Lawyer: If 9/11 Injured Sue, Rescue Efforts Would Suffer
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Future terrorist attack rescue efforts would be endangered if thousands of responders to the September 11, 2001, attacks were allowed to sue, a city lawyer warned a federal appeals court yesterday.
“What is at stake is the extent to which public and private entities will respond to the future such disasters or will hold back for fear that they will be embroiled in thousands of lawsuits and years of litigation,” a lawyer who represents the city and other litigants, James Tyrrell Jr., told judges on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.
Attorneys for the city, the Port Authority, and other entities that helped clean up, protect, and rebuild ground zero are appealing a decision last October by a trial court judge, Alvin Hellerstein, to allow some 8,000 recovery workers to proceed in their lawsuit.
The responders claim they developed respiratory illnesses from toxic air polluted with dust and smoke from the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The suits accuse the city and its contractors of failing to tell workers that the air could be poisonous in the months following the attacks.
An attorney for the police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and contractors who worked at ground zero and at a landfill in Staten Island, Kevin Russell, said a jury should decide whether the city acted improperly by not telling the workers about these dangers.
Besides the public policy dangers in allowing the suit, the city says the government and its contractors are immune from suits because national and local officials declared states of emergency, a lawyer representing the Port Authority, Richard Williamson, said.
In the decision the city is appealing, Judge Hellerstein expressed skepticism that the city should be immune from its decisions made months after the attack.
Last month, Mayor Bloomberg reissued an appeal to federal lawmakers to reopen a national fund to compensate stricken workers and relieve the city and the contractors of the vast litigation burden. The mayor has also warned that the precedent of the suits endangers the city.
In ruling the workers’ case should proceed, Judge Hellerstein last fall appointed a special master to begin compiling a huge database of each worker’s illness and where they worked in the cleanup.
