New Yorkers were apparently the subjects of a 25-year-long experiment in 'what happens if you tell people deadly air is perfectly breathable,' according to a newly released trove of documents. The files, made public by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, reveal that toxic air quality was being recorded in Manhattan almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, even as officials assured the public that all was well.
'People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,' Mamdani said with the kind of understated fury that suggests he's been waiting a long time to say that sentence out loud. Asbestos, he noted, was found 'nearly everywhere' tested near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center towers collapsed in 2001 - which is not great, considering asbestos is not something you want to find 'nearly everywhere.'
TV host and 9/11 survivor advocate Jon Stewart, standing beside Mamdani at Tuesday's news conference, delivered the sarcastic kicker: 'So to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years.' The records show that by October 2001 - a mere month after the attacks - the city knew the air in Manhattan was toxic, yet continued to advise people it was safe to return to the area. Asbestos was found near Ground Zero for months, all while officials were telling folks to mop up the dust with 'wet mops and rags' - a cleaning method that, it turns out, is not recommended for a known carcinogen that requires licensed professionals.
Among the 170,000 documents is the 'Harding Memo,' an October 2001 correspondence in which an aide warned former Deputy Mayor Robert Harding that the city could face as many as 35,000 legal claims due to health advisories that caused individuals 'to return to the area too soon (causing toxic exposure or emotional harm).' Yes, they saw that coming. They just didn't bother to, you know, change course.
Another memo, attributed to Ester Fuchs, a special adviser to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, acknowledged 'potential problems for City Hall' after testimony from the city's top health official claimed a study found 'no elevated levels of asbestos in indoor air' - while simultaneously noting that dust had 'low levels of asbestos in some samples.' So, 'no elevated levels' and 'low levels in some samples' apparently meant 'totally fine, go ahead and breathe deeply.'
The release of these documents resolves a lawsuit brought by advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which had been told the records didn't exist - until city officials miraculously discovered 68 boxes of them last year. The pages were released through an online portal timed for this Friday's 25th anniversary of the attacks, with more documents to come over the next year.
The human cost of this deception is staggering. US health officials say illnesses related to the dust and smoke from the towers' collapse have claimed more lives than the nearly 3,000 who died in the attacks. Karen Klingon, who was involved in the lawsuit, told the BBC her brother lived five minutes from Ground Zero, developed asthma, was later diagnosed with cancer, and died at 61 of a related brain tumor. 'There's a lot of research, probably, that can be done about what was in the air, and the kind of illnesses that derived of those toxins,' she said. 'Hopefully it helps people that were sick know and in the future.'
Phil Alvarez, whose brother Luis Alvarez died of cancer in 2019 after exposure to Ground Zero toxins, noted that people 'continue to get sick every single day, continue to die.' And Christine Todd Whitman, the head of the EPA at the time, who declared the air safe, later apologized, saying the agency 'did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.' Which is a bit like saying you did your best with a fire extinguisher that was actually a bucket of gasoline.
So here we are, 25 years later, with 170,000 documents that confirm what many suspected all along: the leaders lied, the air was toxic, and the cleanup will be measured in lives, not just dollars.