Even if you were just older than a toddler, you remember what happened on 9/11/2001. It was to today’s generation what Pearl Harbor was to older generations.

We may forgive the deluded souls that carried out this horror but we will never forget what they did not only to thousands of victims and their families but to all Americans.

And to watch what all our efforts in Afghanistan came to over the last few weeks may convince you that you made a mistake if you voted for Joe Biden for President.

MY SISTER and her daughter lived in Manhattan in 2001. They took me to the World Trade Center where hundreds of 1st responders and other volunteers from South Carolina were cleaning up the debris after the search for survivors of the terrorist attack.

Here in Lexington on that fateful morning, we saw tons of toxic dust from the collapse of the Twin Towers cover lower Manhattan.

We saw hundreds of fearless American heroes – firefighters, police officers, paramedics, construction workers and volunteers – risk their own lives to work in the Ground Zero rubble, evacuating and triaging the injured.

Thousands of New Yorkers inhaled that poisonous air. Today, the long-term health effects of this exposure is being felt by 9/11 rescue workers and survivors. And for many, the results have proven to be fatal.

THE WORLD Trade Center Health Programtreats over 65,000 rescue and recovery workers, says Dr. Michael Crane, director of the program at Mount Sinai Hospital. 43% of these workers are afflicted with chronic, exposure-related conditions.

Cancer among firefighters at Ground Zero has spiked by about 20% compared with New York firefighters who weren’t exposed. The dust that spread as the towers collapsed was laced with ground glass, lead, gypsum, calcite, and hundreds of tons of asbestos.

For more than a century, we’ve known asbestos can cause mesothelioma, lung, gastrointestinal, laryngeal, and ovarian cancers plus non-malignant respiratory diseases.

Though a known carcinogen, asbestos was widely used in building the World Trade Center, including in the application of sincebanned fireproofing asbestos spray.

Asbestos-caused diseases kill as many as 15,000 Americans a year, but the time from exposure to symptoms is 10-50 years. This means we’re only starting to see the tragic toll of asbestos exposure at Ground Zero.

About 90,000 volunteers desperately dug through debris in hopes of saving survivors, but only 65,000 people are being monitored.

Dr. Crane estimated that about 9,500 volunteers came from South Carolina and other states. Their doctors may not connect symptoms to their exposure 20 years ago.

A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study in San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia found that firefighters in the study had a rate of mesothelioma twice as large than the rate among other Americans

Asbestos is in construction materials, flooring and roofing. When buildings burn, deadly asbestos fibers are released into the air.

Rescue workers who willingly put their lives at risk may survive but may still face the damage of asbestos exposure years later.

Asbestos remains legal in the US and we import hundreds of tons a year in manufacturing. As long as we continue to use this deadly mineral, we risk exposing not just the public but our heroes in times of crisis.

The good news is Congress passed the Lautenberg Act, a bipartisan bill to reform our outdated Toxic Substances Control Act.

It won’t, however, help the heroes of 9/11 and other emergencies.

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