The first 9/11 air-quality records will be public before the 25th anniversary
Mayor Zohran Mamdani
“New Yorkers who have become sick have had to fight for information that should have been theirs from the very beginning.”
Politics & Government Active Updated Jul 3, 2026
The 9/11 air-quality records
For 25 years the city has resisted releasing its records on what officials knew about post-9/11 air quality, a fight that traces back to the EPA's September 2001 assurance that the air was safe, which its own Inspector General later found unsupported by the data. Mayor Mamdani put $34.2 million in the budget for a public portal of those documents, and on the same day his own lawyers moved to dismiss the one active lawsuit demanding them, arguing the 2001 emails were purged. The DOI is running its own $4 million inquiry into the same records.
The story so far
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Jun 30, 2026 Latest
Mamdani announced the $34.2 million records portal at the budget handshake; within hours his corporation counsel filed to dismiss Carboy's lawsuit, arguing the city's email system doesn't retain accounts of employees who left before January 1, 2002. Speaker Menin's finance team wasn't told about the allocation.
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Mar 1, 2026
After ten extensions, the mayor's office told Carboy it had no 2001 emails. He later found a key city liability memo in the University of Texas at Austin library.
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Dec 15, 2025
The Adams administration extended its deadline to answer Carboy's 2023 records request for the tenth time, to March 2026, pushing the obligation onto incoming Mayor Mamdani. By then the DEP's trove had grown to 68 boxes estimated at over 300,000 files, and Carboy's team had found a 2002 city Law Department memo stating World Trade Center documents "must be preserved to serve as evidence," NY1 reported.
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Sep 16, 2025
In Carboy's lawsuit for 9/11 Health Watch, the city reversed its blanket denials, telling the court the DEP had "located multiple boxes" believed to contain responsive records. Carboy called the reversal "extraordinary and unexpected"; by October 27 a city email said about 40 boxes were ready for review, and a city lawyer had earlier called the request "a fishing expedition," NY1 reported.
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Jun 1, 2023
Pro-bono lawyer Andy Carboy filed FOIL requests for the city's 9/11 air-quality records on behalf of 9/11 Health Watch. The DEP denied having any.
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Jul 29, 2019
The Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorization Act became Public Law 116-34. It extended the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund through fiscal year 2092, replaced its $4.6 billion cap with such sums as necessary, and let the Special Master restore awards previously cut for lack of funds.
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Sep 11, 2016
On the 15th anniversary, Whitman apologized in a Guardian interview: "I'm very sorry that people are sick. I'm very sorry that people are dying and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I'm sorry." By then more than 37,000 people registered with the WTC Health Program had been declared sick and more than 1,100 covered by the program had died, the Irish Times reported from the interview.
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Jan 2, 2011
The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act became Public Law 111-347, creating the World Trade Center Health Program to monitor and treat responders and survivors and reopening the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. The health program, extended in 2015 and now authorized until 2090, serves over 125,000 responders and survivors according to the CDC.
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Aug 21, 2003
The EPA Inspector General released Report No. 2003-P-00012, finding the September 18, 2001 declaration that the air was safe was not supported by the data available. It also found the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced the EPA's early press releases, convincing the agency to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.
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Sep 18, 2001
One week after the attacks, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said she was "glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink." The EPA's own Inspector General later found the agency did not have sufficient data to make that blanket statement, with monitoring still lacking for pollutants including particulate matter and PCBs.
On the record
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