More Than 20 Additional 9/11 Firefighters Died Last Year From Rescue-Related Illnesses

“During the ceremony, families placed white roses at the memorial as the 21 members’ names were read.” Photos courtesy of the FDNY

In a Downtown Brooklyn ceremony on Tuesday morning, the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) recognized the 21 firefighters who died since this time last year due to 9/11-related illnesses.

Their names were added to a black-and-bronze memorial plaque hanging on a wall at the FDNY’s Brooklyn headquarters.

The plaque was unveiled in 2011, but it’s been expanding every year since — as more and more firefighters succumb to the toxins they inhaled in 2001.

“You have got to remember that the fires burned for three months down there and the toxins were there — I don’t know what we were walking through,” retired firefighter Ray Pfeiffer reportedly said at Tuesday’s ceremony. “And a good day down at the Trade Center was to find somebody for closure — and that’s why we stayed down there, that’s why we did it.”

The Brooklyn memorial wall now bears the names of 110 firefighters.

(And those are just men and women whose illnesses were indisputably tied to their work at the World Trade Center, an FDNY spokeswoman said. Other deaths are more difficult to prove as 9/11-related.)

Below are the wall’s 21 newest names.

• Joseph T. Callahan (Firefighter)
• Richard E. McGuire (Battalion Chief)
• Douglas Mulholland (EMS Lieutenant)
• Luis de Peña (EMT)
• Michael F. Cavanagh (EMS Lieutenant)
• James W. Mandelkow (Deputy Chief Inspector)
  
• John J. Halpin (Lieutenant)
• William C. Olsen (EMS Captain)
• Keith M. Loughlin (Lieutenant)
• John K. Gremse (Lieutenant)
• Howard J. Bischoff (Lieutenant)
• Daniel E. Heglund (Firefighter)
• Robert E. Leaver (Firefighter)
• Cornell L. Horne (Firefighter)
• Thomas Giammarino (EMS Lieutenant)
• Eugene J. McCarey (Firefighter)
• James J. Marshall (Firefighter)
• Charles S. Szoke (Firefighter)
• John J. Cassidy (Battalion Chief)
• John R. Graziano (Captain)
• Gregory A. Chevalley (Firefighter)

Another 10,000-plus members of the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program are “battling illnesses which are a direct result of their brave and noble work in the rescue and recovery effort at the World Trade Center,” Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro said at the ceremony.

“And now, each year,” he said, “we gather for this difficult and painful tradition, but one that is undeniably necessary, where the FDNY family remembers the men and women who have lost their lives since September 11th.”