(NEW YORK CITY) - Alongside Firefighters, Police Officers and other First Responders, Philip Ronnie Shpiller toiled at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the September 11th terror attacks, working through still-smoking rubble over the course of six long days and into nights. Shpiller, then an Emergency-Response Plumber with the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA), and another few dozen of his colleagues at the agency labored to find the remains of the dead out of a sense of duty, and to help give a measure of closure to families who lost loved ones, he said recently.  

Nearly 22 years later, Shpiller, retired since July 2012 and contending with numerous ailments as a consequence of his work at Ground Zero, still awaits a disability pension that he says should have been granted to him and his colleagues, just as it was to those thousands of other Civil Servants alongside whom they sifted through the ruins of the twin towers.

“We did sixteen-hour days and when we were being taken back to our shop by bus at (11:30) at night, there were thousands of people lining the sidewalks holding lit candles because there was no electricity and they were thanking us and calling us heroes and yet twenty-one-and-a-half years later we are still fighting for what we deserve,” Shpiller, now 68 and living in Florida, said. 

He and his NYCTA Co-Workers, all of them retired, a few of them ill as a result of their work on the pile, have for years been fighting for access to three-quarter disability pensions. 

Even some Private Sector Workers who responded to the attacks’ aftermath were legislated additional disability benefits, among them voluntary Hospital EMTs and Paramedics. 

Despite the abundance of State and Federal Legislation enacted in the immediate aftermath and in ensuing years granting disability benefits to people who developed any number of health issues attributable to their presence on the site, City Transit Workers have so far been shut out. 

And although State Lawmakers from Staten Island sponsored bills starting in 2018 that would have accorded the three-quarter disability payments to affected City Transit Workers, the legislation did not make it to floor votes on at least four occasions. 

The Bill’s last iteration, introduced by then-Senator Diane Savino in 2021, failed to advance out of committee before the legislative session’s conclusion last year, with the late arrival of a fiscal note - a Bill’s cost estimate - cited as the reason.

The legislation’s immediate cost as of last year was put at $8.3 million for 39 Pensioners, Shpiller among them.

The legislation said an “unknown  number” of people could eventually benefit, but noted that about 1,300 NYCTA Employees still working had submitted forms saying they had participated in the rescue, recovery or clean-up operations at Ground Zero. 

"All of these Bills are expensive.  That doesn't mean it should be done,” Savino said last month. 

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