Mayor Mamdani said Tuesday New Yorkers were “lied to” about the dangerous air quality in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — though he declined to explicitly pin the blame on past mayors.
A tranche of long sought-after documents was released Tuesday, with the 25th year since the attacks just days away. After a multi-year legal battle, around 170,000 pages of documents were put online for public viewing, with more uploads to follow as the city reviews more documents, Corporation Counsel Steve Banks said.
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said at a City Hall press conference announcing the release of the documents. “And then when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found.”
Mamdani repeatedly declined to name names.
The roles of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg are coming under increasing scrutiny as more information emerges about the degree of awareness there was about toxins in the air as New Yorkers were told it was safe to return to lower Manhattan.
The roles of Mayors de Blasio and Adams are also coming under review as advocates criticize the continued secrecy at City Hall for failing to make public information that could have saved lives as more and more responders fell ill with 9/11-related illnesses.
Federal officials, including Christine Whitman, who headed the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under then-President Goerge Bush, told the public the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe, are also again coming under the spotlight. She apologized for the messaging years later.
“I wish there was a limited number of people who misled the public that I could describe them in just a few names, but the truth is that, as we have heard, this goes across a multitude,” Mamdani said.
In this Oct. 11, 2001 file photo, firefighters make their way over the ruins of the World Trade Center through clouds of dust and smoke at ground zero in New York. (AP Photo/Stan Honda, Pool, File)
Congressmember Jerry Nadler, whose district in 2001 included Ground Zero, said he had pushed both the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations to release what information they had about the dangerous air quality.
“I was screaming at the top of my lungs to protect our communities, my constituents, but officials like EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Mayor Giuliani denied claims like mine, saying the air was perfectly safe,” Nadler said. “Blasphemous!”
Dust hung in the air for months after the attack — but city and federal officials told New Yorkers things like “everything down here is just perfectly safe,“ an EPA spokesperson said in 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
A spokesperson for Bloomberg declined comment. A spokesperson for Giuliani, who of late has attacked Mamdani for his Muslim faith and called on him not to attend the 9/11 Memorial ceremony Friday, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(R-L) Former New York Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani attend the 14th Anniversary ceremony of the terrorist attacks at the 9/11 memorial on Sept. 11, 2015 in New York. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Many estimates put the number of those who have died due to 9/11 related illnesses at about 6,000. The NYC Health Department’s World Trade Center Health registry places the number at 9,000— triple the number of those who perished in the attack that day.
The documents released Tuesday include the so-called “Harding memo” from Giuliani’s Deputy Mayor Robert Harding to an aide in October 2001, where he described the various possible litigation the city could face after the attacks, including “toxic tort cases that might arise in the next few decades.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and actor and activist Jon Stewart (at podium) attend a press conference, releasing more than 170,000 pages of previously unreleased records related to air quality in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, at City Hall in New York on Sept. 8, 2026. (Barry Williams / New York Daily News)
There are also pages showing that buildings in the area, including Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street, received test results showing above dangerous levels for asbestos and other carcinogens.
The records include a batch of documents stored in 68 boxes that the city had said they lost in a Department of Environmental Protection office, as well as papers sent to an insurance company called Captive and documents sent for archival by the Giuliani administration. The release of the documents comes as the city’s Department of Investigation looks into the city’s response.
The release of the documents is part of a settlement agreement for a lawsuit brought by 9/11 Health Watch, which sued to release the documents.