NYC Corporation Counsel Steven Banks said that the city’s Department of Investigation is now investigating what city officials knew and when they knew it, as well as why information appears to have been withheld.
Meanwhile, city officials continue to comb through millions of additional pages of documents they say the federal World Trade Center insurer, WTC Captive Insurance Co., had in its possession.
The city last week settled litigation over public access to the records, including by a group called 9/11 Health Watch. Now, this information is available to the public via a new online portal Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of earlier this year. He allocated up to $34 million this year to operate the database.
The documents made public Tuesday include the contents of 68 boxes city officials say were located only recently in a Department of Environmental Protection office.
They also contain records the Giuliani administration sent for archival, and documents the city’s law department had related to 7 World Trade Center, the building where Giuliani positioned the city’s emergency “bunker,” and its ultimate collapse.
00:49
Mamdani to release documents related to 9/11 health impacts
00:0000:00
Banks says those 170,000 pages are just the first of “millions” of pages the Mamdani administration is reviewing. They say their goal is to post as many as possible over the next 12 months.
Banks said many of the documents were out of the city’s possession for years because they were turned over to the federal insurer that Congress established. He says they were only recently returned. Some of them are redacted to protect personal and security-related information, Banks added.
In a statement obtained by NBC New York ahead of the drop, Mamdani says at the “very least,” the city owes transparency and accountability to those whose lives were forever impacted by the 9/11 attacks.
“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. “This portal is part of our administration’s enduring commitment to honor those we lost, care for those living with lasting health consequences, and give thousands of New Yorkers the answers they’ve been asking for.”