What Did City Hall Know and When Did They Know It?

A Push to Disclose Secret Knowledge of September 11 Health Risks

Decades of delay and secrecy surrounding a stash of never-disclosed City Hall documents that may shed light on what municipal government knew about environmental health risks in the weeks and months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 may reach a turning point today (Monday, July 14) in the City Council.

At 12:30pm, the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Council member (and former Manhattan Borough President) Gale Brewer, will consider Ms. Brewer’s Resolution 0560. If enacted, the legislation will compel the City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) to open a probe into what Rudolph Giuliani, who was Mayor in September 2001, knew about toxins released in Lower Manhattan (and beyond) after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Passage by the committee that Ms. Brewer chairs of the measure she is sponsoring is a virtual certainty. Following that, the measure will be taken up by the full Council, where multiple sources predict that it is very likely to pass.

This development marks a watershed in the decades-long quest to clarify what local officials knew about environmental contaminants that have since claimed thousands of lives, because under the City Charter, the Council has the power to order an investigation by the DOI, regardless of whether the Mayor consents to it.

The resolution would compel DOI “to obtain from City agencies and City Hall all documents with information about the types of toxins, the length of time the toxins were expected to remain in the environment, the immediate and long-term health impacts of human exposure, as well as an analysis of the contrast between the knowledge mayoral administrations possessed and the information they conveyed to the public,” explains Benjamin Chevat, executive director of 911 Health Watch, a nonprofit that seeks to ensure the Federal government’s continued, long-term commitment to the health and well-being of September 11 responders, survivors and their families.

Mr. Chevat’s organization has repeatedly tried to obtain these documents through Freedom of Information Law requests. An original filing submitted in September 2023 and expected to be completed by October 10 of that year has been extended by the administration of Mayor Eric Adams eight times, most recently in May, with a new fulfillment date of August 15.

In the decades since September 2001, the administrations of four mayors (those of Mr. Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams) have refused to reveal what those records contain. In July 2022, Mr. Adams took a tentative step that was blocked by his three predecessors, and announced he was willing to consider releasing documents about the information City Hall had in the weeks following the disaster. But two months later, Mr. Adams reversed this stance, and refused to make public the documents in question, unless City government was first granted immunity against any lawsuits that might arise from them.

Although Mr. Giuliani said little in public about the dangers posed by environmental toxins in Lower Manhattan during the three months that remained in his tenure after September 11, 2001, one indication of his frame of mind might be gleaned from an action he took in November of that year. The Mayor urged members of New York’s Congressional delegation to help pass the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which specifically capped “the liability for all claims against the City of New York as a result of such attacks to no more than the City’s insurance coverage or $350 million.” This position may have been motivated in part by an internal discussion within the Giuliani administration. A February 16, 2023 letter from Congressman Dan Goldman to Mayor Adams cites an October 2001 confidential memo circulated among City Hall staff, warning of “toxic tort cases that might arise in the next few decades,” which might number 10,000 or more.

Without adequate warning of the dangers posed by more than 2,500 contaminants (including asbestos, lead, mercury, dioxins, crystalline silica, cadmium, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, along with pulverized concrete and glass) now known to have filled the air and coated every surface for hundreds of yards in all directions, thousands of first responders and cleanup workers flocked to the site, and tens of thousands of local residents returned to their homes. In the decades since, the death toll among these groups has surpassed the number killed during the actual attacks, while the count of those sickened with the 80-plus conditions subsequently linked to exposure to World Trade Center debris is now many times the tally of the dead.