PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5)Â -- Arizona's survivors of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center find themselves at an increased risk from a different danger: COVID-19.
"It's scary," said Theresa Scott, a Phoenix resident who worked on Wall Street just blocks away from where the World Trade Center collapsed. "It's scary anyways because we still don't know the effects of 9/11. We're still all finding this out, right?"
Scott was supposed to be commuting right underneath the World Trade Center on 9/11, but something told her to get off the train and go back home.
"Calling into work to say you know I 'm going to be a little late, I'm not sure if I need to be out, I just feel something's wrong," Scott said. Scott would watch the towers fall from her apartment building's rooftop in Brooklyn.
"We didn't know what was going on at that time... Just, that how could that be?"
But even after avoiding the terror of the plummeting towers, a different danger floated in the air when Scott went back to work on Wall Street.
"It smelled like a combination of burnt bodies and plastic and iron," Scott said.
A cloud of toxic dust clung to Manhattan, and it would eventually lead to serious breathing issues and cancer for many of those that worked and lived around the World Trade Center site.
"Three-hundred-thousand office workers, and students, and teachers who came back because the government assured us it was safe. Well, that was a big problem, and that's how they all got sick," said Michael Barasch, a partner at Barasch and McGarry Law Firm, which represents 9/11 victims.
And nearly two decades later, the people that survived the attacks of 9/11 are now fighting to make it through the COVID-19 pandemic -- their cancer and breathing issues making the diagnosis even deadlier.
"Your immune system is shot, or your lungs can't fight off the virus. And that's why we're seeing so many people in the 9/11 community die of COVID-19," Barasch said.
Barasch estimates that there are hundreds of 9/11 survivors like Scott who are living in Arizona.
"We're high risk," Scott said.
Scott says she now deals with asthma and sleep apnea and fears catching the coronavirus amid Arizona's spike in cases -- a survivor of one American tragedy, simply trying to live through another.
"It's a fear," Scott said. "It's a reality."
