat or collective trauma like 9/11, it can reshape how we view ourselves. Our partisan definitions, such as race and political affiliation, begin to wilt, and our shared identities grow in their place. 

Dr. Jay Van Bavel is a social psychologist and neuroscientist at New York University, who studies how humans build groups and the collective concerns that shape our minds, brains, and behaviors. Click "listen" in the player to hear his take on why 9/11 bred unity, while other mass traumas such as the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in heated divisions. 

Ivonne Sanchez was responding to an emergency in the Bronx when the first plane flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11. By the time the NYFD EMT was able to make it downtown, the towers had collapsed.

From that moment, she rushed to help the survivors who escaped the disaster. And for the next 10 months, she recovered the bodies of those who didn’t.  

“We were just in rescue mode,” Sanchez said. “We were just trying to get all the people out quickly and safely as possible and try to figure out what was going on from there on.”

In the years after, Sanchez initially developed asthma, as did many first responders given the air pollution from the towers’ collapse. But after she retired in 2004, she developed breast cancer and had a mastectomy. The following year, the city allowed people to reclassify their reasons for retirement—a procedure that could make them eligible for more benefits related to 9/11-health conditions. 

But when Sanchez tried to reclassify her retirement and add her breast cancer diagnosis via the New York City Employees’ Retirement System in 2014, she was denied four times. She argues the cancer was linked to her work at Ground Zero, but needs the retirement system’s medical board to reach the same conclusion. Ultimately, the retirement board approved only benefits for her asthma, a decision that came in 2018.

“I lost out on several thousands of dollars because it took four years,” Sanchez said. And if she were to die from her breast cancer, she would not get the full benefits.

First responders who worked at Ground Zero frequently run into red tape as they develop health conditions such as cancer. These types of long-term illnesses tend to emerge well after exposure to pollution or another health hazard, making it hard to prove cause and effect.

Click "listen" in the player to hear more details, and head to Gothamist for the full story. 

Radio Rookies partnered with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum to mark the 10th anniversary of September 11 by sharing the stories of six young people from New York City, New Jersey and Long Island who are part of the last generation of young people who remember 9/11 as a lived experience, rather than a historic event. Their stories give voice to grief, pain, and loss, but also resilience, altruism and courage.

Fear and shock, grief and guilt, anger, gratitude and solidarity - these emotions overwhelmed many New Yorkers along with the billowing cloud of smoke and debris after the Towers collapsed. WNYC’s news team spent days, months, and then years reporting on the attacks and their aftermath. Through a mix of their recordings at the time and interviews with people ten years later, WNYC guides listeners through the stories of people who were directly impacted by what happened and have been struggling for a decade to make sense of it.