Category: News

NEW YORK — In the harrowing months that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers were repeatedly assured that the air around the fallen towers was safe to breathe.

But 10 months later, health officials were still finding evidence of asbestos as much as half a mile away, according to a sample of air quality records being released Tuesday.

The documents, reviewed by the New York Times in advance of their release, include more than 170,000 pages of air quality reports, contamination records, and correspondence among city officials that were stored in 68 boxes in a city office, shielded from public view for more than two decades, and, according to city officials, discovered only last year.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has directed his administration to release the records to the public through an online portal, timing it to the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the attacks in lower Manhattan.

Over the course of the next year, his administration intends to review, redact, and publicize many more papers, found in municipal and insurance offices, that relate to the environmental toxins brought about by Sept. 11.

The records being released Tuesday provide a snapshot of the frenzied months following the attacks, when New York City and its leaders were struggling to balance the city’s recovery with fears of terrorism and lingering toxins.

The documents are limited in scope, offering only a fraction of the air quality reports taken around ground zero. And while they also include a smattering of internal memos — including the so-called Harding memo, in which the city discussed its potential liability stemming from the Sept. 11 air quality — many more are presumably absent.

But even in a scattershot way, the records seem to strengthen the notion that New Yorkers were instructed to return to the ground zero area before it was safe to do so, potentially exposing workers and residents to dangerous toxins.

“The very least our city owes the families, survivors, and first responders whose lives were forever changed by the horrific terror attack of Sept. 11 is transparency and accountability,” Mamdani said in a statement.

Releasing the documents was both a massive logistical hurdle, for which the mayor budgeted $34 million, and an acknowledgment that, even after so many years, as fewer Americans remember the attacks, the health effects persist. More people are believed to have died from illnesses related to the attacks than the nearly 3,000 people who were killed Sept. 11. They are succumbing to lung and blood cancers and heart and respiratory diseases.

Records related to 15 John St., a building less than a mile from the World Trade Center, offer a glimpse into the prolonged, frenzied, and often confusing cleanup work that took place around ground zero.

On July 13, 2002, with New Yorkers still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center that blanketed lower Manhattan in debris, inspectors were busy collecting dust samples from the building.

Each report echoed the last: Asbestos present on the facade ledge. Asbestos present on the west side roof. Asbestos present on the top electrical cable.

Some reports show that asbestos levels appeared to stay under limits set by environmental and worker protection agencies; others indicate they may have been too high, though many of the papers are not accompanied by written analysis.

The documents show that the asbestos found at 15 John St. was not an outlier: Lists of environmental quality measurements taken by city agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency, and privately contracted laboratories demonstrate the presence of asbestos and other contaminants, sometimes at levels exceeding acceptable limits, in dust and air in other parts of lower Manhattan after Sept. 11.

They include records preserved by the Giuliani administration, as well as documents related to 7 World Trade Center, which collapsed on the afternoon of Sept. 11.

A letter to the city’s Department of Environmental Protection from a New Yorker in February 2002 underscores how isolated and frightened people felt at that time.

A resident of 333 Rector Place detailed what she viewed as extensive missteps by city officials and her building’s property manager in attempting to remove asbestos and other contaminants from the premises.

“Sept. 11, 2001. Felt I had to do something,” the resident, Marisa Ramírez de Arellano, wrote, describing how she had “scooped up dust from coffee table into a paper bag. Also started to clean the floor with wet paper towels,” an effort she acknowledged was “mostly futile.”

Reached Monday, Ramírez de Arellano, 80, said she had spent several years after the attacks under the care of an allergist and a pulmonologist. She was prescribed steroids and other medications because respiratory tests led doctors to fear she had suffered lung damage, she said.

She said she spent several hours in her apartment Sept. 11 because she “didn’t realize that very lightweight dust that was coming in was as bad for human beings as it turned out to be.” She left the apartment when firefighters came to evacuate her.

By the time she returned several weeks later, officials said the air was safe to breathe, but she had doubts, especially one night when a hazmat team came to dig up the grass from a small roundabout in the neighborhood.

