AFT Update: On 9/11, the spirit of public service lives on

Some AFT members were working at what would become ground zero on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when two hijacked planes took down the twin towers at the World Trade Center in New York City. Some AFT members rushed to care for the first responders. And some of today’s AFT members were not yet born.

For some of the youngest survivors—thousands of children who watched the towers fall from their classroom windows—this was only their second day of school.

Among nearly 3,000 people who perished that day were dozens of AFT public employees, including members of the New York State Public Employees Federation and two members of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York. In Washington, D.C., three members of the Washington Teachers’ Union died with their 11-year-old students when their plane crashed into the Pentagon. They had just taken off for California to attend a National Geographic program on marine biology.

But even as the horror unfolded, AFT members lived up to the highest standards of their professions. Two special education paraprofessionals who worked at a school next to the towers partly wheeled and partly carried their wheelchair-bound students through streets choked with debris and ash. Arriving late that afternoon at the home of one of the girls, her para simply said: “I have her.” Ten years later, the student and para remained fast friends.

On that day in 2001, a stunned nation struggled to comprehend what had happened. But AFT healthcare workers from New York and New Jersey rushed to the scene, setting up triage centers that, in the end, were barely used because so few survived.

These members gradually realized they could help the first responders, venturing over to the disaster site and offering eye washes and drinks of water to the rescue workers, as well as protective gear, clean socks and hugs. They even ministered to injured rescue dogs. “We walked around looking for a place that needed us,” one said.

Months later, though, the intensive care nurses, psychiatric nurses, paramedics, EMTs and visiting nurses said they still felt haunted by their empty triage centers and a job they felt was left undone.

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