9/11 Stories: Michael Barasch

[Music] so tuesday september 11th was a day very similar to today not a cloud in the sky first thing i did that morning i went to the gym and i'm working out and all of a sudden we heard a loud bang the air conditioning system shook and uh everybody said what's that what's that everybody said i don't know i don't know and we all went back to working out and a few minutes later words started to come up to the second floor i was at the new york sports club on vc street and broadway just a block and a half from the world trade center and somebody said ah a small plane hit the world trade center and people were like what really that's crazy so people started going outside and we saw in the distance i know it's only a block and a half but it was so high up that you really couldn't see what was there except we did see smoke coming out of where the plane had gone in and then we started to see a few people jump and i was like a deer in headlights thinking this is insane why are they jumping why don't they just go to the roof um and we're watching and really there was no more working out after that and then some time went by and we hear this incredibly loud noise and then it was just a split second that we could see it the second plane hit the north tower and i i mean then obviously the genius that i am i realize that's not a coincidence and i went running back into the gym grabbed my clothes went running to the office and i'll i forget two of my paralegals dana and dawn were standing there shaking downstairs on park place which is just two blocks from the sports club and i said get out of here we're under attack i went upstairs i don't know why but just to make sure that no one else in my firm was staying and my part my partner bruce k was also my cousin he was there with my friend joey and poor bruce was also shaking because his wife worked at windows on the world and he knew that both since both towers had been hit um and not by small planes that jody his wife um could be in real trouble and but he kept thinking gee maybe it was okay we had a big fight this morning and we were both late getting to work and this is just as an aside um proof that fighting in a marriage can really be healthy because it turned out that jody was stuck in the subway because once the trade center was hit they turned off the subway but she had no way of reaching bruce because there was no cell reception down there and um we're standing in the corner office we're watching people after people jumping and it was just i don't know there's no way i can say it shelly is it was mesmerizing i just couldn't we couldn't grasp what we were seeing as the hole got bigger and bigger and finally the doorbell rings and bruce goes running to the door and it was jody and it was really a beautiful you know like right out of a hollywood movie i'm so sorry i was wrong this morning no i was wrong this morning kissing i'm so glad you're okay and um then the four of us joey jody bruce and i stood in the corner office and just watched and i'll remember also my wife candy called me up and said what are you doing there do you know what happened because she was at home watching on the today show and i said yes candy they're not gonna attack 11 park place i think we're probably okay and as i said those words the first tower started to fall and we look at each other and we say holy [ __ ] we better get out of here and we were smart enough not to try to take the subway because all the electricity in the building went out so we ran downstairs now i'm on the 18th floor i'm surprised how long it takes to run down 18 flights of stairs um but by the time we got down to the lobby the smoke was starting to pour into our building and we went running out the murray side of the street and then i'm one of those people that you've seen in countless photographs running away i'm running north on broadway as the fire engines and cops are going downtown so um look there was nothing i could have done but it just shows you my instinct was to flee when so many heroes and they really are heroes shelly um they were running towards the disaster and that probably more than anything else has influenced my career just how in awe i am of these first responders so your office was steps from the world trade center at the time you were an attorney mainly helping fdn wires correct yeah injured firefighters when they get injured in the line of duty they're allowed to make a claim against the negligent building owner who violated the electrical code which is usually the cause of a fire so i was representing hundreds of firefighters before 911 and obviously i didn't know it at the time but we lost 343 firefighters and a lot of those firefighters were friends of mine or clients of mine were witnesses in my clients cases and that led us to the next few weeks i don't know if you want me to get to past 9 11 but you know my secretary barbara and dana and dawn and it wasn't just me it was everybody we did what we could do and we visited firehouses and barbara and some of the other women would make trays of lasagna this wasn't just us this was a new york centric thing everybody did this but while we were visiting firehouses for the next weeks and months we kept hearing all these guys coughing and in fact dr david present of the fdny bureau of health service he actually dubbed it the world trade center cough and um it was then that i realized wow