9/11 victims fund ready for disbursement

Nearly three years after establishing a fund to compensate the families of Sept. 11 victims, the federal government said Monday that it had completed the task and that it would end up paying more than 5,000 families almost $7 billion.

To mark the end of the program, the fund's administrator, Kenneth Feinberg, met with President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft on Tuesday afternoon at the White House.

In an interview afterward, Feinberg said the president praised the program for giving the families the full compensation to which they were legally entitled.

It was a bittersweet coda to a program that hovered, day after day for a total of 997 days, as a sad and sometimes numbing reminder of the awkward and difficult process by which the families and the government decided how much the lives and the injuries were worth.

On Sept. 22, 2001, Congress created the Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund without any financial cap as part of an airline bailout package, and as a fast and, it hoped, less painful alternative to lawsuits.

In exchange for giving up their right to sue, which some lawyers argued could be a draining and risky option, relatives of dead victims were told that the average payment would be about $1.5 million, tax free, after deductions for life insurance and other possible benefits.

The fund got off to a slow start, plagued by criticism of rules governing eligibility to apply and how the financial calculations would be made, as well as an overwhelming sense of grief among victims' families. Just a month before the application deadline, Dec. 22, 2003, only 60 percent of those eligible for death benefits had filed claims.

The rate was so sluggish that New York members of Congress pushed for a one-year extension.

As the deadline approached, hundreds rushed to file, pushing the final application rate to 97 percent of the 2,973 families of the dead who were eligible.

In what Feinberg said was a sign of the fund's success, only 70 lawsuits were filed against the airlines, while 30 or so families filed neither a lawsuit nor an application with the fund.

"When you have about two-thirds of all the physical injury claims not coming in until the last 45 days and 40 percent of the death claims, the magnitude of getting this completed fairly and consistently by the June 15 deadline was a difficult challenge, but we did it," Feinberg said.

By Tuesday, Feinberg's office said that 2,878 families had received, or were about to receive, compensation on behalf of dead victims that averaged almost $2.1 million per family. The lowest individual payment was $250,000 and the high was $7.1 million.

In addition, 2,675 of the 4,430 who filed injury claims were to be compensated; of those, 1,919 were rescue workers at ground zero or the Pentagon. The range of those payments was from $500 to $8.7 million.

In all, Feinberg said, the government would spend approximately $6.9 billion on the fund, roughly $1 billion of which would go to injured victims.