“They dug several inches down and took it all away and replaced it with new dirt, new sod, new grass,” Ramírez de Arellano said. “And I thought, if they were thinking the grass is contaminated, then what are we all breathing?”

A draft document of data collected by the city’s DEP listed locations throughout lower Manhattan where asbestos levels in some dust samples exceeded hazardous limits in the days immediately after the attacks. Another undated document lists ambient samples that were also above acceptable asbestos limits.

An audit from November 2001, prepared by a private firm and submitted to the federal EPA based on data collected by New York City and state agencies, showed other troubling findings. That audit demonstrated that air concentration of the carcinogen benzene was still spiking near the towers’ footprint, and that the concentration of asbestos in the air at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island had increased after the attacks.

But the uncertainty about the air quality in residential and commercial buildings in lower Manhattan was already raising concern among public officials including Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat whose district included ground zero at the time.

“Congressman Nadler believes that the EPA has neglected its responsibility for monitoring indoor air quality around ground zero,” according to a memo from a city official, Ester Fuchs, sent to six others including the city’s top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, on Feb. 28, 2002, two months after Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor, replacing Rudy Giuliani.

She noted that Nadler said that the federal Environmental Protection Agency “handed over responsibility for measuring indoor air quality to the city without putting in place proper oversight measures,” a responsibility the city passed on to property owners.

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The city’s health department instructed citizens to “clean their buildings with wet mops and rags,” Fuchs said, and summarized the agency’s position that air quality testing, while painting an incomplete picture, had not shown results “that would indicate long-term health impacts.”

In an interview this week, Nadler recalled trying to persuade the administrations of Giuliani and Bloomberg to release whatever information they had collected on air quality around the site of the attacks.

“They knew about the air quality and they essentially did nothing about it,” Nadler said. “I suspect that all they cared about was getting Wall Street reopened, and they didn’t give a damn about the health of the people down there.”

Indeed, city and federal officials, most memorably Christine Todd Whitman, the administrator of the EPA at the time, reassured Americans that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe. Whitman has since apologized.

A review of news articles and interview transcripts in the days and weeks following Sept. 11 show that Giuliani continued to vouch for the safety of the air quality.

“I come down here in the morning and sometimes the odor is terrible,” he said in late October 2001, according to an article in the New York Daily News, which had reported on toxic chemicals and metals that had been released into the environment around ground zero. “You smell it and you feel there must be something wrong with it. But what I’m told is that it is not dangerous to your health.”

In February 2002, Bloomberg said, “Every test that has been done says the air quality was in acceptable limits. I think some people are just never going to want to believe that.”

A spokesperson for Bloomberg declined to comment. A spokesperson for Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.

Correspondence between Deutsche Bank, at 130 Liberty St., and the city DEP discusses testing from September 2001 through April 2002 that found asbestos in dust samples exceeding the 1% threshold for harm throughout the building, as well as the presence of carcinogenic organic contaminants, heavy metals, fungi, and bacteria.

The bank’s experts “have recommended a systematic testing program” to quantify the hazard and identify appropriate methods for handling and disposing of the materials, the company’s managing director for corporate real estate wrote in a June 2002 letter to the DEP commissioner. The building would eventually be demolished.

Asbestos exposure can cause lung tissue scarring, mesothelioma, and lung cancer. Dust, smoke, and other pollutants from the site have also been associated with lymphoma, leukemia, and other cancers.

The release of the documents resolves litigation brought by 9/11 Health Watch, an advocacy organization that sued to force the publication of the documents.

“For 25 years, four different mayoral administrations kept from the public, the U.S. Congress, and the City Council documents showing what the city actually knew about the danger of the toxic chemicals in Lower Manhattan and Western Brooklyn after the World Trade Center collapse, even as city officials continued messaging to the public that the air was ‘safe and acceptable,’” Ben Chevat, the executive director of the 9/11 Health Watch, said in a statement.