this isn't going away i've got to protect these guys so we ended up filing uh 650 notices of claims against the city of new york the law says you have to file a claim within 90 days of an incident to preserve your right to later bring a lawsuit so i did that on behalf of all these guys with this world trade center coffee in case it didn't go away and wow did the press kill me um the new york times wrote apparently one lawyer has no problem suing the city of new york when it's at its worst right now when things are so terrible when the city is grieving now i wasn't suing i was preserving the rights of my clients to bring a lawsuit if this cloth turned out to be anything more than a cough and i didn't want them to be time board and the fact is both the federal government when the epa said the air is safe to breathe and the city of new york when they told everybody go back to work go back to school it's okay it's safe they violated osha standards by not providing these guys with proper respiratory protection while the buildings burned for 99 days and they worked tirelessly on the pile so i did that to protect their rights um have i skipped over 9 11 too quickly i ended up walking home like like everyone else did and then because we had no electricity and because we were south of chamber street the army actually the army had put fencing around ground zero but it included my office it was a tank part on i'll send you a picture of it too right from my building at 11 park place and in order and because we had no electricity we didn't come back we weren't allowed back into our buildings i mean i did sneak back just to get my diary of court appointments uh my partner and i came back uh i think two weeks later um but we had a police escort to take us we weren't allowed to stay other than just get our diary but we didn't reopen until like earlier mid-october because there was no electricity so um we were i remember we we used to meet my office we would meet in chinese restaurants they let us come if we stayed for lunch and that's how we would we got by they fortunately the courts had all postponed all their court appointments they extended statutes of limitations but um if i can i'll go back to uh so i filed all these notice of claims um before december 10 2001 and then i'm vacationing with my family in the caribbean and something happened in the caribbean that really changed my life i met ken feinberg i had been watching the giants play the redskins at a at the hotel bar and these three snot-nosed kids are rooting for the redskins and i'm rooting for the giants and you know that's the great thing about sports you could be rooting on one side and they're rooting on the other side but then we're sharing a beer together afterwards and they were not they're all college kids and um i told them what i did and they said oh our father is ken feinberg he's the special master of the victim compensation fund would you like us to introduce you and i said okay i call up barbara and i said barbara send me the medical records the air sampling reports um the notice of claim so when i met ken feinberg on christmas morning of 2001 i was able to hand him these documents and ken said to me gee rudy giuliani told me that either you died on 9 11 or you lived nobody got hurt nobody got sick i said well ken i'm really worried about these guys because you know it's one thing for a lawyer to have this world trade center cough or asthma or any respiratory illness i can still work but if you're a firefighter with asthma you lose your career and when ken heard this he said you know i'd like to pursue this when we're back in new york i made an appointment for the first week of january i brought with me a doctor from mount sinai hospital a firefighter and a construction worker and we presented the case to mr feinberg and he said to me afterwards if i if i drop the requirement that says that someone making a claim had to have been had to have seen a doctor or a hospital within 72 hours will you drop all your notice of claims and bring all these people to the victim compensation fund and i said absolutely i have no interest in suing the city or the epa i'd love to go to the victim compensation line it was a good thing for him because he was at the time he was having trouble getting firefighter widows to come shelly they were so angry all they wanted to do was sue the security companies and the um they wanted to sorry they wanted to sue the um airlines and sue the city of new york and i said this is a better way this is non-litigation and it will um give us all peace so i ended up representing in that first victim compensation fund several dozen firefighter widows and some non-firefighter widows as well and about a 1500 first responders and that lasted all the way until 2003 mr feinberg was incredible as far as being flexible and finding and when i say non-litigious non-adversarial you didn't have to there was none of this perry mason isn't it true that you weren't there long enough to have sustained this respiratory illness it was nothing like that he took everybody's word for it and i mean it was clear i mean guys were we handled so many hearings and mr feinberg did a lot of the hearings personally most of the hearings that were with department of justice uh lawyers and i had the attorneys in my office doing this you know every day for months and months and it was the most gratifying thing i ever did uh up until that