Court Clears Way for 9/11 Illness Lawsuit

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Source: New York Sun

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN
March 26, 2008

A federal appeals court has refused to give New York City immunity from the lawsuits of thousands of city workers and construction laborers who say they now suffer from respiratory illnesses after they helped clean up ground zero in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The lawsuits claim that the city failed to ensure that ground zero was a safe work place. High among the claims is the assertion that the city failed to enforce rules requiring workers to wear respirators while working amid the toxins and rubble.

Citing the unprecedented nature of the disaster, New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, both defendants in the suits, have argued that they are entitled to immunity from the claims. The defendants say they cannot be required to pay out to the workers what could amount to billions of dollars in damages.

The first significant ruling in the case came in 2006, when a federal district judge in Manhattan, Alvin Hellerstein, found that the city was only entitled to immunity for its conduct in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks. The lawsuits could go forward against the city's wishes, Judge Hellerstein ruled, to give workers the chance to prove their claims that ground zero remained an unsafe work environment even weeks and months after September 11, 2001.

The city and port authority appealed. In a victory for the ailing workers, today?s decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that appeal and largely affirmed Judge Hellerstein?s decision.

The appeal was decided by Judges Jon Newman, Sonia Sotomayor, and Richard Wesley.

Lawyers for either side could not be reached for comment.



Read more: www.nysun.com/news/new-york/court-clears-way-911-illness-lawsuit

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Justice for 9/11 workers?

They might be dead before they see a penny of any potential award.
That seems to be the city's plan.

[Deny and Shred]

1. Some of them already are. Screw tort reform. Forget caps on lawsuits

Doing so would just encourage CEOs in ivory towers to look at killing those who work for them as a cost of doing business.

I lived in not-so-lower Manahttan during and after 9/11. I remember the smell, and it would come back after it rained or the weather changed, through the following spring/summer.

My sinuses haven't been the same since. It's not ironclad proof, but I NEVER had issues with alternately runny/stuffy nose before. All that started about a month or two after. Extra parts per million WILL after some small portion of the population adversely. Those workers were inhaling large amounts of asbestos and mercury - from the tens of thousands of broken fluorescent lights.

Environmental poisoning is virtually impossible to prove in court, but I wish them luck. George W, Christie Todd and Rudy should have to be in the cross hairs somehow, too.