World Trade Center - On Being a Cassandra

The City of New York is now paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to first responders at the World Trade Center and others who breathed in all those poisonous dust particles...

I predicted all this misery would happen when I saw the firemen and others going through the clouds of dust and rubble at the time.

"They are just breathing in all that stuff without any protection," I said to anyone who would listen, "eventually a lot of those people are going to get very sick!!"

Nobody seemed to care at the time...I guess a crisis on that scale deranges people to a degree and a lot of common sense gets tossed overboard--

And it didn't help that the Head of the EPA overseeing the event seemed to think nothing was really that amiss.

Some say hundreds of people who breathed in all that dust have already died.

The only positive effect from all this on me was that it made me resolve to give up smoking no matter what or how long it took me...which I eventually did.