00:00I joined the FDNY when I was 20 years old. I turned 21 in August of 2001, right before the
00:04World Trade Center attack.
00:06I was proud to put on this uniform. I was proud to join a family of people who ran towards
00:10danger when everybody was told to run away.
00:13On September 11th, that's exactly what we did. We watched friends go into those buildings. We watched far too many
00:18of them never come home.
00:20343 FDNY members were killed that day, but this is the truth America must understand.
00:25For the FDNY, September 11th did not end on September 11th. It did not end when the fires were finally
00:30extinguished.
00:31It did not end when the pile was cleared. It did not end when the cameras left ground zero.
00:35For 25 years, we have continued to bury our brothers and sisters. Just yesterday, we buried the 453rd member of
00:41the FDNY post-9-11.
00:43These are not just statistics to us. There are firefighters who cannot make it up the stairs without losing the
00:49breath.
00:49It's a member who sits through chemotherapy. It's a widow who have to explain to her children why our father
00:54and mother is not coming home.
00:56The retiree who fought to survive September 11th, only to find out years later that the dust he's breathing in
01:01is still killing him.
01:03That's why today matters.
01:05The release of more than 100,000 pages of city records, including the Harding memo, and the long-missing boxes
01:10of documents must be more than a headline.
01:12It must finally bring truth into the open.
01:15We're not here as Republicans. We're not here as Democrats. We're here as firefighters.
01:19We protect, we serve, we go into buildings while others are trying to get out.
01:23What the people sent into that toxic environment deserve to know the full truth about what was in the air.
01:28They deserve to know the risks. They deserve protective equipment, honest warnings, medical monitoring,
01:33and a government that treated their health in urgency as they treated the city's emergency.
01:37We'll see you soon.
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