|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A little more than a year after September 11th, Kenneth Feinberg, who holds the title of special master of the Victim Compensation Fund, met with a group of firefighters in his midtown office. Feinberg, who is fifty-seven, has a long face, a prominent forehead, and an abrupt manner. Standing, he appears to be straining forward, and even when he is sitting down he leans in, as if about to get up again. That morning, Feinberg had taken off his jacket, and he greeted the firefighters in his shirtsleeves. His gold cufflinks--a gift to himself--were embossed with the scales of justice.
The first of the men to speak was a burly firefighter with a ruddy complexion. He had spent four weeks at the World Trade Center site, initially trying to rescue victims and then to recover remains. He told Feinberg that whatever he had breathed in during that time--pulverized glass, concrete, lead, traces of asbestos; "I call it a bunch of crap," he said--had reduced his lung capacity by more than fifty per cent. He coughed throughout the session.
"Sleeping's tough," he said. "When I'm getting depressed, my wife calls it 'the mood.' She takes the kids out." The fireman told Feinberg that he had recently had to quit the F.D.N.Y. and had taken a job monitoring security cameras at a school. "I can't play street hockey, can't play ball--my son, he can't understand why Daddy can't do nothing.
"This is what I take every day," he announced, holding up a freezer bag filled with medications. "There's a bunch of pills, there's nasal sprays, there's steroids, there's inhalers." He extracted some more medicines from a fanny pack. "This is what I keep on me all the time: albuterol, epinephrine--it's a self-stick. If it gets really bad, I've got to hit this and go to the hospital."
Eventually, a second firefighter-- a slight man who sat slumped in his chair--spoke up. He explained that he had spent the afternoon of the attack sifting through the ruins of the World Trade Center concourse. "We were trying to dig this person out of the dirt and the debris and the dust and the smoke. You saw the astronauts on the moon, that dust surface? That was what was coming into your face. Three weeks later, I was coughing up blood, dirt, debris. Since then, I've been in the hospital three times. It's affecting my liver, my pancreas, my stomach, and nobody can really give me a definite answer why. My eleven-year-old son, he asks his mother, 'Is Daddy going to die now?' "
The Victim Compensation Fund, or V.C.F., as it is known, expires a year from next month. Between now and then, it is expected to issue checks to some three thousand families. The fund is the first of its kind, and, to the extent that it has a logic, Feinberg, as special master, has imposed it. It is Feinberg who drafted the rules for disbursing the fund, Feinberg who is determining how the rules are administered, and Feinberg who will hear appeals from people unhappy with the way the rules have been applied. In the case of victims like the firefighters, whose ailments did not manifest themselves until days, or even weeks, after the disaster, Feinberg has the authority to decide not just how much compensation they will receive but whether they will get any at all. By most estimates, the bill for the fund will eventually run to five billion dollars, though it is possible that it could be a good deal higher. How much higher is, once again, entirely up to Feinberg, who has been granted what amounts to a blank check on the federal Treasury.
Anyone in Feinberg's position would have found himself at odds with some of the victims' families; Feinberg has managed to infuriate just about all of them. "I've heard you say that you couldn't put yourselves in our shoes," a widow told him publicly a few months ago. "I think if you could feel our pain for one hour your tone and your mannerisms would be so drastically different...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
