The years right after 9/11 brought a wave of mental health needs among emergency workers, especially those who left their jobs. Lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic brought another wave of retirements — and another wave of grief.
Among the more than 300 New York firefighters killed on Sept. 11, 2001, 12 were members of the Vulcan Society, the FDNY’s association of Black firefighters: Gerard Baptiste, Vernon Cherry, Tarel Coleman, Andre Fletcher, Keith Glascoe, Ronnie Henderson, William Henry, Karl Joseph, Keithroy Maynard, Vernon Richard, Shawn Powell and Leon Smith Jr.
The Vulcan Society was founded in 1940 by Wesley Williams, one of the first Black fire chiefs in the country and has long advocated for Black firefighters. Each year, it invites the families of the firefighters it lost on 9/11 to a memorial service in Brooklyn.
“While the city may forget, the families don’t,” Vulcan Society member and firefighter Greg Shepherd said during a previous commemoration. “A lot of these people had kids and some of them are firefighters now. I bet you they never forgot either. For us, it’s about helping the families. They’re our extended family.”
Mental health issues also have stretched across the decades.
“Think about what difficult jobs our patients had,” said Dr. Iris Udasin, medical director at Rutgers. “They’re not just recovering from what happened on 9/11. They’re recovering from whatever happened to them when they were police officers, firefighters or first responders.”
Many first responders who stayed on the job suppressed their feelings for years, Streich said. “Once they retired, symptoms often surfaced for the first time, compounded by their own illnesses or trauma unrelated to 9/11. As responders age, new health problems can emerge, deepening their grief,” she added.
Black police officers who worked at Ground Zero had higher PTSD rates than white officers, and Black bystander responders — construction, utility and cleanup workers — had a PTSD rate of 27.3% compared to 26.5% for their white counterparts. The researchers found the gap was driven less by race itself than by factors like prior psychiatric history, exposure severity and socioeconomic disadvantage.
Issues affecting the city’s firefighters are handled separately by the FDNY WTC Health Program. The program has found that FDNY firefighters and EMTs have rates of PTSD at roughly 7% to 8% higher and twice that for depression. But the program has not separated the data by race, which leaves an unclear picture of how Black firefighters and EMS workers have been affected.
