"Fifteen city workers who suffered health problems from working at Ground Zero will be the first to get payouts from a $2.8 billion 9/11 fund created by Congress two years ago.

The biggest award is $1.5 million, to a 43-year-old firefighter who had to stop working because of respiratory problems, officials of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund said yesterday.

The minimum awards are $10,000. All are for respiratory ailments, said Sheila Birnbaum, the lawyer overseeing the fund.

Fourteen of the payees are firefighters and one worked for the city Department of Correction.

Individuals offered payouts are getting only 10 percent up front. Whether they eventually get the full amount that Birnbaum has deemed appropriate will depend on how many people file claims and whether Congress funds the entire cumulative payout".

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/st_zadroga_payouts_qsxHWgNjnX8EfumSnFQhML

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704271804575405680334859208.html

AUGUST 3, 2010

Bid to Revive 9/11 Care Bill

Lawmakers Try to Resolve Standoff

By DEVLIN BARNETT

WASHINGTON—New York lawmakers have begun discussing ways of rescuing a bill to provide health care for ill Ground Zero workers following its defeat on the House floor last week after a bitter battle.

The bill was voted down late Thursday night amid angry partisan finger-pointing, and now Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney and others have begun weighing options to make the bill more tolerable to factions on the right and left.

The bill sparked a nasty public fight between two New York lawmakers—Rep. Peter King, a Long Island Republican, and Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Queens Democrat—over the use of a parliamentary procedure to vote on the bill without amendments, requiring a two-thirds vote rather than a simple majority.

As the bill headed for defeat, Messrs. King and Weiner engaged in a furious shouting match on the House floor—not uncommon among lawmakers, but rarely seen between two from the same state who voted together on the bill in question.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry and the New York City Health Department established the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Registry in 2002, with the goal of monitoring the health of people directly exposed to the WTC disaster. Today, the Registry is an ongoing collaboration with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

SEE THE INTERACTIVE MAP of exposed victims.

http://nyc.gov/html/doh/wtc/html/registry/registry.shtml

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, representative of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, talks about Congress' action to investigate Bush about the war in Iraq but no more investigations about 9/11.

I asked him if there's any movement to answer the unanswered questions about 9/11 and he basically says 9/11 is a dead issue.

It's funny that 9/11 is a dead issue for Nadler because you look at his website, http://www.house.gov/nadler/, and it's loaded with investigations into the air quality at ground zero.

Why not ask some other questions?

It looked like Wolf Blitzer gave this some coverage on CNN tonight, but by the time I really caught what he was discussing, they were onto the poor Ground Zero rescue pooches that are also dying.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070131/hl_nm/sept11_workers_dc

Ailing NY Ground Zero workers demand more help

By Tom Hals Wed Jan 31, 4:00 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rescue workers with chronic illnesses they attribute to exposure to the rubble at the World Trade Center site demanded long-term support from the government on Wednesday, and one advocate feared it could become "America's Chernobyl."

As President George W. Bush met the son of a World Trade Center rescue worker who died of lung disease, a group of residents, paramedics and union members gathered at the site and demanded hundreds of millions of dollars to help workers who cleared the area after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

"This could be America's Chernobyl, but it doesn't have to be," said Mariama James, a resident of the neighborhood near the World Trade Center.