But the documents’ release may expose the city to new or amended lawsuits. The information could also help those sickened in the years after Sept. 11 with their applications for federal victim compensation funds. The mayor and the city’s chief lawyer, Steven Banks, agreed that it was important to make the documents public, Banks recalled in a recent interview.

“For years, families, city workers, and survivors have been crying out for more transparency from their government,” Banks wrote in an introductory letter contained in the document release.

In a recent interview, Denise Verzi discussed losing her husband, Michael Verzi, a New York City firefighter, to lymphoma that was linked to his time working at ground zero.

“He truly loved being a firefighter. That was his calling,” Verzi said of her husband, who died in 2022. “All that being said, now years later we’re finding out that there’s all these files.”

She said her husband and his colleagues had been assured that “the air quality is fine, you can be down there.” And while they would have gone to the site regardless, she said, “maybe different precautions would have been taken.”

“I don’t understand hiding it to begin with,” Verzi said. “That was horrific. But 25 years in, there’s people that are still getting sick.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

As concerns mounted that the extreme physical strain of flying fighter jets was causing brain injuries in pilots, and may have led to the death of a number of career aviators, the Navy did almost nothing.

It didn’t even study its pilots to understand if it had a problem.

That is one of the numerous findings in a harshly critical report released Tuesday by the powerful House Oversight Committee. The report said that because the Navy had repeatedly failed to act, Congress should pass legislation requiring the military to create a specific program to study and care for the brain health of all aviators.

“Despite credible warnings, external reporting and internal awareness, the Navy has yet to determine whether the very conditions that define naval aviation may also be causing long-term harm to the pilots who endure them,” the report said. “Instead, it has relied on a system designed to respond to visible injuries, while leaving potential cumulative damage largely unexamined.”

Naval aviators are repeatedly exposed to body-crushing forces as they catapult off aircraft carriers and pull high G-force turns in training. The Navy has never studied how those forces over time affect the human brain, which contains 100 billion neurons in a network with a consistency similar to Jell-O.

A number of career pilots have raised concerns that those repeated exposures may cause brain injuries that slowly accrue over years of service and lead to debilitating mental health problems.

“Landing on a carrier is like a car crash. In my career I’ve been in hundreds of car crashes,” said Matthew Buckley, a former TOPGUN pilot who after 15 years of flying struggled with headaches, mood swings, and suicidal thoughts. He later started an organization to help the many other pilots he encountered who were experiencing similar problems.

“I’m almost shaking, I’m so furious,” he said after learning about the findings of the House committee. “People have died. We know we have a problem. And you’re telling me someone needs to call for legislation to have the admirals do their jobs? It’s insane.”

In 2024, the New York Times published an investigation showing that three pilots who all had symptoms consistent with brain injuries died by suicide in an 18-month span, and that a dozen current and former pilots were struggling with similar issues.

In the following months, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), who heads the House Oversight Committee, formally demanded to know how the Navy was responding to the problem.

The report released this week said the Navy had barely responded at all: It had not done a formal investigation to see if fighter jets were causing injuries. It had not put monitoring in place that might detect injuries. And it had no plans to offer expanded brain health services to its aviators.

While the Navy has done extensive research on the immediate health effects of flying fighter jets, it has never looked at the long-term impacts. Because the Navy had no evidence of a brain-injury problem, its medical officials maintained that no problem existed. It continued to do so even as Navy doctors started sending pilots who were experiencing issues to a civilian neurologist.

When that neurologist raised concerns to the Navy in 2020 that he was seeing a pattern of brain injury, he said it stopped sending him patients.

Internal documents reviewed by the House committee showed that a few years later, when three career pilots who flew the Navy’s F/A-18 Super Hornet died by suicide, several Naval officers grew deeply concerned.

In 2024 a Navy doctor and former pilot conducted an informal survey of pilots and found widespread mental health issues that were often going untreated. His report rippled through the pilot community, and a Navy captain soon sent the report to several admirals.

“Feedback from the bro-network is that this is a hot topic … and it is affecting retention of our senior aviators,” the captain wrote. “The suicides may, or may not, be linked by common causes. But we will not know until we choose to study this problem.”

The committee said no study took place.

