“This park is getting too small for the amount of names that are going up so fast,” Mike Negron said.
“I kind of lost track,” he told CBS News New York, “it’s crazy.”
Negron was a member of the New York City Department of Correction Emergency Services Unit on 9/11 who were summoned to or volunteered at Ground Zero after the attacks.
Those crews worked for months after officials said the air was safe.
Negron, who was in charge of scheduling, said the pain lingers in his heart.
“It hurts to know that I had to send somebody down to Ground Zero and that they may become sick or may die,” he said. “At the time it didn’t matter. We were there to do one thing…find survivors."
Now, 23 years later, more people have died from cancer and other diseases from exposure to the dust cloud than died in the attack itself.
More than 2,000 names are now on the wall at the Responder Memorial Park in Nesconset, NY, a suburb on Long Island.
The World Trade Center Health Program was to be funded through 2090, but that money is already running out and health services may need to be cut.
Created by Congress in 2010 and reauthorized in 2015, the program was given $1.6 billion in funding, but advocates say another $3 billion is needed.
“Nobody took into account medical inflation in 2015,” said John Feal, a 9/11 Responders advocate. “There were 70,000 people in the program in 2015, now there is 132,000 plus.”
Congress has until 2028 to approve the funding, if not, medical treatments could be cut for those sick and those whose diagnosis is coming.
