Harding Memo Shows City Knew 9/11 Air Was Toxic Sooner Than Admitted

Fresh revelations about City Hall’s handling of environmental hazards after September 11th highlight uncomfortable truths about trust and transparency in the face of disaster.

Of all the artefacts to emerge decades after the September 11th attacks, an internal memo may be the least showy and the most momentous. Buried in the municipal archives for over two decades, a newly released memorandum penned by New York City’s then-chief environmental officer, Joel A. Miele Sr., to First Deputy Mayor Joseph Lhota, dated October 2001, makes for chilling reading. It documents that city officials were aware—weeks after the Twin Towers collapsed—that toxic dust and fumes lingered perilously over Lower Manhattan.

The long-sought document, made public after litigation by victims’ advocates and media, outlines how city agencies had detected hazardous levels of asbestos, lead, and volatile organic compounds at several monitoring sites around Ground Zero. The memo shines light, at last, on what the city’s highest officials arguably knew and when. In direct contrast, public messaging at the time, including confident statements by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, insisted the air was “safe to breathe.”

For New Yorkers, the memo’s release is more clarifying than cathartic. In the weeks after the attacks, Lower Manhattan residents and first responders found themselves walking—and working—amid an acrid haze from pulverised concrete, burning plastics, and whatever else the buildings’ collapse might have liberated. Decades later, the tale that officials did their best in impossible circumstances now looks threadbare.

The first-order consequences are hard to exaggerate. According to the World Trade Center Health Program, 80,000 responders and 400,000 residents, students, and workers were exposed, often unwittingly, to a banquet of carcinogens and respiratory irritants. Many subsequently developed chronic conditions—cancer, asthma, autoimmune disorders. As lawsuits and compensation funds roll onward, the city’s liability for downplaying environmental dangers seems unlikely to dissipate.

The document’s publication resonates with particular poignancy in a city that still prizes its resilience. To date, more than 2,000 deaths have been certified as related to 9/11-linked illness, a number that now increases annually. Future chronic disease among the cohort exposed is a grim certainty, not a vague possibility. The city’s obligation to provide healthcare and support for these New Yorkers remains gargantuan; public trust, meanwhile, has been left notably more frail.

But the consequences ripple further. The memo’s emergence may deepen scepticism of official statements, especially in the wake of more recent disasters—Superstorm Sandy, the COVID-19 pandemic, the wildfire smoke of summer 2023. If authorities hedged or dissembled about environmental dangers then, what credence should New Yorkers place in statements now? The erosion of trust bodes poorly for the city’s ability to coordinate mass responses and ensure compliance with safety orders in future crises.

Consider the financial impact as well. The World Trade Center Health Program, established in 2010, serves more than 120,000 participants and requires over $400m in annual federal funding. New evidence of early City Hall knowledge is likely to spur calls for expanded eligibility, broader screening, and—eventually—greater public expenditure. For New York’s precarious municipal ledger, the revelations could yet prove expensive.

Nationally, the affair places New York’s response alongside other notable examples of official communication gone awry: Flint, Michigan’s water crisis; the missteps around Deepwater Horizon; or the EPA’s equivocations after Ohio’s train derailment last year. Yet official prevarication is not uniquely American—witness Chernobyl, or Beijing’s early messaging on COVID-19. Disaster communications the world over reveal a tendency among governing institutions to reassure first and correct later.

Trust and transparency, after the fires die down

Data, of course, are rarely perfect in the chaos of catastrophe. In October 2001, scientific understanding of the dust’s chemistry was imperfect and public panic an ever-present threat. Yet the desire to avoid mass hysteria can easily, as here, cross into misrepresentation and bureaucratic myopia. Contrary to the blandishments of then-officials, the hard truth is that candour might have cost less—financially and morally—than artful obfuscation.

It would be comforting to treat the Harding memo (as it has become colloquially known) as an artefact of a distant, exceptional moment. Tempting, too, to believe that city leaders today would never repeat such a blinkered gamble. In practice, the incentives that led authorities to “manage” the message remain in place, and the institutional memory—as persisting lawsuits show—remains patchy.

The city’s measures for environmental emergency response are today more robust than before September 2001. Air quality monitoring, hazard communications, and transparency requirements have all evolved, informed by the hard-won lessons of 9/11. But data without trust are a puny bulwark. If New Yorkers are to believe officials in the next disaster, it will not be because of regulations or protocols; it will be because those in authority grudgingly learn to tell hard truths before soft reassurance.

History’s judgment may yet be kinder than our own—managing an urban cataclysm is a Herculean task. Yet a memo, once filed and now exposed, reminds us that the path to a more resilient metropolis requires not only better science and ample funding but also a frank reckoning with the failures of candour past. ■