Instead, Naval leaders blamed the crisis on stubborn barriers to seeking mental health, including pilots not coming forward out of fear that they might be grounded. The Navy tended to blamed individuals for not seeking help. The House report found no evidence that leaders considered that the problem could be caused by its jets.

The Navy’s elite TOPGUN fighter jet school saw things differently.

In 2024 it surreptitiously set up a brain health program, known as Project Odin’s Eye, to monitor its top flyers, modeled on a program created by the Navy SEALs. TOPGUN did not alert the larger Navy to the suspected problem, or inform other fighter wings, the report said.

Navy leadership knew nothing about Project Odin’s Eye until the Times wrote about its existence in December 2024.

After the Times published its investigation, top Navy leaders pushed Navy medical experts on whether flying was causing brain injuries, according to the report. In a bit of circular reasoning that seemed pulled straight from the novel Catch-22, the experts said the Navy had never studied the problem, so there was no hard evidence that it existed. And since there was no hard evidence that existed, there was no reason to study it.

“The medical team argued that because there was no evidence, there would be no need to investigate further,” the report noted.

The House committee was particularly critical of that decision because, it said, the Navy was “well equipped” to study the issue, and already had an extensive aviation physiology research and monitoring program that could easily add a brain health study.

The Navy, by its own estimate, could conduct a long-term study of brain health for 1,000 pilots for $3.9 million — about the cost of training one pilot to fly.

Instead, the Navy chose to do nothing, the report said.

“In sum, the Navy’s response to the committee reveals a paradox: A well-funded and expansive research enterprise that has nonetheless failed to address a consequential question in aviator health,” the report said. “Given the Navy’s substantial investment in human capital, failing to allocate comparable resources to understanding risks and protecting that investment, particularly in terms of long-term health, is unfortunate.”

The committee recommended that Congress step in and require a comprehensive program that would create a frontline brain healthcare program for all pilots, modeled on Project Odin’s Eye.

The committee also called for requiring the Defense Department to track catapult takeoffs and high G-force maneuvers in aviators’ medical records, and conduct a comprehensive study of the cumulative effects over time, including after pilots leave the military.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

After a seven-year run marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration, Lonnie Bunch III announced Tuesday that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian.

The White House has escalated its criticism of how the Smithsonian presents American history and values, prompting concern from some about what they see as an assault on the institution’s autonomy and commendation from others for reining in an organization they view as overtaken by liberal bias.

In an interview, Bunch, 73, said it was not the pressure that had led to his departure.

“It was really just saying, now’s the time,” he said.

“I’m a fighter,” he added.

At the same time, he acknowledged the strain of the role.

“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” he said. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cell phone.”

In a statement, Chief Justice John Roberts, who serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said that Bunch had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the Smithsonian had “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.” The Smithsonian said Bunch was expected to depart at the end of the year.

For more than a year, Bunch has tried to balance diplomacy and openness to criticism with a determination to resist a White House push to present what President Donald Trump calls “patriotic” history. Some admire how Bunch has managed to quietly hold the line against the White House. Others believe the Smithsonian has shown too much deference to Trump and even engaged in self-censorship.

Last year, painter Amy Sherald withdrew her blockbuster show at the National Portrait Gallery over a disagreement about how the museum would display her portrait of a transgender Statue of Liberty.

But Bunch said he had no regrets. “My goal has been to win, not to make me feel good,” he said. “To win — to protect the Smithsonian — there were times I would fight, make clear what the red lines were. And there were other times I let things go.”

Bunch, a widely respected historian who previously oversaw the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said his next chapter would most likely include teaching or a fellowship.

Created by Congress as a trust in 1846, the Smithsonian has long been viewed as independent of the executive branch. Its governing Board of Regents must now appoint a new leader in the face of withering attacks from the administration.

The 17-person panel, led by Roberts, includes six members of Congress, split along party lines; nine private citizens; and Vice President JD Vance. The terms of three citizen members have recently expired, and the names of replacement nominees have not made it to Congress, an unusual holding pattern that appears to be evidence of the shadow war over control of the Smithsonian.

