The collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, sends a cloud of pulverized concrete, asbestos, and heavy metals over Lower Manhattan, and this film follows what happened to the people who breathed it. Steve Buscemi, a former New York City firefighter himself, narrates the account of first responders who worked the pile in the weeks after the attack, many without proper respirators, after the EPA publicly declared the air safe to breathe. Interviews with scientists, EPA officials, and ailing firefighters and police officers lay out the medical record that followed: chronic respiratory disease, rare cancers, and deaths among responders who were healthy on September 10. The film traces how that early EPA assurance shaped policy and left thousands unprotected in the crucial first weeks, and how long it took for the government to acknowledge the connection between the dust and the illnesses showing up years later. It is a straightforward account of a public health failure that unfolded in plain sight, told through the people who are still living with it.