http://www.nynewsday.com

James Zadroga spent 16 hours a day toiling in the World Trade Center ruins for a month, breathing in debris-choked air. Timothy Keller said he coughed up bits of gravel from his lungs after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Felix Hernandez spent days at the site helping to search for victims.

All three men died in the last seven months of what their families and colleagues say are persistent respiratory illnesses directly caused by their work at ground zero.

While thousands of people who either worked at or lived near the site have reported ailments like the "trade center cough" since the terrorist attacks, some say that only now are the consequences of working at the site becoming heartbreakingly clear.

"I'm very fearful," said Donald Faeth, an emergency medical technician and officer in a union with two of the ground zero workers who died last year. "I think that there are several people who died that day and didn't realize that they died that day."

Some officials say it's too early to draw that conclusion. Doctors running different health screening programs say it will take decades to get a clear picture of the long-term health effects of working at ground zero.
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"He came back coughing" two days later, she said. Faeth said that Keller, who worked as an EMT out of a battalion at a Queens hospital, told him that he coughed up debris so violently he could barely breathe on Sept. 11, and later developed emphysema.

Keller went home to Levittown on medical leave in March. He died on June 23 of heart disease complicated by bronchitis and emphysema, the Nassau County medical examiner's office said.
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Zadroga, a 34-year-old city police detective, logged 470 hours at the site in 2001, including Sept. 11, and died Jan. 5. Family and co-workers said he had contracted black lung disease and had high levels of mercury in his brain. Results of an autopsy aren't available yet.

David Worby, an attorney representing more than 5,000 plaintiffs suing those who supervised the cleanup over their illnesses, said 21 of his clients have died of Sept. 11-related diseases since the middle of 2004. He said he was not authorized to release their names, but said he represented people who toiled at ground zero, at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island where trade center debris was moved, and at the city morgue.
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