A thoughtful review of “City of Dust” in an L.A. blog called Zocalo. You can read it by clicking here.

A truly worrisome development, and the loss of a hero. My latest HuffPost and a coda to “City of Dust.” Click here to read the full column

They took it right up to the wire last night, but the hyperkinetic lame duck Congress got its act together and passed a watered-down version of the Zadroga bill to provide health care and compensation to a broad range of people who were exposed to the dust of the destroyed World Trade Center.  While it’s great that the bill finally will be signed into law,  it’s too bad that the terms of the package had to be cut the way they were. Instead of the long-term funding for the medical treatment of sick responders, the bill provides just five years worth of coverage. Five years is better than the one or two year long extensions that Mount Sinai and the other medical centers have had to work under since 2002, but it’s not the long-term solution because we know the illnesses are not going to clear up and disappear in five years. Nor does this provide the long term support for the scientific research that will provide answers about the toxicity of the dust and finally resolve some of the mysteries about its toxicity so that everyone who breathed it in isn’t condemned to lifetimes of dread. The part of the Zadroga bill that reopens the Victim Compensation Fund also got shaved. The lower cap and shorter term ($2.5 billion over five years) has the potential to incur the same kind of injustices that resulted from the premature closing of the first fund. That effort only lasted to the end of 2003, when many of the most serious impacts of the dust were just starting to be felt. In five years we will be roughly 15 years from 9/11, which might seem like a long time. But we know that cancers have a 20 to 30 year latency period. The original Zadroga bill would have held the compensation fund long enough to really know if there is an increased risk for cancer among survivors. I realize that this kind of compromise may have been the only way to get anything through the lame duck Congress, and the legislators involved are probably thinking that they will live to fight another day. But I’m afraid that, like the $625 million settlement of the 10,000 ground zero cases against the city, the passage of the legislation in this form will not settle anything, and that in five years we will see the same painful confrontation played out all over again.