The Daily - The Lives That 9/11 Keeps Taking

0:04From The New York Times, I'm Michael Balvaro. This is a Daily. In New York City this morning, the families of those killed at the World Trade Center will gather for the 25th time. To honor the dead. One by one.

0:35In a solemn ritual that has become synonymous with the anniversary of the attacks. Among those at Ground Zero will be an array of public officials who assured the public, starting just weeks after the attacks, that it was safe to return to lower Manhattan, to live work, shop, and to go to school. Today, the story of the 68 boxes of newly released documents that make clear that those original assurances were wrong. I speak with my colleague, City Hall reporter Sally Goldenberg, and to Dana Nelson, who spent her teenage years next to Ground Zero, about the 9-11 health crisis that has now claimed more lives than the terrorist attack itself. It's Friday, September 11th.

2:19at the very beginning. So can you just describe what happened to you on September 11th and what that morning was like for you? I know it was 25 years ago, so it was a while ago. It was my fourth day of high school. I was going to Stuyvesant High School.

2:38And I was commuting in on the Staten Island ferry with my dad, and it was a beautiful day. My dad worked at 2 Rector Street, so he's three blocks south of the World Trade Center. And I went to Stuyvesant, so I was three blocks north of the World Trade Center. And I remember that day we were talking about how excited I was because I wanted to try out for the debate team that afternoon. Spirits were very high. I was wearing like a Care Bears t-shirt, you know, on the Staten Island ferry. Because I was a teenager and I was like a little punky, and I thought I was being ironic and cute.

3:06And, you know, he took the train with me to chambers and said that he would just, you know, stretch his legs and walk back down to Rector Street after he walked me to school that day because it was still new. So he was still walking me and helping me get adjusted to this travel. And everything seems to be normal until I was sitting in my English class on the ninth floor facing south. And my back was to the windows, but suddenly all of the kids facing the windows got up and ran to the windows and said, oh my god, somebody bombed the train centre because all we could see was just a gaping hole on fire at that point. Our teacher was running late that day, and so no adult in the room, just a bunch of high school freshmen trying to make sense of what we were seeing. Right, to make sense of the absolutely not make sensible for anyone of any age, let alone people of your age. Yeah.

4:06The principal got on the loudspeaker at some point during all of this and told us we were going to go about business as usual for now. So the bell rang. I went down to the second floor from an ex-class, which was history. And from the second floor, there were too many buildings to see what was going on out the windows. So we asked to put the news on. And then suddenly the picture on the news shook and it went to just static.

4:34And my classroom windows were hit with a wall of dust. At that point, they started evacuating us. And the entire school was crushing out of the north side emergency exit doors. And then we were just told to run north. This might sound like a strange question, but once you're outdoors and now both of the towers had collapsed, what did the air smell like and what did it feel like? You know, I don't know how to describe a smell that you can just conjure out of anywhere. Like I could smell it right now just thinking about this. But it was like, as if it was burning concrete. I mean, it's something that until you've smelled it, I don't think you can imagine it. Imagine burnt hair, burnt plastic, a campfire, every...

5:30horrible smell combined and that is what it smelled like and you know it's in my nose right now even as we're talking about it because we smelled it for so long and it was so strong. And my dad he wound up walking through the dust cloud and then north to meet me at another girl's apartment. Wow. He did tell me that he stopped at a bar on his way just to listen to the radio and and have a whiskey because he just could not fathom what was going on. How long was it?

6:08before you returned to school and into lower Manhattan. And what do you remember about what you were told about whether it was safe to return? So about three weeks after this happened, we were sent back to Stuyvesant. Only three weeks? Yes.

6:30And I remember the Parents Association having a lot of questions and sending a lot of emails about air quality and things like that and making sure that it was safe for the kids and having emergency meetings. And all the officials talking about how the air was safe to breathe and the water was safe to drink.

6:48What I remember even more than that is the constant repeated refrain of, oh, well, if we don't return to normal, see the terrorists win. Like, oh, if we don't go back, the terrorists win. And like, we need to show them how strong we are because that's the patriotic thing to do. And so, yeah, we went back three weeks later and we were told that it was fine. When you got back to the classroom, did you feel like things were back to normal?

7:16in that physical space was that indescribable smell that you talked about earlier gone? When I went back, it was like a dystopian nightmare. As soon as you enter the area, there was smoke, ash, sludge everywhere. That smell permeated everything. It's almost like, you know, how the beginning and end of the Wizard of Oz is in CPO? Like that's kind of what was going on in downtown New York.

7:45There was just so much dust and so much smoke and so much debris. It was void of color for a really long time. The air you're describing does not sound clean and normal. It sounds a little dangerous, a lot dangerous. Yeah. And in retrospect, of course, it was obviously dangerous. So when did you first get sick? I mean, in some ways right away.

8:17I quickly ended up having much worse sinus problems and allergies than I had had prior to that. So like, I had always had a slight allergy to my cats. I had always had some seasonal allergies. All of these things went haywire after September 11th. Like, I could no longer breathe around cats. Like, I would...