point helping because i've never helped so many people you know i've been used to helping people when they had individual accidents and to build car accidents individual firefighters when they got hurt but never had i represented thousands or hundreds of people actually 1500 people so it was really um it was a very satisfying thing for me as an attorney let me just break in here because i have known michael barish for years but until this conversation i did not realize that you were the first attorney to protect those who were suffering health effects you were the first to recognize and the first to do what you had to do to protect them and it's there's the yiddish word bashert it was meant to be that you met the lawyer the head of the victim compensation fund while on vacation you two were meant to get together you're going to have to love the redskins i have to say that just as okay but just i did not know until this moment that you were the first i know that you have been you have won more compensation for those who have suffered the health effects than any other lawyer in the 911 community i had no idea that you you almost knew this instinctively from day one because you had worked with the fdny yeah i didn't know if it was instinct or just dumb luck that i ran into ken but obviously the two of us realized immediately we can help each other and by doing it we can help so many people in the 911 community i'll tell you another funny story though so i was um in federal court before judge helstein and there were hundreds of people there and this is when the litigation was heating up and um not everybody went to the victim compensation plan there were a lot of people who were so angry shelley all they wanted to do was sue they wanted to sue motorola for the bad radios the airlines of course and this was their right to do it and all these 9 11 related cases fell on judge hellerstein's docket and um he had an agenda he's going through it and finally goes is there anything else now i was a i had been a lawyer for a long time but not a federal court lawyer i was all my work was always or almost always in state court and i sheepishly raised my hand i said your honor um what about the um the people who are sick i represent hundreds of firefighters and police officers who are sick and we're not even mentioning this he goes what were cases of these and i mentioned the world trade center cough and um he said what's your name i said michael barras he goes all right i'm appointing you liaison to all the sick and injured people and it was like what i don't even know what a liaison is but um that was that just shows you be careful what you wish for be careful when you open your mouth unfortunately all my clients ended up going to the victim compensation fund and i did not have to pursue the litigation which i really um i respect people who did it but it wasn't anything i wanted to do as a new yorker i want you to talk about james droga because the law that passed ultimately finally years later to help ailing first responders and those impacted in the 911 community those who live there those who went to school there but this was your client so jimmy was one of my original 1500 clients who i brought to the victim compensation fund and when i first met him you know i knew he had a bad pulmonary illness it was pulmonary fibrosis and what i later learned is that's what people call black lung disease that's what coal miners get jimmy was doing security around the perimeter of the world trade center for um over 200 hours and i remember distinctly one day he comes into my office with his daughter tyler ann who is about four or five years old and jimmy was so weak at that point that his daughter said daddy i need to change your oxygen and she lifted up the oxygen i wanted to help and she goes no i got this and she changed jimmy's oxygen container so um fast forward to i think it was january of 2006 and jimmy died of pulmonary fibrosis and an autopsy done in new jersey um by dr bretton it's amazing what you're the little details you remember um it showed ground glass in his lung tissue as well as asbestos chromium lead benzene these are all known carcinogens so at the time the original victim compensation fund had closed on december 22nd 2003 although it didn't quite end up paying everybody until july of 2004. and um so from 2004 to 2000 and jimmy's death in 2006 people kept calling me up and i was sadly having to tell them i'm sorry the victim compensation fund is closed hey john and um there was nothing i could do except constantly be calling mr kleinberg who kept saying no michael we're not going to leave this open forever congress passed it it had an end date there's nothing you can do but jimmy's medical report and his autopsy was the evidence that the advocates needed for the next four years to argue for the passage of what became the james edward health and compensation act it was passed at the end of 2010 and president obama signed it into law when he was in hawaii on january 2nd 2011. so but before that after jimmy died there was this well-known controversy because i don't know exactly how but oh jimmy was fighting or jimmy's family was fighting for line of duty death benefits for him you know i always use the example of stephen mcdonald you know the famous cop who got shot but who courageously lived for 25 years by the way um and he was in a wheelchair but such an inspiration and they kept him