## The Coworker’s Warning
“This is probably going to kill us in 20 years.”
Buscemi recorded that remark, made by a coworker at Ground Zero, in his TIME essay. He recorded it without knowing, in 2021, exactly how accurate it had turned out to be. By the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, the death toll from Ground Zero illness — cancers, respiratory conditions, the full range of documented WTC-related diseases — was already in the thousands. The World Trade Center Health Program was tracking tens of thousands of certified cases. Firefighters who had worked the pile for months were dying of cancers that epidemiologists linked, through careful analysis, to the specific compounds in the Ground Zero dust.
The coworker’s remark was not a prediction; it was an intuition from someone working without adequate respiratory protection in a known industrial hazard, surrounded by burning debris from two of the largest office towers ever built. It turned out to be accurate not as prophecy but as ordinary risk assessment.
Buscemi’s own health, as of his public statements through 2021, had not produced the kind of documented medical crisis that affected many longer-term Ground Zero workers. He was at the site for approximately five days; many firefighters and construction workers were there for months. The differential in exposure was real. He was appropriately cautious in his public statements about his health, saying he gets checked without claiming either illness or certainty of good health.
What the remark represents, in the context of his story, is a reminder that the Ground Zero response was not a single dramatic moment but a sustained industrial and biological event with consequences that have continued for decades. The firefighters who worked the pile were workers in a hazardous environment, and the hazard did not announce itself in the acute way that fire or collapse does. It accumulated. It appeared in medical records years later. It is still appearing.