New York City’s council, authorized by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on Tuesday released thousands of documents related to Sept. 11, 2001, including private communications between city officials about litigation and air quality.
One memorandum from October 2001 sent by a lobbyist working with the mayor’s office at the time to the deputy mayor said the city’s lawyers pegged the number of potential plaintiffs as a result of the attacks at around 35,000, with an estimated 10,000 filing a claim.
“A major concern is that if these cases make it to court, the judges and juries will be biased in favor of plaintiffs (even though the city seems to have a strong defense) and therefore award substantial damages to compensate individuals for their loss,” the memo stated.
Lawsuits could center on people whose homes or businesses were looted because police failed to secure the premises, or people who returned to the area too soon because they were following health advisories, resulting in toxic exposure, according to the memo.
Another document, a 2002 memo, detailed how Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) called the mayor’s office to communicate that the city was neglecting monitoring indoor air quality around Ground Zero, or the site of the attacks in lower Manhattan, leaving it open to lawsuits.
He also said that the federal government through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should be paying for cleaning indoor areas.
City officials had directed people to clean buildings with mops and rags, even though only licensed asbestos cleaners were supposed to clear asbestos, which was detected in dust sample tests from the area in late 2001.
“If Nadler’s concerns are justified, we are not informing people of the real health risks in lower Manhattan, the city may face major public relations problems and is leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits,” the memo stated.
“At the least we should discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags. We should be asking FEMA for funds to support indoor cleanup.”
“My colleagues and I who represented Ground Zero and the surrounding communities immediately warned local and federal officials of the health risks posed by toxins in the air at the time,” Nadler said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Our warnings were not heeded, and now we and the public know that City Hall, led by former Mayor Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health impacts from these toxins.”
Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor at the time, did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The federal government later created the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, a no-fault fund for injuries or deaths caused by the attacks or the debris removal efforts in the wake of the attacks, as was proposed in the first memo.
Mamdani told reporters during a briefing at City Hall in Manhattan that “people got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.
“And then when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way, was nowhere to be found.”
Other documents released on Tuesday include more than 20,000 files discovered in boxes at Department of Environmental Protection facilities in 2025.
The documents can be accessed through the city website https://sept11documents.cityofnewyork.us/
Additional files will be released in the coming months, city officials said.
They are able to release the documents because they settled two lawsuits brought by a group called 9/11 Health Watch.