NY-17: Second in a series on the environmental stakes of one of the nation’s most fiercely contested congressional races.

Nancy Vann’s resolve has become the subject of a local jingle. Its chorus goes: “If she can do it, so can we.”

Vann, 78, moved to Peekskill, 40 miles north of New York City, after September 11, 2001. Brown & Wood, the law firm at which she worked, occupied five floors of the World Trade Center. She watched both towers fall before her 10:30 a.m. call-in. 

Over the next 10 years, her dawn and sunset hours were spent on the Metro-North, a commuter railroad, the Hudson River unspooled alongside. 

Vann was no stranger to the Hudson Valley; since the late ‘90s, she had owned a summer cabin in a co-op community in neighbouring Buchanan. Her cabin lay just half a mile from Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant on the river’s eastern bank. Indian Point, she later learned, had possibly been considered as a target by the 9/11 hijackers.

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