{"id":341173,"date":"2026-09-08T22:46:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T22:46:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/341173\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T22:46:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T22:46:09","slug":"9-11-public-portal-nyc-unlikely-to-face-lawsuits-over-newly-released-documents-on-air-quality-danger-after-terror-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/341173\/","title":{"rendered":"9\/11 public portal: NYC \u2018unlikely\u2019 to face lawsuits over newly released documents on air quality danger after terror attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York City is unlikely to face lawsuits based on the information in newly released documents<\/a> about what the city knew and hid about Lower Manhattan\u2019s dangerous air quality in the weeks following the 9\/11 terrorist attack, lawyers who have been handling 9\/11-related claims for decades told amNewYork.<\/p>\n

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday announced<\/a> his administration would be settling years of litigation with advocacy group 9\/11 Health Watch by releasing 170,000 documents, city records and emails which show the city knew the air quality in Lower Manhattan after 9\/11 was dangerous and downplayed the risk to get people back to work and school quickly, information the advocates had sued the city over its previous refusal to turn over. The city will release hundreds of thousands of more documents in the coming months.<\/p>\n

Mamdani and Corporation Counsel Steven Banks told reporters Tuesday they were releasing the documents because it was the \u201cright thing to do\u201d and weren\u2019t scared of the city being the target of lawsuits over what the documents revealed.<\/p>\n

That conclusion, legal experts said, is probably because they know it is highly unlikely New York City would actually find itself on the wrong end of court papers \u2014 and nearly impossible it would find itself the target of successful ones \u2014 based on the information the city released.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s just not a real question,\u201d said Ben Chevat of 9\/11 Health Watch when asked if he thought anyone would sue based on the documents. \u201cThat is not something that anyone is really expecting.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not even thinking about lawsuits now. I\u2019m just thinking how disappointing it is that our own government, our own city and state, didn\u2019t tell us the truth 25 years ago,\u201d said attorney Michael Barasch of Barasch and McGarry<\/a>, one of the most prominent firms providing legal counsel to 9\/11 victims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Legal experts: Nothing changes with 9\/11 document release<\/p>\n

Essentially, legal experts said, nothing has changed from before these documents were released to now in terms of people\u2019s ability to sue the city over how it handled its 9\/11 response. That\u2019s not because the information isn\u2019t damning, lawyers said. It\u2019s because there\u2019s a slew of high legal hurdles in place, making a successful lawsuit \u201cnearly impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of those hurdles is that filing a claim via the Victim Compensation Fund \u2013 the landmark federal fund that provided compensation and free healthcare to anyone who lost a family member or suffered health complications due to the terror attack \u2013 bars a person from filing any 9\/11-related lawsuits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The vast majority of impacted people have opted to take part in this fund instead of filing a lawsuit because it grants the same relief a suit would \u2013 money and healthcare. It also gets you those for a much lower bar than a suit would \u2013 to be eligible for the fund, a person simply has to prove they worked, went to school or were by Ground Zero on or in the months following 9\/11, which is a big part of why lawyers told amNewYork they recommend their clients file a claim through the fund instead of a lawsuit. If a person chooses to sue, they\u2019d have to prove their health complication \u2013 cancer, asthma, lung disease \u2013 is linked to the 9\/11-impacted air quality and not something else.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why does that matter so much? To file a successful lawsuit, you have to be able to show a court you were directly harmed by the action you\u2019re suing over, attorneys said. That means only those who have a relatively recently diagnosed 9\/11-linked health complication, haven\u2019t already filed a claim with the Victims Compensation Fund and can accomplish the nearly impossible task of proving their disease was caused by breathing in the air around Ground Zero a quarter-century later would have a realistic shot of a successful suit against the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be incredibly difficult \u2013 likely medically impossible \u2013 to prove to a court that that disease was actually caused by dangerous air quality from 9\/11 and not anything else that might have happened to them over the past 25 years,\u201d said attorney Noah Kushlefsky of 9\/11 victims firm Kreindler & Kreindler. \u201cEvery condition exists in the ordinary population, and specific causation means you have to link your condition to that exposure to the exclusion of anything else. It\u2019s just almost impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n

A person who doesn\u2019t have a loss or health condition they can link to 9\/11 and is simply upset the city didn\u2019t properly inform the public about what it knew and when about how bad the air quality was can\u2019t sue the city based on the information in these documents, Kushlefsky said. He emphasized he, like the other attorneys amNewYork talked to, didn\u2019t see anything changing on the litigation side of things due to the release of these documents. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is just about what the city knew and when,\u201d he told amNewYork.\n<\/p>\n

The real goal of 9\/11 document release<\/p>\n

Gaining grounds to sue the city was never the goal of 9\/11 Health Watch\u2019s quest for these documents, its attorneys have repeatedly said<\/a>. The goal, Chevat said, is to gain answers and accountability, uncover new data that could help track and treat 9\/11-linked diseases and give scientists and doctors access to studies the government may have conducted that they haven\u2019t seen before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The goal is also to ensure the city doesn\u2019t attempt to cover up its responsibility in or knowledge of a disaster in the future, rebuild trust in government and reinforce the need for funding and resources for the 9\/11 health program providing free care to those impacted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [getting these documents] is to ensure health coverage and lifelong medical benefits,\u201d Kushlefsky told amNewYork. \u201cThat\u2019s my view. This can be used to assure that everybody is protected and taken care of going forward. It\u2019s information that feeds into the notion of: \u2018You told us it was safe. It wasn\u2019t. Now you take care of us.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMy view is that there was a definite purpose to what the city said [in 2001]. They wanted to make sure that life went on in Lower Manhattan, that businesses didn\u2019t struggle, that the city didn\u2019t die, and they made a decision to get a semblance of normalcy as quickly as possible. It was a huge, massive mistake,\u201d Kushlefskyy continued. \u201cThis is about accountability and making sure that \u2013 God forbid something happens in the future \u2013 the public, innocent people, aren\u2019t misled as to the health risks.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York City is unlikely to face lawsuits based on the information in newly released documents about what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5301,98863,2710,2850,22925,9,24,63,134,136,135,42256],"class_list":["post-341173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-9-11","tag-9-11-health-watch","tag-law","tag-lawsuits","tag-mayor-zohran-mamdani","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news","tag-steven-banks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}