A crisis counselor spent twenty days at an NYPD command center about 600 feet from the World Trade Center site, assessing exhausted and distressed officers and deciding which of them needed to come off the job and get treatment. She was not paid for those days. She did not move debris.
Years later she developed sarcoidosis. The Workers’ Compensation Board ruled she had not participated in the rescue, recovery and cleanup operations, and denied her claim.
In March 2025 the Appellate Division reversed. The decision is worth understanding by anyone who was down there in a role that did not involve a shovel.
The statute has two different tests, and most people only know one
Workers’ Compensation Law § 161(1) defines who is a participant. It covers employees acting within the course of employment and volunteers who satisfy one of four descriptions — and the four are not written the same way.
- The Fresh Kills Landfill — the test is that you worked at it.
- The New York City morgue, or the temporary morgue on the west side piers — that you worked at it.
- The barges running between Manhattan and Fresh Kills — that you worked on them.
- The World Trade Center site itself — that you participated in the rescue, recovery, or cleanup operations there.
Read those again. For three of the four, presence and work is the whole test. Nobody has to characterize what you were doing at the landfill — if you worked there in the covered period, you are in. Our page on Fresh Kills and 9/11 responders covers that route.
Only the fourth — the site itself — asks what you were doing. And that is where the arguments happen.
What “participated” actually requires
The Board’s standard, as the court described it, is that the claimant directly participate in or otherwise have some tangible connection to the rescue, recovery or cleanup operations.
Note the second half of that. Or otherwise have some tangible connection. Direct participation is one way in, not the only way.
The court also emphasized how the statute is to be read. Article 8-A was enacted to remove obstacles to timely filing for conditions that take years to appear, and it is undisputed that the legislation was intended to be liberally construed to provide a potential avenue of relief.
A remedial statute read liberally, and a standard that expressly reaches beyond direct participation, is not a framework built to exclude people.
Why the counselor qualified
She had been retained to provide crisis response services to first responders, and worked at a command center near the site in the days immediately after the attacks. In October and again in December she came back — unpaid — at the request of the NYPD’s on-scene coordinator.
What she did there was assess the mental condition of workers and determine whether they could keep working or needed to be pulled out for treatment through the department’s employee assistance program. The coordinator testified that she was well received and that her work identifying personnel who needed to be removed for treatment was instrumental in continuing the operation.
That is the connection the court found decisive. Given it, and given the liberal construction owed a remedial statute, the Board’s conclusion that she did not participate was not supported by substantial evidence — a notably strong way for the court to put it, since that standard usually protects the Board’s findings rather than defeating them.
Volunteers are covered, and always were
The days that mattered in this case were unpaid.
Section 161(1) covers volunteers expressly. The only difference is evidentiary: a volunteer establishes participation by presenting evidence satisfactory to the Board, where an employee has the course of employment to point to. That is why the coordinator’s testimony carried the case.
If you volunteered, you are not outside the statute. You need someone or something to establish what you did.
The roles people wrongly assume do not count
The reason this decision matters is that a great many people served in roles that were essential and are not what anyone pictures.
Counselors and clergy. Medical and mental health staff. People who ran command posts, logged equipment, handled communications, drove, fed the crews, cleaned the facilities the crews used. None of that is moving steel, and all of it can carry a tangible connection to the operation.
The question is not whether your job was physical. It is whether what you did connected to the rescue, recovery and cleanup work — and whether you can show it.
Register now, even if nothing is wrong
Registration and a claim are different things. Filing Form WTC-12 registers your service; it does not assert that you are sick and it does not start a claim.
New York extended the registration deadline in September 2026, so participants now have until September 11, 2030 to file the WTC-12. The extension applies to open and closed claims alike.
Register while the people who can describe what you did are still reachable. This case turned on a supervisor who remembered a volunteer from 2001 and was able to say what her work accomplished. That kind of witness gets harder to find every year, and the conditions Article 8-A exists for are exactly the ones that surface decades later.
If you were there in a support role
- Write down what you actually did — dates, location, who you reported to, what your work accomplished. Specific function beats a job title.
- Identify your witnesses now and get contact details while you can.
- Do not self-select out because you were unpaid, off the books, there briefly, or not doing manual work. None of those is disqualifying.
- Check which clause applies. Fresh Kills, the morgues and the barges ask only that you worked there. Only the site itself asks what you were doing.
- File the WTC-12 regardless of how you feel today. That is the entire purpose of registration.
Talk to a New York workers’ compensation attorney
A Board denial on participation is not the end of it. This claimant was told she did not qualify, and the Appellate Division disagreed on a record about counseling work done 600 feet from the pile.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
Matter of Goss v WTC Volunteer, Appellate Division, Third Department, March 13, 2025, Docket Nos. CV-23-2160, CV-24-0333; Workers’ Compensation Law §§ 161(1), 162, art. 8-A; L 2026, ch 296.
We handle workers’ compensation claims for injured workers throughout the five boroughs and across New York State. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Whether someone qualifies as a participant depends on the evidence in the individual case.
