Immigrant WTC cleanup crews facing health crisis

BY BART JONES | Newsday Staff Writer

Claudia Gil was working weekends as a waitress in a discotheque in Queens when terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center.

A week later, the undocumented immigrant from Colombia heard that people were needed to help clean up offices and apartment buildings near Ground Zero.

So she and the entire nine-person staff of the disco headed downtown. Smoke was still rising from the debris and the air smelled like rotten eggs. The first week, equipped with only a pair of work gloves, she made $60 a day.

Five years removed from the horror of 9/11 and its aftermath, Gil, who spent five months at the site, may be paying with her health for her decision to seek work near Ground Zero. She said she suffers from chronic headaches, has trouble breathing at night and often experiences severe stomach cramps. She said she has no health insurance and, as an undocumented immigrant living illegally in the country, is ineligible for government benefits such as Medicaid and Social Security.

"It wasn't only the firemen and policemen who risked their lives," said Gil, 37, an Elmhurst resident who was an executive secretary in her homeland and now does odd jobs such as baby-sitting. "In a way, we also risked our lives going in there to work without knowing the consequences."

They said it was safe

An estimated 40,000 people worked at the World Trade Center and surrounding area and the Fresh Kills dump on Staten Island, either trying to rescue and recover victims, or cleaning up debris. While officials five years ago said the air quality at the Manhattan site was safe, thousands of people now complain of sickness attributed to poor air quality.

Last week, a Mount Sinai Medical Center study of first responders' health showed that 7 out of 10 suffer chronic health ailments. Newsday reported last month that fewer than 45 percent of Ground Zero workers wore respirators, while the rate among firefighters and police officers was slightly better.

The stories of immigrants who responded to Ground Zero are largely an untold part of 9/11 history. Experts estimate that between 3,000 and 10,000 Ground Zero workers were immigrants, of which half -- between 1,500 and 5,000 -- were in the country without papers, said Carmen Calderon of the Manhattan-based nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.

Experts point out that the undocumented who played roles at and around Ground Zero are particularly at risk now because they have almost no recourse to government benefits and are often cut off from mainstream social service agencies, said Dr. Ben Luft, program director at Stony Brook University's World Trade Center Monitoring Program, based in Islandia.

Because of their citizenship status, many in this pool of workers at and around the World Trade Center site have yet to receive treatment for suspected 9/11-related illnesses.

"The undocumented are the most vulnerable," Luft said. "They live on the margin. They're not being taken care of. They don't have any insurance. They're going through life from hand to mouth."

Finally seeking help

Interviews across the region show that some of the undocumented immigrants who worked at the site are, in fact, now seeking treatment offered by Stony Brook, Mount Sinai and other regional facilities.

In February, Calderon's group opened an office in Hauppauge to search out these workers on Long Island and to offer assistance. Meanwhile, Stony Brook's monitoring program is planning to hire a Spanish-speaking doctor and social worker to cope with what they expect will be a growing number of undocumented immigrants coming for help at the Islandia clinic.

Experts and activists say that many of the undocumented immigrants have not come forward because of language barriers. Others fear deportation, although government officials say they don't plan any such crackdowns. Calderon said most of the undocumented immigrants are from Poland, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

"When they went to that site, it was just so much particle matter in the air, they either breathed a lot of it in or they just swallowed it," said Luft, whose team co-authored the Mount Sinai study released last week.

"It was like breathing in soap or lye. It was highly irritant with a lot of different chemicals in it that we know are problems," including asbestos.

He added that the air contained "nanoparticles" of glass. "When the buildings fell, all the concrete was pulverized and all the glass was pulverized," he said. "That's what they were sucking in."

At Mount Sinai, about half of the 2,000 patients in that center's 9/11 treatment program are immigrants, said social work and advocacy manager Scottie Hill. She added that many of them likely are undocumented, although Mount Sinai -- like Stony Brook -- does not ask about immigration status.