Council compels inquiry about city’s knowledge of 9/11 toxins

Nearly 24 years after the 9/11 terror attacks, questions persist about what and when city officials knew about the toxins that lingered over ground zero and swaths of downtown and Brooklyn in the aftermath of the twin towers’ collapse.

The City Council is looking to change that. On Monday, city lawmakers enacted a binding resolution directing the Department of Investigation to dig up what mayoral administrations from Rudy Giuliani’s to Eric Adams’ knew about the toxins and when.

Ahead of the Council’s vote, the resolution’s prime sponsor, Council Member Gale Brewer, said that federal lawmakers had several times tried to pry the information from mayoral administrations but were stonewalled on each occasion. 

“As I think we all know, more people have died in the years since the attack than died on the day itself, from respiratory issues, cancer and other diseases caused by the toxins at ground zero and the surrounding areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn,” Brewer said Monday afternoon during a meeting of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, which she chairs.

The resolution compels the DOI to assess what mayoral administrations knew about the toxins, their type, how long they were expected to remain in the environment, and their short- and long-term effects. It also asks the investigative agency to compile a timeline of when the various administrations became aware of how long the toxins would remain and of their short- and long-term effects. 

It also seeks an analysis of what the administrations knew about the toxins and what they told the public. 

The advocacy organization 911 Health Watch, in its own timeline documenting its efforts to get the city to release the pertinent documents, notes that while Giuliani administration officials’ public pronouncements shortly after the attacks assured city dwellers that the air was safe to breathe, they privately expressed concern that the city could face 10,000 liability claims resulting from toxic exposures.

Brewer’s resolution, which passed unanimously by voice vote, “would finally reveal what city government knew about environmental toxins reduced by the September 11th attacks and when,” the Upper West Side Council member said at the committee meeting. 

“This transparency is particularly relevant in this moment when trust in government is severely lacking,” she added. 

The binding resolution directs the DOI to submit a report on its findings within two years. This is the first time the Council has used a City Charter provision that empowers it to direct the DOI to investigate a matter.

Benjamin Chevat, 911 Health Watch’s executive director, alluding to the city’s resistance in releasing the documents, was grateful for the Council’s action. 

“Thank you to Council Member Brewer and Speaker Adrienne Adams for taking on this challenge of finding out what Mayor’s office doesn’t appear to want the public to see about what the City of New York knew about the dangers of the toxins from 9/11 in the aftermath of the attack,” Chevat said in a statement Tuesday.

“City Corporation Counsel has continued to fight the release of documents and the review of what the City knew and when did it know it, but now we hope that the truth will out,” he added. 

Brewer said the Council’s move has been in discussion “for many years.” She called it “a direct response to the Adams administration's refusal” to make public what it and previous mayoral administrations knew about which toxins were released by the collapse of the twin towers. 

A 2018 report by the federal World Trade Center Health Program, “Development of the Inventory of 9/11 Agents,” lists 352 chemicals. 

Lower Manhattan shortly after the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower Sept. 11, 2001.

NYPD Detective Gregory Semendinger.

Mayors deflected requests

The resolution notes that U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler and then-U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney asked then-Mayor Bill de Blasio in September 2021 to release city records from 2001 and 2002 pertaining to the attacks but the lawmakers did not get a response. 

The two officials submitted a similar request to Mayor Eric Adams in May 2022 but city attorneys deflected the request by arguing that the documents could not be released until and unless the city was granted full immunity for claims related to the attacks. 

The next year, Nadler, joined by U.S. Representative Dan Goldman, wrote Adams requesting the records, with Adams responding that the documents’ release could only happen through legislation authorizing federal funding for their release. 

Later in 2023, 9/11 Health Watch filed a Freedom of Information Law request seeking documents from city agencies in a bid to determine what was known about the toxins and their potential harm. The request was turned down, with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection saying it had no relevant documents. A similar effort by Nadler and Goldman in April 2024 was also turned back. 

Nearly 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center the day of the attacks. Since then, about 7,000 people who contracted respiratory illnesses, cancers and other ailments and who enrolled in the federal World Trade Center Health Program have died because of exposure to the toxic debris and dust released when the towers collapsed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

As of March, more than 142,000 people living with illnesses, disorders and injuries attributable to toxins released by the Twin Towers' collapse had enrolled in the program, 25,000 more than just four years ago. The program, which was temporarily gutted by the Trump administration earlier this year before sustained objections from advocates and a bipartisan group of lawmakers obliged it to walk back the cuts, provides medical monitoring and treatment of WTC-related health conditions for 9/11 responders and survivors.  

The program provides medical monitoring and treatment of WTC-related health conditions for 9/11 responders and survivors.

A study by researchers at Stony Brook University released in June 2024 found that people who were exposed to the toxic dust and debris at ground zero and at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island are developing early onset dementia at a higher rate than those present at the pile who had no exposure or wore protective equipment. 

The Council resolution says that there has never been “a comprehensive investigation by New York City of the knowledge possessed by mayoral administrations on the dangers of the environmental toxins produced by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and when this knowledge accrued.”

Brewer said she hoped the Council’s resolution would finally compel city authorities to come clean about the attack’s malignant aftermath, as well as inform the city’s response in any future emergency involving toxins.  

“We've all been trying to get this information,” she said ahead of the Council’s vote. “We're asking the Department of Investigation to find the material that 20 years ago wasn't available to the public.” 

richardk@thechiefleader.com