Log in Subscribe

A few of our stories and columns are now in front of the paywall. We at The Chief-Leader remain committed to independent reporting on labor and civil service. It's been our mission since 1897. You can have a hand in ensuring that our reporting remains relevant in the decades to come. Consider supporting The Chief, which you can do for as little as $3.20 a month.

UFA to Press Feds for Cash Infusion For WTC Victims Compensation Fund (free article)

Posted

The leadership of the Uniformed Firefighters Association Feb. 22 announced a national lobbying campaign to pressure Congress to fully fund the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, whose top administrator announced a week earlier that a spike in claims required major cuts in future awards. 

The Department of Justice-administered fund has allocated almost $5 billion of the $7.3 billion that Congress authorized to satisfy 21,000 claims. Without relatively quick congressional intervention payouts on claims that have been already filed would cut by 50 percent and future claim payouts would be reduced by 70 percent. 

Clock Ticking 

The VCF is slated to close its doors by Dec. 18, 2020.

“Every Sept. 11 just about every politician tweets out or sends out some sort of ‘never forget 9/11’ [message],” UFA President Gerard Fitzgerald told reporters at a press conference. “Now, it's your turn to step up and not to forget that day.”

The UFA along with several other unions planned to join comedian Jon Stewart and a bipartisan Congressional delegation  in Washington D.C. Feb. 25 to kick off the drive to win passage of the “Never Forget the Heroes: Permanent Authorization of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Act,” which would cover potential shortfalls in funding for the VCF and permanently authorize it.

Mr. Fitzgerald told reporters that the human toll on his rank and file from the World Trade Center toxic fallout continued to mount. The FDNY, which lost 343 lives the day of the attack has since lost close to 200 Firefighters and fire officers to WTC-related cancers and other diseases. Union officials estimate another 6,500 active and retired FDNY personnel continue to battle certified WTC conditions including cancer—more than half of the 11,000 agency personnel who served at the site. 

“With every passing day in the near-18 years since Sept. 11, 2001, these terrorists are still attacking our first-responders and claiming victims,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “These are not normal disabilities and illnesses that often lead to an untimely deaths that leave children without fathers, parents without their sons, fending for themselves financially. The Victims Compensation Fund provides stability for these families.”

The UFA President said that the Federal Government had an additional moral obligation to fully fund the VCF because it was former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who within days of the attack erroneously said the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe.

"She did make that comment so that affected us, it affected the civilian population and the other first-responders and the children that were in that neighborhood and people that had apartments below Canal Street that were living there and were able to breathe that toxic air."

The VCF was set up along with the WTC Health Program for the estimated 90,000 first-responders who served at the WTC site during the response and recovery that went on for several months after the attack. 

'Survivors' Eligible 

Both programs are also available to the estimated 400,000 “survivors” who lived, worked or went to school in the lower-Manhattan contaminated zone where dozens of city public schools continued to operate even as the toxic clean-up was completed.

The survivor category also includes thousands of Federal, state and municipal workers whose offices were south of Canal Street, but played no role in the site response and clean-up.

Projecting the long-term liability for the VCF is problematic because fewer than 20,000 of the 400,000 survivors have been screened, close to 90 percent of the first-responders have been. WTC advocates note that in the years since, an unknown number of survivors may have succumbed to a WTC condition and never had known of the cause.

Mr. Fitzgerald also implored WTC survivors to get screened for possible WTC conditions. "At the FDNY we get annual medicals for active duty...But not everybody has that. The NYPD doesn't have them and the regular civilian that was on the street they are not going to have that." 

Officials at the fund estimate it would take an additional $5 billion to meet future compensation claims at the same level prior to the fund’s fiscal crunch that  first surfaced officially with a formal notice in the Federal Register in October.

In the four months since, the VCF received a full year’s volume of claims. In January alone, the fund posted 4,000 new claims, six times the normal monthly volume. 

world trade center victim compensation fund, uniformed firefighters assocation, federal government

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here