‘Dust lady’ survived 9/11 but has lost to cancer

An American woman whose traumatised, dust-covered face summed up the horrors of the September 11 attacks has died of stomach cancer at the age of 42, The Telegraph of UK reports.

Marcy Borders, known as “The Dust Lady” thanks to the photograph taken in the immediate aftermath, became one of the most recognisable survivors. She had started work at Bank of America a month before the attack, and was working on the 81st floor of World Trade Centre when the first plane hit.

She managed to make it down to the ground level, and was walking away when the second plane struck the tower, leaving her covered from head to foot in thick grey dust.

In the years that followed the mother of two fell into a spiral of drink, drugs and depression, which saw her rack up huge debts and have her children taken into care.

“I just couldn’t cope,” she told The Telegraph in 2011, to mark the 10-year anniversary of the attacks. “The alcohol made me numb, the drugs got me high.

“Every time I saw an airplane, I thought there would be another attack. I could not get that day out of my mind.”

But a decade on, she was finally getting back into the working world and helping with a candidate’s local campaign for mayor when, in August 2014, she was diagnosed with stomach cancer.

“I’m saying to myself: ‘Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?'” she said.

“I definitely believe it because I haven’t had any illnesses. I don’t have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes.”

Announcing the news of her death on Monday evening, her first cousin, John Borders, said his relative died of “the diseases that (have) ridden her body since 9/11”.

In the years since 9/11, many hundreds of people caught up in the attacks have been diagnosed with cancer. Figures from July 2014 showed that more than 2,500 police officers, firefighters, ambulance staff and sanitation workers reported they had cancer in 2013 – twice as many as said they had the disease 12 months earlier.

It is unclear how many emergency staff have already died after contracting cancer as a result of their work at Ground Zero.

Doctors said those who spent significant amounts of time at the site are at increased risk of a number of different cancers, including prostate, thyroid, leukaemia and multiple myeloma, after coming into contact with “wildly toxic” dust emitted for months following the World Trade Centre attacks.

Fires at the site burned for three months, releasing carcinogens and other deadly chemicals into the air, while thousands of tonnes of pulverised toxic debris lay strewn at the site of the Towers’ collapse.

The compensation bill for treating those who became ill after helping in the long-running recovery operation at Ground Zero has already run into millions of dollars.

When asked if she ever looked at “The Dust Lady” photo of herself, Ms Borders said she avoided doing so as much as possible.

“I try to take myself from being a victim to being a survivor now,” she said. “I don’t want to be a victim anymore.”