on duty during those 25 years he didn't want to retire and when he did die of these gunshot wounds 25 years later he was given a line of duty death benefit or his family was well that was what i argued should be fair for jimmy zadroga too yes he was exposed in 2001 but he didn't get sick the latency period was such he didn't get sick for a few years and then he didn't die until 2006. so we were fighting the police department or the city of new york to get him his line of duty death benefits they asked for the tissue samples from the autopsy and the medical examiner concluded based just on just on looking at the tissue samples not on all the medical records that showed he had pulmonary fibrosis and asthma before that and breathing problems ever since 9 11 just looking at those tissue samples the doctor concluded he died of an overdose of oxycontin because he said there's oxycontin in this and that's how people who overdose an oxy that's what happens to them so um his family was just outraged so was the whole nypd i i was getting calls from every union saying you've got to fight this and we did i i hired this doctor uh baden who used to be the medical examiner for um the city of new york and he reviewed the tissue samples and all the medical records and he concluded that all right so that maybe there was some oxycontin he was prescribed oxy for his pain so it wouldn't be surprising many patients after they're taking oxy orally for so long they're not getting any pain relief so jimmy apparently was crushing it up and snorting it to get pain relief but you have to look at why was he getting the oxy he was dying he was in agony and if i could only show you these the photographs of his lungs they were dark purple that's why they call it black lung disease so i demanded a meeting with mayor bloomberg the press was an enormous help you know shaming the mayor when i showed dr baden's report and all the medical records bloomberg met me and jose roga well first i'm sorry first we had a meeting with charles hirsch and basically he said well this is my opinion i'm not changing it and i said doctor don't you think it would help you to look at all the medical records to see the years of breathing problems that mr zadroga had but you know sometimes when people make a mistake they just don't want to admit it they're ashamed to admit they may have made a mistake so instead he did the opposite and he dug in so we demanded an apology and a meeting with the mayor he met with us at city hall and according to my friends in the press it was the first time they ever heard the mayor apologize bloomberg was another one like our current president who doesn't always admit when he makes a mistake maybe that's um something that all leaders sometimes hate to do but anyway bloomberg apologized and then he public apologized later that day and jimmy's family got his his daughter got his line of duty death benefits and i was able i had already gotten him a very large award from the victim compensation fund we then amended it for his wrongful death uh but at least tyler and is financially uh secure which is what i'm sure joe and linda's at roger jimmy's parents were on and i'm sure it's what jimmy would have wanted for his daughter as well and then finally uh the zed roger health and compensation act became law and that obviously um was a big turn it was only supposed to last though for two years um or a few years till 2015 four years coincidentally one of my boredom law school professors sheila birmbaum was named the special master and um even though she had no memory of me i remembered her and i was not much of a student and i don't blame her for not remembering me but um i became very close with her because i represented more people in that version of the zed roger fun than anybody else and you know the single biggest source of all my new clients is word of mouth and because i've represented so many people that's a lot of people recommending me thankfully um then finally you know we fought very hard to get this thing extended that's when i met john phil in 2015 when we fought to get uh the zadroga act extended we did get the health program extended for nothing until 2090 but the victim compensation fund was only extended at that point until 2020 and then last year obviously thank god for john stewart and john feel and the unions we were able to get this bill permanently extended so now the victim compensation fund and the health program both will last for the rest of everybody's lifetime and that brings us to um my relationship with you and my partnership with you and helping me get the word out to people about the deadlines to register you have been a an inspiration to the whole 911 community chief and um you've been uh fabulous and i'm so happy that our paths crossed that's some more to share it that's true thank you for those words most of the people by far who are registered in the world trade center health program and thus the victim compensation fund are first responders only five percent are office workers please share the story of your own office and how cancer has devastated your office or hit your office just steps from the world trade center because i think that brings it all home well you know in hindsight it really shouldn't surprise anybody we were two blocks from round zero um yes i was one of the people caught in the dust cloud that day but even if i hadn't been caught in the dust cloud i