In the midst of devastation, debris and danger, 40,000 workers plunged into the suffocating tasks of rescuing, salvaging and clearing the twisted wreckage of the World Trade Center towers on and after September 11, 2001. They could have called in sick; instead they valiantly went to work and got sick. Some very sick.

To television viewers, the pictures of George W. Bush and the fire fighters and police around him may remain as the most remembered scenes in the immediate aftermath. To the workers personally, the scenes were coughing, short breathing, spitting dust and blood from what a hospital report called "the largest acute environmental disaster that has ever befallen New York City."

The media understandably focused on the heroics but, not as understandably, never really got around to tracking the occupational sicknesses. Or what the workers are still going through to recover, retire or simply plead for workers' compensation. Not until, that is, a poignant feature by Anthony DePalma in the May 13th issue of the New York Times.

DePalma portrays what the workers are going through in the courtroom of Judge Mark Solomon in Brooklyn. Day after day, workers come and sit at the dark wood table in front of the Judge while their attorneys strive to connect their illnesses and their inability to work with the dust clouds that swirled through lower Manhattan.

These airborne densities contained asbestos, lead, mercury, cadmium, and other deadly particulates. It did not help that the federal EPA assured New Yorkers that these clouds posed no significant risk to health a few days later - a faulty assessment from which the EPA later had to backtrack, to its embarrassment.

Doctors at the Mount Sinai Medical Center believe that half of the 12,000 workers, participating in an extensive medical study by area hospitals, will show respiratory problems linked to ground zero.

The world of workers' compensation claims is one of sick or injured employees wrestling with recalcitrant employers and denying insurance carriers. The laborers' attorneys make little money off these cases. Their fees are fixed and the awards are far below awards under the tort system, though these worker claims do not have to prove negligence by their perpetrators. They have to prove causality and the degree of disability.

Right after September 11th, the insurance companies sped to Washington demanding guarantees, bailouts, limited liability and anything in the corporate welfare trough they could get their hands on in Congress or over at Bush's executive branch. They received plenty, including a sky's the limit license to raise property-casualty premiums. Witness the staggering increase in these companies' profits last year.

So, overflowing with all these goodies, how do the insurance carriers and their attorneys respond to the ground zero workers wheezing and faltering in Judge Solomon's courtroom? Fight the claims - full speed ahead. Dispute any causation, charge the workers with malingering or with smoking or with exaggerating - anything to keep the weekly compensation payments from reducing the bottom line of insurance industry profits.

For the workers, disbelief has turned into personal, not just physical, hurt. Franklin Chandler, a 54 year old bus driver who missed 10 months of work after 9/11, told the Times, after months of effort to receive a portion of his lost pay: "I was belittled. They tried to portray me as someone who could not be trusted." Walter Jensen, an army veteran, said: "I need to have my dignity back."

Workers, like soldiers, have their tragic moment in history when politicians lather praise on them. Then after their usefulness has passed, politicians are elsewhere shaking hands, marching in parades and floating through new flatteries.

Where are the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of Defense and the members of Congress, like Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Charles Schumer? The other funds set up after 9/11 were for the victims' and their families. Some rescue workers are appealing to these funds, but with little success.

The publicity rush for photo opportunities, showing site visits by politicians, are designed to imprint lingering images on viewers' (voters') brains. The images that last in the minds and hearts of the injured and sick, who did the dirty work of cleanup those days and weeks after 9/11, are not allowed to linger. This epidemic is not televised.

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