NYC releases 170,000 pages of 9/11 air quality records held back for 25 years

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration this week released more than 170,000 pages of city records documenting what officials knew about toxic air quality around Ground Zero in the months after the September 11 attacks, resolving two lawsuits brought by survivors and first responders who had sought the documents for years.

The records include air quality reports, contamination data and internal correspondence among city officials, much of it stored in 68 boxes that were only rediscovered last year, according to ABC7 New York. The release settled litigation brought by 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy group representing first responders and survivors that sued the city to force disclosure.

Among the documents is an October 2001 memo to then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding outlining the city’s legal exposure and anticipated lawsuits over toxic exposure, and a February 2002 memo discussing concerns that public criticism could become a “major public relations” problem, according to Al Jazeera.

A separate document shows asbestos was detected on the facade ledge of 15 John Street, near but outside the immediate Ground Zero site, in July 2002, more than 10 months after the attacks, according to ABC News. Some locations showed asbestos levels below applicable cleanup and exposure benchmarks, while others appeared to exceed them, the released records show. Federal health authorities say there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure.

Mamdani said in announcing the release that “people got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.” Benjamin Chevat, executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, said city officials “continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable'” even as internal documents raised alarms, according to Al Jazeera.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that roughly 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, physical injury risk, or acute stress in Lower Manhattan in the days, weeks and months after the attacks, according to the CDC’s World Trade Center Health Program. Fires within the debris pile continued burning through the end of 2001, with flare-ups into 2002, releasing additional carcinogenic combustion byproducts, the CDC says.

9/11 Health Watch says nearly 6,000 people have died of illnesses linked to 9/11 exposure since the attacks, according to ABC News, a toll that now exceeds the roughly 3,000 people killed in the attacks themselves.

The document release follows a 25-year effort by survivors and advocates to obtain the underlying records, spanning four mayoral administrations before Mamdani’s, according to Chevat, who said in a statement that “for 25 years, four different mayoral administrations kept from the public, the U.S. Congress, and the City Council documents showing what the city actually knew about the danger of the toxic chemicals in Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn.”

The full set of records is now available to the public through a city-run portal, according to ABC7 New York.

The federal WTC Health Program, created under the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, provides medical monitoring and treatment to responders and survivors exposed to Ground Zero contaminants, covering cancers, respiratory disorders, mental health conditions and musculoskeletal disorders linked to the exposure, according to the CDC.