Agarwal1

Harshil Agarwal

Mrs. Sharbaugh

Secondary Research Paper

6 April 2017

Analysis of success of 9/11 Victims Aid Program

INTRODUCTION

Imagine you are in Manhattan, New York at the world trade center on September 11th

2001 with your family members and something unimaginable happens when you are at the

building. At just that moment a plane crashes into the tower and your parents including your

brother are trapped in the tower and they are striving to survive under the huge blanket of smoke.

Then, when you think it cant get any worse, another plane crashes into the south tower and few

minutes later the tower with your family in it collapses. Something similar to this actually

happened with a 16 year old boy and his family when they were just casually visiting the world

trade center. This story was from a webpage called http://www.newsday.com/911-

anniversary/children-of-9-11-life-with-a-parent-missing-1.3159102. The boy had suffered

emotionally and financially and now runs his own aid programs because he does not want other

families to suffer the same thing. The victims of 9/11 terror attack required enormous support

from improved aid programs to recover, due to scale of death tolls and injuries, varied impacts

on physical, physiological, psychological, financial, and religious factors and lastly global

impact on particular society of the world due to hate crimes against them.
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Death Tolls and Injured People

The number of people who died or were injured was devastating. More than 3,000 people

died on 9/11 and the number of people who were injured was far more greater. One reason why

aid programs were unsuccessful was because of the number people who had to be treated. The

number of people was a really high number for the aid programs to handle according to the

webpage: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Exec.htm.

The families who lost their loved ones and those who were the only earning member of

the family were very large in numbers. Such families required immediate government support

financially. America never had such a devastating situation to handle in such short period and

high monetary value. To summarize, the aid programs that existed in 2001 were not designed to

support such large scale needs. New aid programs were not tested in the past and they proved to

be insufficient. Here is a source down below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks
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PHYSICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND FINANCIAL IMPACTS

The aid programs were unable to help victims for their physical, psychological, financial,

and religious factors. People who had physical needs were not able to be handled by aid

programs because people also suffered from financial needs and could not get the money to do

the proper medical treatment. People lost their jobs due to collapse of World Trade Center. So

there was loss of monthly earnings and no money for treatment. Day to day needs was hard to

cover due to financial hardships. Government initiated aid programs to provide financial aids,

but the mechanism to reach the money to real victims were slow as US never had such

experience of handling large scale aid programs.

Causes of people getting psychological effects were due to loss of their near ones. Some

of the families lost more than one family member. Some families lost their young earning

members. This affected them emotionally. The injured took a long time to recover and still

havent recovered completely till today. Many of the injured loss their body parts in the building

collapse that they were never thought of. They have to make adjustments in their life to move on.

This required occupational therapy and changes to their homes were required. Mr. Holland was a

paramedic supervisor when he went to ground zero. He still has nightmares about firefighters

needing help (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/nyregion/post-traumatic-stress-

disorder-from-911still-haunts.html). Physical changes to the faces of the victim due to burns

resulted in distorted appearances and scar on their mental states. The aid programs required many

number of psychologists for counselling. US were short of such aid workers and help was not

available immediately.
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RELIGIOUS FACTORS AND GLOBAL IMPACTS

Religious matters were most controversial factors that had impact on aid programs.

Majority of the terrorists were Muslim that attacked World Trade Center, the greatest society that

faced the impact were Muslims and they were affected globally. Some eastern countries whose

natives look like Muslims were impacted. These include Sikhs and Indians. They were

mistakenly taken as part of the same sect and were impacted by hate crimes. The airport security

and other security agencies started profiling the citizens. The aid programs were not designed to

support profiling for large number of people across the world. Statistics for VCF 2001-2003:-

The fund received 7,408 claim submissions from 75 countries. Awards were made in 5,560 of

those cases and totaled over $7 billion (Source/: http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/27/us/september-

11th-victim-aid-and-compensation-fast-facts/)

Some people think that only people in U.S. were affected but everyone globally were

impacted. This was one of the main reasons why aid programs were not able to reach some of

those victims worldwide. Aid programs were also crippled by corruption in other countries where

money was reaching to high profile politicians. These politicians used the money for their own

sake and did not distribute the aid to real needy ones. There were minimal audit and controls in

place to monitor the flow of aid from US internationally.

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CONCLUSION

The victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks showed the dire need for improved U.S.

victim aid programs because of the thousands of deaths caused, the physical, psychological, and

financial impact on affected families, and large global scale of people affected of many cultures

and religious factors. This research can be extended by people who show the importance

limitations of the victim aid programs that were designed poorly to handle large crises. People

can take interviews with victims who may or may not still be affected. They can take surveys of

people who believe that the victim aid programs should be redesigned if something like 9/11 re-

happens.. The research that is crucially needed is that the government, especially, should be

questioned about why they not altered aid programs as soon as possible, why did they spend

money on a war that was not necessary and not on aid programs to help people who were striving

to survive. The question that most people asked the government and still do is, Did the

government even care about the victims and deliberately not redesign the aid programs?

Conclusively, the 9/11 Victims aid programs were insufficient and poorly designed to bring the

victims back to normal state of life.