John Feal (construction worker), Nesconset
It is said that in the house of every 9/11 responder, you will find a shrine. John Feal’s shrine doubles as his office, the office of his foundation, the Feal Good Foundation. Nearly every inch of wall space is covered—with pictures of friends who have been lost, posters from benefits he has put together, a letter from President Obama. Feal’s shrine extends to his own flesh: covering his entire back is a tattoo featuring a detailed image of the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. He has another such tattoo on his left arm, which reads, “FDNY and NYPD—for all those who gave.” And then, speaking of flesh and scars and the souvenirs of 9/11, there’s his left foot.
It has been nine years since 9/11, and in those nine years, 9/11 has become John Feal’s whole life.
Of course, he wasn’t even downtown on the 11th. In fact, he didn’t make it to Ground Zero till the night of Sept. 12, when Feal, along with two other people from his construction company, Turner Construction, was escorted into Manhattan, to The Pile, by Nassau County Police. From that moment, Feal worked 43 hours straight. He went home, showered, slept, came back. He worked every day for the next five days.
Then, roughly 8,000 pounds of steel landed on John Feal’s left foot.
Blood was squirting from his boot, six feet into the air. The person working next to him fainted. The fire department was there in minutes, and Feal was escorted to Bellevue, where he spent 10 days. In Bellevue, he got gangrene. From there, he went to North Shore University Hospital in Plainview, where he spent 10 weeks fighting the gangrene. Eventually, it was decided that the toes of his left foot had to be amputated.
“As soon as they did [the amputation], I didn’t talk to anybody for a week,” says Feal. Today, Feal is wired, eager, always smiling, moving, constantly taking phone calls and replying to e-mails. Today, Feal is a tightly wound ball of energy, all purpose and drive and forward momentum. But it has been a long road from 2001, when he lost the first few inches of his left foot. Back then, he was silent; he stared at the ceiling. He went into a depression. In his depression, he was told by doctors that he had to lose another half-inch off his foot. He went from 185 pounds to 120 pounds. For weeks, he refused to even try to walk. When he did try, he says, “On a scale of one to 10, it was a fucking thousand in pain.”
Upon finally getting back on his feet, and out of the hospital, Feal stayed at his mother’s house for a few weeks. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by four doctors. He went to therapy—physical and mental therapy—for a year.
The turning point came not in therapy, though, but one afternoon at McDonald’s, when he saw a family sitting next to him—a dad and two daughters, one of whom was severely developmentally disabled. For Feal, being in the presence of this young woman would prove to be a revelation.
“She was so excited to be at McDonald’s; it was the highlight of her day,” says Feal. “For her, just to get her mouth on the straw, it took like five minutes… And I said to myself, ‘This girl was born like this. She was born without a choice. I have a choice.’”
Feal started going to support groups—fighting for his own benefits, workman’s comp, Social Security, disability.
“And when I fought for my benefits, I saw all these other people struggling to get theirs,” he says. “I started advocating. Without even knowing it, I became an advocate.”
Feal remembers that people would hear about him somewhere, from someone, find him, e-mail him, call him. “It was like we were in the black market or the Underground Railroad,” he says. “Word traveled, there was this guy who lost half his foot who could help you.”
Feal spent his time in libraries, researching benefits, laws. “And then,” he says, “I started helping people.”
He started the Feal Good Foundation in 2005. At first it was just an e-mail address—[email protected]—then a website. Today, FealGoodFoundation.com is the top-ranked 9/11-related site on the Web, says Feal proudly. In the five years of its existence, he says, the Foundation has donated almost $300,000 and has helped responders in 18 states.
Those are impressive numbers, to be sure, but they are dwarfed by others—others that Feal can also recite from memory. For instance, he points out that approximately 40,000 people worked The Pile in the initial weeks following 9/11, and 90,000 worked The Pile over the course of 10 months. He estimates that 90 percent of 9/11 responders have PTSD and 70 percent are battling physical ailments and illnesses. He also estimates that hundreds of thousands of toxins were inhaled by responders working The Pile.
“And here’s the thing,” says Feal. “Many of those toxins by themselves had something on the warning label with an ‘X’ in it. Mixed together, nobody knew what they would be like. The buildings were pulverized when they came down, so the cement went airborne. To make cement hard, it’s got to get wet. So the cement was inhaled in powder form; it got into your lungs, your lungs are filled with fluids, they got hard in your lungs. But whatever was in the air, in the cement, got hard in your lungs with it. So the mercury, the lead, the powdered glass—because everything was pulverized—it all got embedded in people’s lungs. The respiratory equipment they gave us, the masks or the canisters, they weren’t sufficient to stop that type of mass toxic exposure. So the benzines from the plane, the jet fuel, the mercury, the lead, all of these things were inhaled. And by themselves they’re deadly. Now combined…”
As Feal points out, all the responders at Ground Zero—just like John McNamara—worked there under the assumption that the air was safe to breathe, the water safe to drink. Indeed, those were the exact words of Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the time. In the EPA’s Response to Sept. 11, released on Sept. 18, 2001, Whitman was quoted as saying, “I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” (A 2003 EPA report announced that Todd’s claims were misleading, because the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses” to quantify her assurances.)
“We didn’t only breathe it in,” says Feal. “We were drinking water down there. We were eating food down there. It was in our food, we ate it, we drank it, we slept in it.”
Feal knows he’s one of the lucky ones. “I have a physical, visible injury,” he says. To emphasize this, he grabs the toe of his left boot and flexes it back and forth, to indicate that there is nothing in there. “[Some of] these people have invisible diseases that are killing them.” Feal has now had half a dozen surgeries on his right foot, and back problems, due to the amputation of his left foot. “My gait is all messed up,” he says. “I favor my left foot and really walk on my right foot.” His doctors have told him that he’ll need hip surgery in the next decade.
He notes that these types of effects have compounded and cascaded for many responders. He points out that people who have been prescribed steroids for nine years due to respiratory problems are now finding themselves in need of hip or knee replacements—because steroids eat away at your joints, he says, they eat away at your bone density. Steroids “make you retain water and you gain weight, and these guys who were 190 pounds working at Ground Zero are now 300 pounds.”
He runs down a few more numbers: As he points out, 2,751 people died at Ground Zero on 9/11. “[Responders] are going to outnumber those people in a few years,” he says. “We’re over 900 now. Next year we’ll be over 1,200. Year after that will be 1,500.”
Feal has dedicated his life to this cause. “I’m never going to stop being an advocate,” he says. “It took me 30-something years for me to realize what I’m supposed to be.”
What he is, though, is something much more than an advocate: Three years ago, on August 30, 2007, Feal donated a kidney to a responder who reached out to him through the Feal Good website. Today, he gets e-mails informing him whether he might be a match for a bone-marrow transplant. To be clear, Feal is hoping to donate marrow, not receive it.
The mostly up-tempo Feal grows heated and dark when he runs down the list of diseases that are killing 9/11 responders—like the colon cancer that wiped out John McNamara.
“Now, it’s the blood cancers,” he says. “Now it’s the leukemia. Now it’s the ‘Holy shit, we’ve never seen this kind of cancer before.’ This is what the doctors are saying: ‘This is the most rapid-growing cancer we’ve ever seen. We’ve never seen anything move this fast. There’s no cure for this leukemia…’”
Feal pauses.
“And then these people die. How sad is that? But before they die, the government never helped them, the city never helped them, and they leave behind hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills to their families. That is unacceptable and that’s un-American.”