Devlin Barrett, Washington Post, there was a lot of talk about 9-11's first responders

in Washington this week, last week too.

I think everyone has the images of these first responders rushing to the Twin Towers on September

11, 2001 seared into memory.

But how long did they stick around once they got there?

How long were they there?

They were there working for months when the attack first happened.

In the initial days, government officials predicted this cleanup could take multiple years.

What happened, in fact, was they actually got the bulk of the cleanup, the real work

of it done in basically a year.

But those first months were brutal.

They were brutal emotionally and they were brutal physically.

In part, folks forget this now, but the fires in the debris pile burned for months.

Even as they're trying to find remains, they are working around fires.

That doesn't even get into the question of all the toxic dust that's in the air.

These are basically pulverized concrete and steel buildings.

It's just an incredible amount of debris, an incredible amount of dust.

All these folks are working in that space for months and months and months.

One of the factors in people getting sick, frankly, was that especially in the early days,

weeks and months, a lot of the people who were doing that work would not come off the

pile.

They would find ways to work longer than they were supposed to.

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