New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released more than 170,000 pages of records Tuesday that call into question public claims that the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe following the 9/11 attacks. The release includes documents found in 68 boxes at the Department of Environmental Protection in 2025, dating back to the aftermath of the attacks, and comes just days before the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people.
Thousands of people exposed to toxic dust and debris after 9/11 have since died from related illnesses, while many more continue to suffer from health conditions, according to the World Trade Center Health Program and other health authorities. During a Tuesday press conference, Mamdani said people became sick because leaders they trusted told them it was safe to breathe toxic air.
The records challenge assurances made by then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who said in a Sept. 18, 2001, press release that monitoring results indicated the air near the World Trade Center was safe to breathe. The documents show that ten months after the attacks, traces of asbestos were found on the roof of a building at 15 John Street, less than a mile from where the World Trade Center once stood. Asbestos was detected at some locations at levels below applicable cleanup benchmarks and at others at levels that appeared to exceed them. Health authorities have said there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure.
Among the records is a Feb. 28, 2002, memo from then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg's senior policy adviser summarizing Rep. Jerrold Nadler's concerns about indoor air quality in Lower Manhattan. The memo warned that the city could face public-relations and legal problems over the cleanup, noting that the EPA had handed responsibility for measuring indoor air quality to the city without oversight measures in place. The city had in turn passed responsibility to property owners, while the Health Department instructed residents to clean buildings with wet mops and rags.
«If Nadler's concerns are justified, we are not informing people of the real health risks in lower Manhattan, the city may face major public relations problems and is leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits,» the memo stated. «At the least we should discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags. We should be asking FEMA for funds to support indoor cleanup.»
Among the clearest evidence of lingering asbestos contamination was a finding at Stuyvesant High School, located less than half a mile north of the World Trade Center. Testing in August 2002 revealed what concerned parents described as extremely high levels of asbestos in the auditorium carpeting. Nearly a year after the attacks, testing of a carpet sample using an EPA-recognized ultrasonication method found asbestos concentrations measured at roughly 2.5 million structures per square centimeter. For comparison, the EPA's Lower Manhattan Test and Clean Program later called for professional cleaning when settled dust exceeded 5,000 asbestos structures per square centimeter, making the Stuyvesant sample roughly 500 times higher than that cleanup benchmark.
The parents' findings reached city officials, and a copy of the press release announcing the asbestos results was transmitted through the NYC Department of Environmental Protection's Bureau of Public Affairs on Aug. 7, 2002. In July 2002, more than ten months after the attacks, the Independence Plaza North Tenant Association wrote to the EPA arguing that the agency's cleanup of two Tribeca residential buildings had not gone far enough while urging broader environmental testing.
Diane Lapson, the tenant association's environmental chair, wrote that work on the project had been done in an unprotected and possibly dangerous manner, allowing dust from old carpet being torn up to seep into tenants' apartments. She criticized the EPA's and the city's reliance on visual inspections at Independence Plaza's buildings, including 310 Greenwich St. and 80 North Moore St., arguing that agencies should instead conduct more comprehensive testing using ultrasonication to more reliably measure asbestos levels. By September 2002, about two months after Lapson's letter, the EPA announced that eight contracts had been awarded for asbestos cleanup throughout the downtown area.