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Twenty five years later what we know about the attacks the air people breathed and the generation that inherited a changed America
By Dee Daniels | Women’s Network News | September 11, 2026
I wasn’t supposed to be covering a story that morning. I was off work. At the time, I was a reporter with the Chicago Tribune City News Service, and sleeping in sounded like a pretty good idea.
The television was on as I lay there—half asleep, half awake. Then I saw an airplane going into a building. For a moment, my mind tried to make sense of what I was seeing: What kind of action movie is this?
Before I could fully comprehend it, another plane hit another tower. And suddenly I understood. This wasn’t a movie. This was America.
I got out of bed. I watched the news. I called the office. I called my daughter’s school to make sure she and the other students were safe. Like millions of Americans that morning, I began trying to understand something that only minutes earlier would have seemed unimaginable.
Twenty-five years later, those images have become history. But September 11 is more than the images of airplanes, collapsing buildings and smoke replayed for a quarter-century. We now know more about the toxic substances people were breathing around Ground Zero, illnesses that emerged years later, and the limits of early government assurances about the air. In 2026, federal researchers also began a new effort to understand what 9/11 exposure may have done to people who were children and young adults when the towers fell.
For those of us who lived through September 11, something else changed that is harder to measure: America lost part of its sense of security.
Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes on September 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower. American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Passengers and crew aboard United Airlines Flight 93 fought back after learning what had happened aboard the other aircraft; Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The attacks killed 2,977 people from more than 90 countries—2,753 in New York, 184 at the Pentagon and 40 aboard Flight 93. It remains the deadliest foreign attack on American soil.
Numbers cannot completely explain what Americans experienced. People called their children, parents, spouses and friends. Schools heightened security. Businesses closed. Airports shut down. Television networks abandoned regular programming. For the first time in U.S. history, civilian aircraft across the country were ordered to land, and military aircraft began protecting American airspace.
In Chicago, military aircraft could be heard and seen over the region as security tightened around one of America’s largest cities. For people on the ground, the significance was unmistakable: the skies themselves had changed.
That is one of my strongest memories of September 11. I was hundreds of miles from Ground Zero, yet distance suddenly provided very little comfort. Chicago is a transportation and financial center with some of the most recognizable buildings in America and one of the busiest aviation systems in the world.
That morning, Americans did not know whether the four hijacked aircraft represented the entire attack. We did not know what might happen next. That uncertainty became part of the national trauma. Before September 11, most Americans boarding an airplane did not imagine aircraft could be transformed into guided weapons against American cities. After September 11, we could imagine it. We had seen it.
The images from Lower Manhattan showed an enormous cloud swallowing streets and buildings as the World Trade Center towers collapsed. At the time, many people saw dust. Today, scientists describe something considerably more dangerous.
According to the federal World Trade Center Health Program, the collapse created a dense mixture of toxic dust, gases and smoke that moved through populated sections of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and entered homes, businesses and schools. More than 350 potential hazards have subsequently been identified as possibly present at the disaster areas and related sites.
The exposure did not end on September 11. Fires continued burning while first responders, recovery workers and volunteers spent weeks and months in the debris. Residents, employees and students returned. Federal health officials estimate approximately 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, risks of physical injury, or physically and emotionally stressful conditions associated with September 11 and its aftermath. The dust disappeared. For many people, its effects did not.
In the days following the attacks, the Environmental Protection Agency issued public statements reassuring people about air quality. An EPA Office of Inspector General investigation later found serious problems with how those assurances were communicated.
The inspector general found that EPA’s overriding public message was that people did not need to be concerned about airborne contaminants from the World Trade Center collapse. EPA officials later told investigators that an important September 18 statement describing the air as safe applied to narrower circumstances, including outdoor air, healthy adults and certain long-term risks. Those qualifications generally were not included in the public statements, according to the inspector general.
The OIG also found that most New Yorkers it surveyed wanted more timely information about indoor and outdoor air quality and did not believe the information they had received. That history matters because the health consequences are no longer theoretical.
According to the World Trade Center Health Program, more than 96,000 people have been diagnosed with physical or mental health conditions resulting from exposure to the dust, smoke, debris and traumatic events associated with September 11.