8:41get a migraine and start coughing when people had too much perfume on if there were dusty or smoky conditions, like my body reacted to that. And I was diagnosed with chronic rhinocinositis. And so I suffer from that still. But the real doozy was when I was 33 years old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And what stage of breast cancer were you diagnosed with?

9:05So I had stage two triple negative breast cancer. I discovered it because I had had a baby 11 months earlier and I was weaning him and I had a lump that wasn't getting worse or better or going away. And so I knew I should probably get it checked out and I did. So I was diagnosed at the end of 2020. So almost 20 years after September 11th. Wow. So pretty much from 2001 on you have had chronic health problems of varying seriousness, but ultimately the most serious imaginable. You got cancer. Yes. And when you found out that you had cancer, did you immediately think to yourself, this is because of what happened at the Trade Center because of that air? I did immediately think that this was the World Trade Center. There was just no reason for me to get breast cancer besides

10:05that. And I know that bad things happen to people all the time. I know that we can't always know for sure what caused something. But we can test genetics. I have no genetic mutations. I don't have a strong family history. It was just something that immediately seemed to be connected. How many other people from your school or from that time also end up getting sick? So many people that I know that were downtown Either at school with me or working there got really sick. My best friend is currently going through cancer treatment and she was in high school with me. My favorite teacher went through her breast cancer treatment at the same time as I did. And my father got kidney cancer a few years before I did. Wow. Just so many people in my orbit have become sick. And every time one of them lets you know.

11:03You just make this connection. How could you not? I mean, what do all of these people have in common? We were down there. We were breathing that air. We were existing in that world on a daily basis and we all ended up really, really sick. So what has been your reaction over the past few days when you learned about these new documents that tell such a very different story about the safety of being in lower Manhattan than what we were told back then. It's hard to remain level-headed and answer your question at the same time. I'm furious and I'm sad. And I think I wanted to believe that it was a mistake, that they thought it was safe, and then found out that they were wrong. But with the release of these documents, I feel like I was used

12:03To keep an economy going, I feel like I was used to symbolically show the strength of America and really that economic factors were more important to the people in power at this time than my health. You know, my cancer itself was bad enough. My dad eventually died because his health spiraled after his kidney cancer. I've lost so much because of their selfishness. And by their selfishness, you mean New York City's.

12:32Leaders correct after the break City Hall reporter Sally Goldenberg on what exactly the new records show and why those records were hidden from people like Dana Nelson for more than 20 years We'll be right back Sally. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for having me Michael What did we learn from these new documents that have emerged over the past?

13:17few days and that I know you have spent hours and hours sifting through. I think the most important finding, and remember there are 170,000 plus documents and many, many more to come over the course of the next year. And they're all over the place that some are correspondence among city officials, some are air quality reports, some are scratchy handwritten notes by inspectors, so it really runs the gamut. The picture that it paints, however, is that air Around Ground Zero for many, many days, weeks and months after the terrorist attacks remained unsafe. There were air quality reports that showed elevated levels of asbestos. There was an audit from an independent auditor that showed elevated levels of benzene, a carcinogen, and that was all based on information that the city was collecting. I just want to point to an open page on one of these reports, Sally, because I find it pretty fascinating.

14:12And at the top of the page it says asbestos error results. And these were taken from 9-11 the day of the attacks to November 29th of 2001. It says 2600 samples analyzed. So we're not talking about just a tiny number of reports here. That's right. That's right. There were constant ongoing error reports being done.

14:33But each one is different. There's not a uniform sort of air quality report that was presented in these documents. But just as a, for instance, we just picked an address, 15 John Street. It's about a half mile from ground zero. And each report just says, asbestos present on the facade, asbestos present on the electrical cable, asbestos present on the West roof. And report after report shows there was a tremendous amount of asbestos around that area.

15:02What these documents make clear is that in the area around the World Trade Center, in the weeks that followed it, that the air quality and even the surface quality of buildings, ledges, maybe even the interior of some of these places is filled with toxic materials. Kind of what you would expect after the extraordinary plume.

15:27that went up when the two towers collapsed. That's right. Now, there is not what people might want to see a smoking gun where mayors Giuliani or Bloomberg say, aha, air is bad and we're not going to tell anybody. Like that doesn't exist. And I just want to point out there's an ongoing city investigation into who knew what when. Okay, helpful. But some of the correspondence among high ranking city officials do show concerns were being communicated to them. So there's one memo here.

15:54that shows us that in the final stretch of the Giuliani administration, a mayoral aide prepared for a deputy mayor at the time, Robert Harding, a brief accounting of the litigation that the city was potentially at risk of. And some of them are because of the air quality around ground zero. Legal risks. Legal risks, that's right. How big a legal risk does this memo outline?

