alt Hacker News[flagged]
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Historically ignorant comment.
9/11 resulted in building collapse throwing something like 1-2 million tons of debris into the air, which then fell and was on fire in a huge pile for 100 days.
Concrete, drywall, glass, asbestos, you name it.
This is nothing like regular car/heating/power combustion exhaust which is well understood, regulated, and result of reasonably efficient conversion of mass to energy.. at least by comparison.
The first 40 floors of the WTC towers had steel beams coated in an asbestos insulating material. The regulations changed mid-construction but the lower floors remained.
About 400 tons of asbestos was thrown into the atmosphere around Manhattan when the towers fell.
^^ comment above you :-)
Reader mode circumvents the pay wall on many news sites, including this one :)
Paywalls only exclude plebians. Being able to bypass a paywall is a competency test for the use of the internet.
It was not paywalled for me. To your other point, sure, but you can see the normal rate of cancer in a population over time and then see the spikes in the years directly after 2001.
The distinction is that the strongest evidence is among responders, workers, residents, and others who were directly exposed, rather than showing that cancer suddenly increased across all of NYC.
If that were the case, then everyone who lived/worked near Ground Zero in the months before 9/11 would have had these same health consequences.
Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.
(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)