{"id":344748,"date":"2026-09-12T05:33:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/344748\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T05:33:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T05:33:28","slug":"newly-opened-records-show-fears-over-air-quality-after-9-11-attacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/344748\/","title":{"rendered":"Newly Opened Records Show Fears Over Air Quality After 9-11 Attacks"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This story was originally published by THE CITY. Sign up<\/a> to get the latest New York City news<\/a> delivered to you each morning.<\/p>\n

In the months after the Sept. 11 attack<\/a>, New York City set up a hotline for residents and workers in Lower Manhattan who had questions about what to do, and how they could get help, as they eased back into their lives downtown.<\/p>\n

A resident of 22 River Terrace in Battery Park City \u2014 less than a mile from Ground Zero \u2014 asked if the city could test their apartment\u2019s air quality.<\/p>\n

The operator responded that the city was \u201cin the process of obtaining funding for testing indoor air quality\u201d and advised the caller to wet wipe and mop.<\/p>\n

A disabled woman who had health issues as a result of the attack called about cleaning her apartment at 90 Beekman St., even closer to the still-burning debris. It had never been cleaned, she said, because insurance lapsed on the building.<\/p>\n

Another person was \u201cunhappy with cleaning recommendations,\u201d the log noted. The caller was \u201cangry,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

These logs are from the Lower Manhattan Air Quality Hotline, which the city operated through the end of May 2002 before the federal government took it over.<\/p>\n

They were released Tuesday as part of the first tranche of Sept. 11 documents by Mayor Mamdani\u2019s administration<\/a>, after settling two lawsuits filed by advocates who have pushed for decades to learn what the city knew about air quality following the terror attacks.<\/p>\n

The first batch<\/a> is more than 170,000 pages, filled with e-mails, reports and news clippings following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center 25 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday is a long time coming,\u201d Mamdani said at City Hall<\/a>, standing alongside dozens of people who pushed for the release of this toxic dust data. They included comedian Jon Stewart, who became an outspoken champion for first responders\u2019 healthcare.<\/p>\n

To Stewart, the documents reaffirmed suspicions harbored by many New Yorkers that they had been misled about whether it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan in the days after Sept. 11.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone knew. And now it\u2019s very clear that the city knew as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd rather than take the steps to ameliorate the damage that would cause to its citizens and to the people that were down there, they instead covered it up to get back to business as usual,\u201d Stewart said. \u201cBut unfortunately, after 9-11, business will never be usual again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mamdani stopped short of directly criticizing any of his predecessors, but said government actions had sickened New Yorkers.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd 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\u2019s way was nowhere to be found.\u201d<\/p>\n

The release of the documents, Mamdani and others hoped, would allow more people to realize they may have become sickened by the toxic air.<\/p>\n

Adams Accuses Mamdani<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg declined to comment. A spokesperson for former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment, and neither did former Mayor Bill de Blasio.<\/p>\n

Through his spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, former Mayor Eric Adams said Mamdani \u201cis exploiting the pain of 9-11 families, survivors and first responders for a political headline.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAny documents related to post-9-11 air quality must be released and scrutinized \u2014 but Mayor Adams did not create, conceal or control records from prior administrations,\u201d Shapiro said.<\/p>\n

The group 9-11 Health Watch had appealed<\/a> what it called Mayor Adams\u2019 \u201cyearslong effective denial\u201d of a Freedom of Information request filed in 2023 for documents, including some that were released Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The \u2018Harding Memo\u2019<\/p>\n

The documents are searchable by the public through a special portal<\/a>, which will have more documents added to it throughout the year, according to Steven Banks, the city\u2019s corporation counsel.<\/p>\n

Banks was asked about releasing the documents at his City Council confirmation hearing earlier this year, and said Tuesday it\u2019s \u201ca testament to what is possible when government chooses to solve the difficult problems as opposed to ignoring them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The initial documents include what\u2019s known as the \u201cHarding memo,\u201d written in October 2001 by a City Hall staffer, Michelle Goldstein, to then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding. In it, the staffer shared concerns about the potential massive legal liability from toxic air exposure and improper safety gear at Ground Zero.<\/p>\n

Hotline Transcripts<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also paperwork related to the Lower Manhattan Air Quality Hotline, which was found in some of the 68 boxes discovered last year<\/a> in the Department of Environmental Protection\u2019s offices.<\/p>\n

The hotline data showed the ordinary fears of New Yorkers: sending their kids to school in Lower Manhattan or returning to office buildings that weren\u2019t properly cleaned. They called to ask about air tests inside and outside, about elementary schools and about how to clean their HVAC systems.<\/p>\n

A resident left a voicemail about their bronchial infection. Another caller reached about a dormitory for the New School for Social Research. At one point, operators thought their hotline was getting crossed with an Off-Track Betting line because they received five gambling-related calls in a single morning, according to an email.<\/p>\n

One operator, who still works for the city and asked to remain anonymous, started her job at the Department of Health on Sept. 11. She was sitting on the front steps of their office on Worth Street when the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n

She had already spent months doing outreach and fitting first responders for personal protective equipment when she started shifts on the hotline.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were synthesizing the information from a lot of different agencies,\u201d she said. \u201cWe had all gotten some basic info in toxicology and understanding what the risks were and what they could be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes the callers were angry. \u201cWhen you\u2019re scared and you\u2019re not getting all the information you need or you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on, of course you get angry and frustrated,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

But she didn\u2019t take it personally.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of us lived and worked in New York City,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the moment I saw people working incredibly hard in really difficult and challenging circumstances to both collect the information and then share that information as rapidly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published by THE CITY. Sign up to get the latest New York City news…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":344749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63,7037],"class_list":["post-344748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-world-trade-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344748","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=344748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/344749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}