Marcy Borders taking refuge in an office building after one of the World Trade Center towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. AP Images

An American woman whose traumatized, dust-covered face summed up the horrors of the September 11, 2001, attacks has died of stomach cancer at age 42.

Marcy Borders, known as "The Dust Lady" thanks to the photograph taken in the immediate aftermath, became one of the most recognizable survivors. She had started work at Bank of America a month before the attack and was working on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit.

She managed to make it down to the ground level and was walking away when the second plane struck the tower, leaving her covered from head to foot in thick gray dust.

In the years that followed the mother of two fell into a spiral of drink, drugs, and depression, which saw her rack up huge debts and have her children taken into care.

"I drank a lot and never went out. It haunted me every day," she told The Daily Mail in 2011.

"My life spiraled out of control. I didn't do a day's work in nearly 10 years, and by 2011, I was a complete mess. I was convinced Osama bin Laden was planning more attacks. Every time I saw an aircraft, I panicked. If I saw a man on a building, I was convinced he was going to shoot me.

"I started drinking heavily. Then I started drinking a lot more. I couldn't handle life so I started taking drugs. I started smoking crack cocaine, because I didn't want to live."

But a decade on, she was finally getting back into the working world and helping with a candidate's local campaign for mayor when, in August 2014, she learned she had stomach cancer.

"I'm saying to myself: 'Did this thing ignite cancer cells in me?'" she said.

"I definitely believe it because I haven't had any illnesses. I don't have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes."

Announcing the news of her death on Monday evening, her first cousin, John Borders, said his relative died of "the diseases that (have) ridden her body since 9/11."

In the years since 9/11, many hundreds of people caught up in the attacks have been found to have cancer. Figures from July 2014 showed that more than 2,500 police officers, firefighters, ambulance employees, and sanitation workers reported they had cancer in 2013 - twice as many as said they had the disease 12 months earlier.

It is unclear how many emergency responders have already died after contracting cancer as a result of their work at Ground Zero.

Doctors said those who spent significant amounts of time at the site were at increased risk of numerous cancers, including prostate, thyroid, leukemia, and multiple myeloma, after coming into contact with "wildly toxic" dust emitted for months after the World Trade Center attacks.

Fires at the site burned for three months, releasing carcinogens and other deadly chemicals into the air, while thousands of tons of pulverized toxic debris lay strewn at the site of the towers' collapse.

The compensation bill for treating those who became ill after helping in the long-running recovery operation at Ground Zero has already run into millions of dollars.

When asked whether she ever looked at the "Dust Lady" photo of herself, Borders said she avoided doing so as much as possible.

"I try to take myself from being a victim to being a survivor now," she said. "I don't want to be a victim anymore."

NOW WATCH: Popular Videos from Insider Inc.