returned to work the following month as did all other the other 14 people who worked with me at my law firm you know they i told you they said the air was safe to breathe but you know what we kind of knew that it wasn't because whenever the air was blowing north which is we're just north of the trade center you know i look at barbara and the other people in my office and say god what is that smell and everybody would say well you know the buildings are still on fire and then it became clear to us it was the smell of death it was the rotting corpses the burning corpses the concrete they didn't find a phone or a computer all the melting plastic the jet fuel kept everything burning and um yeah i guess not surprisingly of the 15 people in my office uh dennis cotter lyanna rivera both age 47 died of cancer lyanna had breast cancer very aggressive cancer uh dennis had very aggressive kidney cancer this is what we were now seeing with all of our clients by the way that this isn't just cancer cancer on steroids and um so they died and five others including barbara as you know who had b lymphoma i have prostate cancer a few others have skin cancer seven of the 14 of us have come down with one of the 68 cancers linked to the toxins um a number of the others have respiratory problems and this is throughout my whole office building i mean all together shelley there there were over 300 000 office workers who were all invited to come back and encouraged to come back to work this is all south of canal street there were 25 000 downtown residents there were 50 000 students and teachers all of us breathing the same toxic dust so yes at the beginning most of my clients were firefighters cops construction workers sanitation workers uh emts but now it's pretty even um and i suspect pretty soon we're going to see a lot more of these 300 000 people come down with cancer and many of them already have i mean we represent 128 people who worked at goldman sachs 128 of their employees have cancer now they have thousands of employees but it just shows you the magnitude and sadly as you pointed out only five percent of these survivors what we call the non-first responders only five percent of them have registered with the health program so far a free world trade center health program it's crazy so that's why i so appreciate people like you who are always helping me get the word out to these people and you know we're doing outreach well we used to before the pandemic we used to do the a lot of these meetings where i'd fly all over and meet uh retiree groups in north carolina south carolina i've been to utah florida countless times california i've spoken to the firefighters out there chicago uh well now with the pandemic we're not doing that anymore so we're doing webinars to do this outreach um so that's that's my new goal now is to educate people to access what you are entitled to those are john stewart's words and again we need to remind people if you are still well if you are still healthy and you were there that day by the world trade center or you were in the area below canal street in the eight months following what do they need to do to protect themselves now because this help is really for a lifetime right so again i have to be fair to the health program you only have to have been south of houston street and in western brooklyn to be eligible for free health care you have to have been south of canal street or at the fresh kills landfill or at the moors or on the barges taking the debris out to staten island and that makes you eligible for both the health program and the victim compensation fund what people should do now even if they're healthy is get your proof because as the years go by it's going to be harder and harder for you to find witnesses to sign an affidavit saying yeah i remember michael was at the working at 11 park place a lot of businesses don't exist anymore that used to exist um you know 19 years ago so i'm telling people all the time you know and people sometimes will say to me well i had some witnesses but they're dead that's going to even be more and more the case as the years go by now fortunately we do hearings all the time with the victim compensation plan and they give you a chance to say i used to work at this firm that is now closed and everyone's gone but if you check with the irs you will see i work for this company at this address and the victim compensation one doesn't want to hurt you they want to help you it's non-adversarial so we've been very um successful getting people in who have less than the best proof um but they will accept affidavits um that are sworn they don't have to be notarized but they have to be sworn by the person who's signing them as accurate and uh i'm imploring everybody if you were in the exposure zone apply register now even if you're healthy in case god forbid next anytime in the next 70 years you get cancer is there anything else you'd like to add michael no i think you've covered my whole career um you have and it was it was like a good psychiatric session here thank you very much thank you for all you do my pleasure i love working with you shelly and ditto ditto thank you michael parish take care [Music] okay

Channel: Q1043 New York

Views: 12,308

Rating: 4.8744392 out of 5

Keywords: q1043, rock, music, video, radio, interview, performance, live

Id: ak5b9AHQMcM

Length: 35min 2sec (2102 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021