Twenty-five years after the devastating September 11 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center, New York City has opened the books on long-concealed internal records that expose early official concerns about lethal air contamination at Ground Zero — concerns that were hidden from the public while officials declared the downtown Manhattan air safe to breathe.
Under an order from newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani, 170,000 pages of internal test reports, memos and administrative records were published via a public online portal, coinciding with the upcoming anniversary of the 2001 attacks. The disclosure settles a years-long transparency lawsuit brought by 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy group that represents attack survivors and first responders. Mamdani announced that the city is allocating more than $34 million to support the full document release process, with additional batches of records set to be published over the coming 12 months. The documents were discovered in 68 city storage boxes last year, decades after successive city administrations claimed the records did not exist.
Mamdani, speaking alongside long-time 9/11 survivor advocate and television host Jon Stewart at a Tuesday press conference, laid out the damning core finding of the released records: asbestos, a known carcinogen, was detected in nearly every test sample collected near the collapse site in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” the mayor said, adding that for a quarter century, consecutive city governments ignored repeated calls for full transparency from survivors and victim families. “We will do no such thing,” he emphasized.
The released records confirm what survivors and researchers have alleged for decades: just days after the Twin Towers collapsed, city and federal leaders — including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under then-administrator Christine Todd Whitman — publicly assured residents and workers that downtown air was safe to return to, even as internal tests showed widespread hazardous contamination. Whitman later apologized for the public declaration, saying the agency made the call with the limited information it had available at the time. The newly unearthed records include an October 2001 internal memo, known as the Harding Memo, that warned then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding (serving under 9/11-era Mayor Rudy Giuliani) that the city could face up to 35,000 legal claims stemming from its handling of the air quality crisis. The memo specifically noted that inaccurate health assurances that pushed people to return to the downtown area too quickly could open the city to liability for toxic exposure and emotional harm. Stewart, who has lobbied for survivor health funding and transparency for decades, sarcastically noted that the information was concealed for 25 years, adding that city officials did not acknowledge the toxicity of downtown Manhattan air until October 2001, nearly a full month after the attacks.
Public health data bears out the devastating human cost of the contamination. U.S. health officials confirm that the number of people killed by 9/11-related toxic dust and smoke illnesses has already surpassed the nearly 3,000 people killed directly in the 2001 attacks. Thousands of first responders, cleanup workers and downtown residents have developed chronic respiratory illnesses and cancers linked to exposure to Ground Zero contaminants. Elizabeth Cascio, a former New York Fire Department emergency medical technician who responded to the attacks, described the immediate experience of the toxic air in a prior interview: “We all knew the air quality was not safe – it was very toxic in terms of how it felt. Initially, when I came off the bus and arrived at the Trade Center, you felt like you had to hold your breath. But there’s only so long you can hold your breath. I could feel the particles coming into my nose and mouth and thought: ‘This can’t be good.” Cascio has since developed chronic sinus problems and persistent headaches linked to her exposure.