"Years after 9/11, my doctor toldme that an environmental insult could have caused my cancer. It's the kind of thing that canhappen after breathingin the smoke and ash of trees and debris and burning structures. We never knew if the smoke from 9/11 caused my wife's cancer or mine. But 24 years later, we are breathing it again. By Dan O'Brien Mr. O'Brien is a playwright, a poet and a nonfiction writer."
"I was standing in the alley behind our home in Santa Monica, Calif., taking out the trash, when I looked up and saw that the mountains were on fire. It was as though I'd never noticed mountains there before; I didn't think of the Santa Monica Mountains as such more like steep hills rising above the village of Pacific Palisades. I stood there stunned, staring straight up my alley at the flames, black smoke unfurling into the blue sky."
"I watched the North Tower of the World Trade Center burn from the corner of Maiden Lane and Water Street at 9:03 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. As the South Tower exploded in a fireball of biblical proportions, black smoke unfurled into the blue sky. An old woman pushing a handcart of groceries crumpled on the sidewalk, wailing. A young woman with a baby in a stroller asked, What's happening? I said I didn't know,"
A wildfire in the Santa Monica Mountains on Jan. 7, 2025 sent flames and black smoke into the sky above a neighborhood. The smoke revived memories of the author reathing smoke after Sept. 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center towers burned and collapsed. A doctor once told the author that an environmental insult could have caused cancer after that exposure; both the author and his wife later received cancer diagnoses. The scene prompted stunned, anxious reactions from neighbors and recalled images of people asking, "What's happening?" and sudden collapse amid panic and smoke.
Read at www.nytimes.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]