New York City settled two long-running lawsuits and published roughly 170,000 pages of previously withheld records Tuesday, revealing that city officials privately tracked the risk of toxic exposure and potential legal liability in Lower Manhattan within weeks of the September 11, 2001, attacks even as they publicly declared the air safe to breathe.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the release at a City Hall news conference alongside first responders, survivors, victims’ advocates and comedian Jon Stewart, days ahead of the attacks’ 25th anniversary on Friday. The documents went live on a new city-run portal, nyc.gov/sept11docs, which officials said will be updated on a rolling basis over the next year as the city’s Law Department reviews millions of additional pages and removes personally identifiable information.
Among the records is the long-sought “Harding Memo,” sent in October 2001 to then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The memo cited a Law Department estimate that as many as 35,000 people could have grounds to sue the city, with roughly 10,000 expected to actually file claims, over issues including toxic exposure, inadequate safety equipment for rescue workers and looting the city allegedly failed to prevent. The memo also laid out options for limiting the city’s financial exposure, including seeking a congressional victims’ fund and requesting indemnification from the federal government.
A second memo, dated roughly five months into the Bloomberg administration in February 2002, warned that public criticism from then-Representative Jerry Nadler over asbestos levels in the dust could trigger a “barrage of lawsuits.” Ester Fuchs, a former special adviser to Giuliani, is shown in the document acknowledging that “at least a low level of asbestos” was present in dust inside many Lower Manhattan buildings, and recommending the city stop advising residents to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags — guidance the city had been distributing at the time.
The release also includes records the city says were not located until 2025, despite years of prior public-records requests: a set the city has referred to internally as the “68 boxes,” along with a collection of documents concerning the collapse of World Trade Center 7. According to a Law Department official who briefed reporters this week, millions of additional post-9/11 records had been transferred out of the department entirely, to an entity called the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company that helped defend the city against litigation stemming from the attacks; the department did not retain its own copies and only recovered the material in recent months, after the Mamdani administration requested it back.
Tuesday’s disclosures resolve a multiyear legal fight brought by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which sued the city to force the records into the open. Under the settlement, the two sides agreed to a yearlong process of continued disclosures, including monthly meetings and agreed-upon search terms for the remaining files; the city also agreed to cover the group’s attorneys’ fees.
“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,” Mamdani said in a statement accompanying the portal’s launch. At the news conference, he was more pointed: “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”
Stewart, who has spent years advocating for 9/11 survivors and first responders battling serious illnesses, said the fight for the documents mattered regardless of whether the material could have changed past outcomes. “I guarantee you it would not have been the struggle that it was to get people to recognize that what they all knew and what we all knew who live in downtown Manhattan: that there was poison in the air and on the ground,” he said, adding that continued access to healthcare for victims remains unfinished business.
9/11 Health Watch executive director Benjamin Chevat said in a statement that four successive mayoral administrations had withheld the material from the public, Congress and the City Council alike, even as the city continued “messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable.’”
The health toll from the attacks has grown substantially over the past quarter-century. More than 140,000 people from all 50 states have enrolled in the federally administered World Trade Center Health Program, and roughly 49,000 participants have been diagnosed with certified WTC-related cancers, according to figures from the 9/11 Memorial. The World Trade Center Health Program has recorded 4,343 deaths linked to exposure-related illness. Mamdani said Tuesday that eligibility for assistance extends beyond current enrollment, and that outreach has not reached some residents who lived near the site.
Former Democratic congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who championed federal legislation establishing and funding the health program and a related victim compensation fund, said in a statement that the newly released pages “belong to the people of New York” and would help survivors document their presence in the exposure zone to secure benefits. The city has not said how many additional lawsuits it expects the disclosures to generate, though officials acknowledged the settlement anticipates continued litigation as further records surface over the coming year.
