The Zadroga Act, which established the World Trade Center Health Program, had required sustained advocacy from first responders and their families to pass and then to be reauthorized. The 2010 passage came after years of congressional resistance. The 2015 reauthorization was similarly contested. The advocacy campaigns involved first responders traveling to Washington, often visibly ill, to testify before lawmakers who were skeptical of the program’s costs. The comedian Jon Stewart used his platform on The Daily Show to draw sustained attention to the reauthorization fight, and the documentary footage of dying firefighters and construction workers giving testimony on Capitol Hill was among the most direct political images of the Obama years.
Buscemi was not the face of that advocacy effort — the faces were the first responders themselves, the men and women who had worked the site for months and were now sick. But his involvement in the documentary work that documented their situation was part of the broader effort to make those consequences impossible to ignore.
## What the Firehouse Meant, and What It Still Means
The question of why Steve Buscemi went to Ground Zero on September 12, 2001 is ultimately not a complicated one, though it has sometimes been treated as mysterious. He went because he was a former firefighter, because his former company was there, and because the culture of the fire service he had been part of was one in which showing up was what you did.
The FDNY’s culture in this regard is worth understanding in some depth, because it is what makes sense of his specific response. The fire service in New York — as in many American cities — operates on the basis of a particular kind of solidarity that is simultaneously practical and deeply personal. The solidarity is practical because it is necessary: fighting fires requires coordinated action under extreme conditions, and people who do not trust each other completely cannot do it effectively. The solidarity is personal because the conditions produce intimacy of a specific kind: people who cook together, live together during shifts, sleep in the same building, and then risk their lives together develop bonds that are not reducible to mere professional collegiality.