On Sept. 11, 2001, thousands of workers rushed into lower Manhattan while everyone else was rushing out. They spent day and night on what became known as the "pile," searching for survivors and, later, remains in the worst of conditions. The cruel irony is that thousands of them are now getting sick. And as Katie Couric first reported last year, a growing number of studies confirm they're getting sick because of all the time they spent breathing the dust at ground zero.
n all there were about 40,000 people who worked on the pile - a collection of firefighters, policemen, construction and utility workers. One of them was 30-year-old New York City Police Det. James Zadroga. When the planes hit the World Trade Center, he drove straight to ground zero and stayed for weeks. His father, Joseph Zadroga, says he remembers that shortly after that his son started getting sick.
"Every morning he would wake up and he said he would be coughing and hacking, and this black stuff would come up out of his lungs," Det. Zadroga's father remembers. "And he just didn't know what was happening to him. He couldn't figure out what was happening to him."
His doctors didn't know either. Before long, James needed to inhale medication to breathe. And when doctors took a scan of his lung, instead of healthy pink tissue, his was black. Then one morning in 2006, James' father woke up to an unusual silence - his son wasn't coughing.
"I went upstairs and soon as I opened the door, I saw him on the floor. I didn't even have to go in there. I knew he was gone," Joseph Zadroga tells Couric. "And we spent the next two hours with him before we called anybody. And then we had them come to take him."
Asked what the autopsy of his son revealed, Zadroga says, "The doctor said, to the best of his knowledge, that Jimmy died from the results of working at the World Trade Center."
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