New York City released about 170,000 pages of documents related to post-9/11 air quality and health risks on Tuesday — a trove of paperwork within which some notes suggest city officials knew of the potential environmental dangers and legal exposure in the early aftermath of the terror attacks.
One undated internal document — a letter to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s deputy mayor, Robert Harding — listed various potential grounds for lawsuits against the city, including health advisories that caused people to return to the area too soon, causing toxic exposure, rescue workers being provided with faulty equipment, and police failing to secure businesses from looters.
Another memo early in the Michael Bloomberg administration, five months after 9/11, said the city was “leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits. At the least, we should discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags.” The note added that the city should ask the federal government for cleanup funds.
NYC Corporation Counsel Steven Banks said that the city’s Department of Investigation is now investigating what city officials knew and when they knew it, as well as why information appears to have been withheld.
Meanwhile, city officials continue to comb through millions of additional pages of documents they say the federal World Trade Center insurer, WTC Captive Insurance Co., had in its possession.
The city last week settled litigation over public access to the records, including by a group called 9/11 Health Watch. Now, this information is available to the public via a new online portal Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the creation of earlier this year. He allocated up to $34 million this year to operate the database.
The documents made public Tuesday include the contents of 68 boxes city officials say were located only recently in a Department of Environmental Protection office.
They also contain records the Giuliani administration sent for archival, and documents the city’s law department had related to 7 World Trade Center, the building where Giuliani positioned the city’s emergency “bunker,” and its ultimate collapse.
Banks says those 170,000 pages are just the first of “millions” of pages the Mamdani administration is reviewing. They say their goal is to post as many as possible over the next 12 months.
Banks said many of the documents were out of the city’s possession for years because they were turned over to the federal insurer that Congress established. He says they were only recently returned. Some of them are redacted to protect personal and security-related information, Banks added.
In a statement obtained by NBC New York ahead of the drop, Mamdani says at the “very least,” the city owes transparency and accountability to those whose lives were forever impacted by the 9/11 attacks.
“For too long, New Yorkers have had to fight for access to records that should have been available to them in the first place,” Mamdani said. “This portal is part of our administration’s enduring commitment to honor those we lost, care for those living with lasting health consequences, and give thousands of New Yorkers the answers they’ve been asking for.”
This story originally appeared on NBCNewYork.com.
