New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has released more than 170,000 pages of municipal records involving the impact of the September 11 attacks on air quality health, as well as the city’s response.
Mamdani announced the documents and an online portal for accessing them on Tuesday. The release comes alongside the settlement of two lawsuits pursued by 9/11 Health Watch, which fought for access to these long-withheld documents.
“For too long, New Yorkers have had to fight for access to records that should have been available to them in the first place,” Mamdani said in a statement.
“The devastating truth is that the suffering did not end once the smoke cleared and the dust settled,” Mamdani also said at a press conference “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”
The tranche of documents offers just a fraction of air quality reports on Ground Zero. But they do include an internal memo where New York City weighed possible liability related to air quality.
The release of these records comes three days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11 – which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. The documents provide further evidence that city officials knew air surrounding the twin towers was toxic – but misled the public into thinking it was safe, officials said.
“My colleagues and I who represented Ground Zero and the surrounding communities immediately warned local and federal officials of the health risks posed by toxins in the air at the time,” congressman Jerry Nadler said in a statement.
“Our warnings were not heeded, and now we and the public know that City Hall, led by former Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health impacts from these toxins.”
New York City council member Gale Brewer voiced similar sentiments.
“For 25 years, first responders, survivors, families, and people who lived, worked and went to school in lower Manhattan have lived with the health consequences of 9/11 while critical pieces of the City’s own record – HOW they got sick – remained out of reach,” she said in a statement.
The portal, Brewer said, “is a great first step toward giving the public access to that record, one that has been denied them under previous administrations …”
Ben Chevat, executive director of 911 Health Watch, thanked Mamdani for “being the Mayor, after 25 years, who finally begins to answer the question: ‘What did the City know about the dangers from the toxic cloud at Ground Zero and when did it know it?’
“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 after the World Trade Center collapse, even as City officials continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable’,” he said in a statement.