Recognized conditions include respiratory illnesses, numerous cancers, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety disorders. Thousands continue living with chronic disease; others have died. The 2,977 people killed in the attacks remain the victims of that terrible day, but the health consequences continued long after television cameras stopped showing smoke over Manhattan. For some families, September 11 never really ended.
On August 25, 2026, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health announced a new research effort addressing people who were 21 or younger when exposed to 9/11. More than 1,500 scientific publications have examined health effects among exposed populations, but federal researchers say only a small percentage focused on people exposed at young ages.
Children breathe, absorb and process environmental contaminants differently than adults, and their bodies and brains are still developing. Researchers identified areas requiring further study, including respiratory and lung development, reproductive health, brain and behavioral health, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses.
Congress directed the WTC Health Program to establish a new cohort of people exposed while young so researchers can study their health and educational outcomes. Twenty-five years after September 11, we are still discovering what September 11 did.
I heard another reminder of America’s changed security environment less than a month later. This time, I was working.
On October 8, 2001, American Airlines Flight 1238 was approaching Chicago from Los Angeles when a passenger attempted to enter the cockpit. The pilot declared an emergency. The Air Force scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to intercept the Boeing 767. The fighters broke the sound barrier as they raced toward the aircraft, creating sonic booms heard across portions of the Chicago area. They escorted the flight safely into O’Hare International Airport. Authorities ultimately determined the incident was not terrorism.
But the reaction tells us something important about America in October 2001. Only weeks earlier, four commercial airplanes had been turned into weapons. Nobody could afford to assume an emergency aboard another aircraft was harmless. That afternoon, I heard the sound of America’s new security reality.
September 11 changed how Americans travel. The Transportation Security Administration was created. Cockpit security and airport screening changed. The Department of Homeland Security was established. Intelligence and counterterrorism operations were reorganized, and government surveillance powers expanded.
The United States went to war in Afghanistan and later invaded Iraq amid the broader post-9/11 national-security environment, although Iraq was not responsible for the September 11 attacks. Words such as homeland security, terror alert and no-fly list entered everyday American vocabulary. For millions of younger Americans, those things feel normal. They were not. They belonged to the America that came after.
Someone who is 20 today was not alive when the towers fell. Someone who is 25 was an infant. Millions know September 11 primarily through classroom lessons, documentaries, photographs and video. They inherited the world 9/11 created without experiencing the world that existed before it.
That creates a responsibility for those who remember it. We must tell them what happened and what it felt like: the confusion, fear and extraordinary courage; firefighters running into buildings while thousands ran out; police officers, paramedics and civilians helping strangers; passengers aboard Flight 93 fighting back; families waiting for telephone calls that never came; and Americans looking into skies emptied of commercial airplanes, wondering whether another attack was coming.
History records events. People remember moments. I remember lying in bed thinking I was watching an action movie. I remember realizing I was not. I remember calling my newsroom and my daughter’s school. I remember understanding that the country I awakened in somehow felt different by the end of the day.
September 11 changed buildings, airports, government, American foreign policy and families forever. For many Americans, it changed something less visible: our assumption that we were safe.
Twenty-five years later, science is still revealing consequences we could not see in the smoke. Researchers are studying people who were children when they breathed that air. Families are living with illnesses connected to that day. An entire generation has grown up knowing September 11 only as history.
Remembering accurately matters because September 11 is not only the story of the day America was attacked. It is also the story of the America that emerged afterward.
Sources:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Trade Center Health Program: Health Effects of 9/11 — https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/exhibition/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Trade Center Exposures — https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/exposures.html
CDC and NIOSH, Early Life Exposure Research Initiative, August 25, 2026 — https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/bulletin/2026/9-11-early-life-exposure.html
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General, Survey of Air Quality Information Related to the World Trade Center Collapse — https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-12/documents/wtc_report_20030821.pdf
Contemporary reporting on American Airlines Flight 1238, October 8, 2001 — https://www.upi.com/Archives/2001/10/08/Passenger-storms-cockpit-jets-scrambled/6891002513600/
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