Read The Secret Documents About 9/11 Toxic Exposure New York Officials Tried To Cover Up

When New York City residents concerned about air quality in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks looked to their public health department for answers, they received a pat reply.

Health officials acknowledged that the Twin Towers’ collapse had released a massive plume of dust contaminated with plastic, fiberglass and asbestos, but insisted that, “in general,” the pollution had been “within standards,” a January 2002 fact sheet shows.

But the truth may be more complicated, newly available internal city records reveal.

Spurred to act by two lawsuits brought by concerned citizens, New York City has unveiled a new portal of 25-year-old documents about the air pollution around Ground Zero.

The portal includes an initial tranche of 170,000 pages. Other records spanning 68 boxes of material will be released over the following year.

City officials have kept the secret trove out of view of the public, Congress, and the New York City Council for years, according to 9/11 Health Watch, a group that advocates for the World Trade Center Health Program.

In 2024, under then-Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, city attorneys denied that any records existed. The City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) dramatically reversed that stance, acknowledging that it in fact possessed hundreds of thousands of pages, after the City Council ordered a law enforcement probe into the matter last year. The Department of Investigations is likely conducting this two-year probe into how much the city knew but never disclosed about toxic exposures now. The City Council earmarked $4 million for it in summer 2026.

“For years, survivors and families have been asking for more transparency from their government,” said New York City Corporation Counsel Steven Banks in a statement. “We have heard them and today we are launching this portal to give the public access to information and documents related to the City government’s response to the September 11th attacks, documents that were never previously made available to the public and that are essential to understanding the City’s actions and decisions, both during the months after September 11th and in the subsequent years.”

“The very least our city owes the families, survivors and first responders whose lives were forever changed by the September 11th attacks is transparency and accountability. That is why I am proud that our administration has launched the City’s first public records portal dedicated to the environmental and health impacts of 9/11 and reached a settlement in these lawsuits,” Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement.

Efforts to uncover the records began in earnest five years ago on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy, 911 Health Watch Executive Director Ben Chevat told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.

The nonprofit initially filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request seeking records about children’s exposure to asbestos and other toxins when they returned to classrooms in the days following the tragedy.

“People kept saying ‘we can’t let the terrorists win.’ Well had they been transferred to other schools, the terrorists still wouldn’t have won,” Chevat told the DCNF.

An August 2002 environmental analysis of Stuyvesant High School, located about a half a mile from the World Trade Center, shows detectable levels of asbestos more than a year after the disaster.

Another document indicates that Stuyvesant students were scheduled to return to class on October 8, 2001, four days after testing began.

Asked by the DCNF whether these records demonstrated recklessness, Chevat said that “these are exactly the types of questions we should be asking. Four administrations refused to do that.”

Tuesday’s tranche includes another key document referred to as “The Harding memo.”

The memo to Robert Harding, a top deputy to former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, details strategies to limit the city’s legal liability from residents who had been harmed by bad advice from city law enforcement or health authorities.

Facing stonewalling from the city, 911 Health Watch and the group’s attorneys first uncovered this critical document in a search of three hundred boxes housed in a private collection in Texas.

The document’s release via the portal represents the first time the city has acknowledged it.