In the short term, Bunch seemed to have sufficient board support to stay on. But he has indicated that he is weary of the fray and ready for some form of retirement.

“When you’re Black in America, you’ve got to figure out how to get through, right?” he told the New York Times in May. “You’ve got to figure out how to build allies, when to stand firm, when to bang the table. So in some ways, all of that prepared me for this moment.”

“But do I wish I was in it?” he continued, referring to scrutiny by the Trump administration. “Of course not. Good Lord, I wish that I was doing my goodbye tour.”

Over nearly 40 years in various roles at the Smithsonian, Bunch developed a reputation as a soft-spoken diplomat adept at raising money and dealing with public officials. As the institution’s first Black secretary, he has at times been a forceful voice on issues of race, particularly after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.

Trump did not pay much attention to Washington’s cultural organizations in his first term but has made them a focus of his second, including through his efforts to govern, close, and renovate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Smithsonian has been forced to respond to White House demands or risk potential cuts to its $1 billion budget, which is largely funded by the federal government.

Last month, in a letter to the board, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, and Vince Haley, a senior White House adviser, made the stakes clear.

“The Smithsonian enjoys support from executive departments and agencies,” the letter said. “Those executive departments and agencies cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”

The president’s attempt to overhaul the Smithsonian began last year with an executive order that accused the institution of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive” and called for an end to spending on exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”

After the White House demanded that the Smithsonian turn over information about the content of its exhibitions, Bunch reasserted the institution’s independence while saying that materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent.”

The board adopted a resolution that called for its 21 museums to review their content for partisanship or bias. But the administration began its own review of exhibitions, wall text, and social media to assess “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

Trump has been unrelenting in his criticism, posting on social media that “the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

The president also announced online that he was dismissing the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian insisted it controlled personnel matters, but Sajet resigned, citing the institution’s best interests.)

The White House pressure reached a new pitch this year with a July 4 report about the National Museum of American History that accused its director of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.”

Many historians expressed serious concern about the report, but some conservatives applauded it, joining Trump in arguing that exhibits had become overly focused on race, identity, and injustice.

“Hardworking Americans don’t want their taxpayer dollars dedicated to Marxist indoctrination,” Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) wrote on social media.

After the report, Anthea Hartig, the museum’s director, came under fire at two congressional hearings. Then Trump ordered warning signs and exhibits installed to convey his view that the museum did not accurately reflect American history. The signs have yet to materialize.

Bunch said it had been difficult to have his colleagues attacked by the administration. “I have always tried to protect people,” he said. “So I’ve always said, ‘Let the most of the weight fall on me. They don’t deserve it.’ We’re in a time when people are being hurt.”

His priority has been “How do I always make sure that we put the Smithsonian in the strongest position?” Bunch said. “That we articulate what we believe in, the importance of nonpartisanship and scholarship?”

When Bunch became the leader of the African American museum in 2005, that institution remained a distant dream.

He worked with Congress to fund it and attracted big-name donors including Oprah Winfrey. He appointed Republicans such as Laura Bush and Colin Powell to the board and won support by arguing that the museum should recognize the horrors of slavery and the struggle for civil rights while celebrating historical Black achievements. Bunch said the museum needed to tell “the quintessential American story” of progress.

It opened to great fanfare in 2016 and was the Smithsonian’s fourth-most-popular destination last year, with 1.6 million visitors. Bunch ascended to the Smithsonian’s top job in 2019.

In the spring, Bunch said he was proud of what the Smithsonian had achieved under his leadership despite the barrage of Trump attacks. “Nothing can take that away,” he said. “So I’m trying to make sure I don’t let this moment steal my joy.”

This week, he spoke of how important it was for the Smithsonian to continue to explore the country’s past in all its complexity. “Americans are an amazingly brave people, who have accomplished so much,” he said. “They’ve got to be brave enough to face their own history.”

“To me, that is essential,” he continued. “And I will stand against wind and tide to prevent history from being erased, softened, and made palatable. That’s wrong.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.