City Knew 9/11 Toxin Risks in October 2001, Lower Manhattan Told Otherwise

The belated disclosure of a memo on 9/11 toxins exposes enduring questions about official candour and New York’s capacity to reckon with its traumatic legacy.

It was an autumn to remember—but not one the city’s leaders seem eager to recall in full. On September 28th, 2001, posters fluttered along Canal Street proclaiming Lower Manhattan “open for business,” less than three weeks after the collapse of the Twin Towers released uncountable tonnes of toxic debris into the downtown air. City officials, led by then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani, insisted the area was safe. New Yorkers, trusting or desperate, returned. Two decades and nearly 50,000 9/11-related cancer diagnoses later, a whistle from the past has sounded in the form of an unearthed legal memo: the so-called Harding memo, which shows lawyers for the city quietly bracing for a flood of liability claims even as they issued those reassurances.

Unveiled last week by City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Councilwoman Gale Brewer, the memo from October 2001 lays out what some had long suspected: the city’s legal advisors knew of health risks—ranging from respiratory illnesses to potential cancers—from toxins like metals and asbestos still filling the air. The risk assessment estimated up to 10,000 lawsuits could arise from New Yorkers allegedly misled by official statements about air quality following the attacks. Yet the document was buried in an archive at the University of Texas for two decades, surfacing only after persistent pro-bono attorneys and weary victims pressed for answers.

For the nearly 500,000 people who worked, lived, or attended school in post-9/11 Lower Manhattan, the revelation is both galling and sadly predictable. Over the years, the discrepancy between official statements and survivor experience became a kind of open secret. Initial claims of safety gave way to mounting evidence of health effects—persistent cough, chronic disease, now nearly 50,000 cancer diagnoses among first responders and civilians alike. The Harding memo, long referenced by watchdogs and authors but never publicly confirmed, is both a historical artefact and an indictment of official secrecy.

The significance is not merely backward-looking. As New York prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the memo’s publication underscores the city’s still-frayed relationship with transparency and responsibility. For every survivor or bereaved family, the knowledge that city hall actively planned for legal exposure—rather than openly discussing health risks—reopens old wounds. “It is outrageous, and it is shocking, and it is heartbreaking,” said Andrew Carboy, an attorney for 9/11 victims, at the press conference outside City Hall. Local officials echoed the sentiment, with Menin herself noting the continued shame of institutional evasiveness.

On a practical level, the act of hiding such a document may shape legal and regulatory consequences for years to come. The city’s prior reluctance to release toxin records—at one point asserting it had “no documents” before a Department of Investigation probe discovered 68 boxes—suggests a systemic habit of opacity rather than isolated misjudgment. Disputes over liability and victim compensation are likely to persist, as plaintiffs’ attorneys seek to use the Harding memo to bolster claims that the city put expedient reopening before public safety.

The broader economic and social reverberations are not negligible. Lower Manhattan, now a glossier, more prosperous enclave than in 2001, was shaped in part by the imperative to restore confidence as quickly as possible. But for thousands battling health effects, the real bill for rapid reopening continues to grow, folding medical costs and compensation into the region’s budgetary fabric. Public trust—the hardest currency to replace—remains perilously low, particularly among populations who feel sacrificed for headline-ready “resilience.”

There is, too, a political lesson. New York is not alone in gilding the facts for public consumption under duress; but its example is a parable in the perils of underestimating the costs, both human and fiscal, of official misdirection. In the months after 9/11, the Environmental Protection Agency, then under Christine Todd Whitman, made ill-fated claims of “no significant health risk” from dust and debris. The Harding memo places the city administration, not just federal appointees, firmly in the dock of hindsight.

New York’s conundrum is, if anything, emblematic of metropolitan governance under crisis. Comparable episodes—think of Chernobyl’s initial cover-up, or, more recently, Wuhan’s handling of early COVID-19 data—suggest a strong but ill-fated temptation to privilege economic normalcy and public calm over full disclosure. But the cultural expectation in the globe’s most scrutinised city ought to have been more rigorous. In Germany, or Japan, one reckons the public release of parallel risk assessments would have been more likely, if only to mollify restive citizens. Yet the underlying dynamic persists: short-term reassurance, long-term erosion of institutional faith.

Disclosure and its discontents

The story of the Harding memo’s rediscovery is nearly as revealing as its contents. The document, first referenced by journalist Wayne Barrett in 2006, lay misplaced in 300 boxes until university clerks—prompted by Texas-based pro-bono lawyers—dug it out only this January. It is quietly telling that, in 2024, city record-keepers must rely on outside pressure and distant archives to fulfil overdue promises of transparency. Even now, much of the city’s internal deliberations around environmental risks remain inaccessible.

That secretiveness bodes poorly. Confidence in public institutions—battered by the pandemic, regulatory lapses, and noisy disinformation—needs shoring up, not further battering. More transparency, and swifter release of historical documents, could help. Releasing the full trove of 9/11 health records would not merely aid remaining litigants; it would serve as penance for a city too often content to polish its own legend.

Still, we detect in the memo’s emergence a sorrier theme. It has become axiomatic that governments act first to diminish liability, later to mend credibility gaps. New York is left clinging, yet again, to the hope that economic buoyancy and the passage of time will erase a hard-learned lesson: public trust, once lost, is rarely reacquired at any price.

Yet there remains a faint glimmer of progress. The revelation has prompted renewed calls from City Council leaders to re-examine, and possibly improve, health monitoring and compensation for the 9/11-affected. Public memory, while unreliable, has a way of sharpening policy through intermittent rediscovery.

That said, the pace is lamentable. Even amid a city predicated on perpetual motion, the wheels of reckoning turn slowly. For survivors, workers, and the bereaved, justice in increments is paltry consolation.

The Harding memo does not upend New Yorkers’ understanding of the post-9/11 response. But it throws the city’s failure of candour into sharper relief, demanding more rigorous stewardship in the face of future crises—a standard as urgent today as it was on that autumn day in 2001. ■