The World Trade Center Health Program that resulted from the Zadroga Act, and its subsequent reauthorizations, has provided monitoring and treatment services for the enrolled population for more than a decade. The statistics that the program publishes — the enrollment figures, the certified condition counts, the mortality data — represent the most rigorous available accounting of the health consequences of Ground Zero exposure. They are the documentation of what the coworker at the rubble pile intuited in the immediate aftermath: that the dust was dangerous, and that the danger was not going to present itself immediately but would unfold over years and decades.
## What “Honorary Battalion Chief” Actually Means
The Honorary Battalion Chief designation that the FDNY conferred on Buscemi in 2014 is worth examining in some detail, because honorary designations of this kind are sometimes dismissed as purely ceremonial — “honorary” in the sense of a plaque given to a celebrity donor — and the actual meaning and function of the designation requires some nuance.
The FDNY’s honorary designations are not, in the first instance, about celebrity donors. They are a mechanism the department uses to formally recognize people whose support for the institution and its community has been sustained and meaningful, and to extend the department’s own identity to include people who are not formally employed by it but who are part of its extended community. Former members who left the department without completing a full career, members of the arts and advocacy community whose work has served the department, and public figures who have demonstrated sustained commitment to the FDNY’s community are among the people who have received honorary designations over the department’s history.