16:19So she says, you know, and she's basing this on an accounting from the city law department, there are about 35,000 potential plaintiffs as a result of September 11th and she estimates that 10,000 could file a claim. And so what this aid does is, you know, she sort of lays out a bunch of potential risks legally for the city. Some didn't come to fruition, but one, which is relevant to this conversation, she says health advisories caused individuals either to return to the area too soon, causing toxic exposure or emotional harm or too late, causing economic hardship. We now know 25 years later which of those two things happened. It was a much earlier return and many people are getting sick. So a pretty revealing memo when we think about how aware or worried city officials were

17:08right after the attacks that what was in the air was going to be a problem. And obviously that's paired with these air quality reports that we can now see that showed that what's in the air includes carcinogens at pretty meaningful levels. So Sally, just remind us how much what's reflected in these documents differs from what city leaders were telling the public, were telling all of us in the weeks and months after these attacks. So shortly after September 11th, the public was being reassured that the air was safe to breathe. I think the most memorable person who said that was Christy Todd Whitman, who was the director of the Environmental Protection Agency. As I say, you know asbestos was in there, is in those buildings, lead is in those buildings. There are the VOCs, however.

18:04The concentrations are such that they don't pose a health hazard. We're going to make sure everybody's safe. So at the highest level of government, an assurance was being given, I believe, one week later, the air was safe to breathe. But that was a federal government. You can't get higher. Right. That was somebody who worked for President George W. Bush. Correct. Based on that information, Mayor Giuliani at the time was saying in countless quotes, I think it's safe. The health department has done...

18:32tests and at this point is not concerned. But so far all the tests that we've done do not show an undue amount of asbestos. It doesn't show any particular chemical agent that we have to be concerned about. Now he often qualified those statements. He acknowledged the odor is terrible, there is smoke, but there was an assurance being given that the air was safe to breathe. He was parroting that.

18:58When Mayor Bloomberg took over January 1st of 2002, he was very anxious to get Lower Manhattan reopened to really drive the economy down there because it was a ghost town. The most important step in New York City's rebuilding effort is the revitalization of the economy of Lower Manhattan. Right, and because he himself had hailed from Wall Street, he very much was focused on bringing back the economy. Yes, that was very important to him.

19:24There cannot be nationwide prosperity if the financial institutions of New York City are allowed to fade in the aftermath of September 11th. And so Mayor Bloomberg also was kind of continually saying, it's safe, don't worry. Every single test done by the federal state and city governments say that the air quality here is perfectly safe. And in February of 2002, we found a quote in which 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. Is it safe to say that that cannot really be reconciled with these new documents? So the documents don't always show

20:15that the asbestos is out of the limits that were acceptable. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Unfortunately, it's hard to paint a sort of perfectly clear picture because each test is a bit different. And not everybody agrees on what's an acceptable level of asbestos. But what I think this shows is that whether or not these mayors, and in this case, Mike Bloomberg knew Everything there was to know and he probably didn't to be fair. You know, the information was constantly changing He was painting a partial picture for New Yorkers because his priority was reopening Manhattan And so he and Giuliani before him were giving some information not all they were certainly not warning people of the most severe concerns that they and their administrations seemed to know I want to focus for just a minute on what would likely have been the motivation

21:06folks whether it was Christie Todd Whitman or Rudy Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg to focus on the message of let's get back to normal. And it's hard to remember 25 years ago just how desperate the scene was in Lower Manhattan and the fears of economic collapse.

21:30Yeah, I think that's an important point. So this is conjecture on my part. But I think from a federal point of view, it was making Americans feel safe. I mean, this was a terrorist attack on American soil. It was considered an act of war by many people. We were alive at the time. You know, it was very scary for many people. It was an unknown, something people hadn't experienced before. And I think the federal government felt a responsibility to make people feel safe and make people feel like America was still thriving and not under permanent threat of attack. Locally, there were concerns, and again, understandably, there were concerns about the economy. People were afraid to be in lower Manhattan. They wanted businesses opening. They wanted schools opening. I think it was partially psychic. They wanted a sense of normalcy. And of course,

22:16Yeah, Wall Street is a tremendous economic engine. They wanted that going. And if you were in Lower Manhattan for years after, it really was a very different place. And it took a long time for it to become kind of thriving again. And so I think that that is sort of a typical instinct that leaders have to like reassure the public and get things back to normal. Right. And to not necessarily say, let me show you all these air quality reports.

22:42that paint a much more complicated picture. Yes, and I think they didn't want to scare people probably also because they didn't necessarily know the greatest risks. I'm sure they were not aware of how many people would be getting cancer how many years later. Sally, why has it taken so long for us to see what in many cases are literally 25 year old documents that were in the hands of our city government?

23:08So it's a very strange and complicated story. It starts with an advocacy organization called 9-Eleven Health Watch and they, as aptly named, are advocating for the healthcare for people who are around Ground Zero. They didn't know what the city had. They didn't know, you know, what materials was in the city's possession, but they correctly assumed that the administrations starting with Rudy Giuliani would have air quality reports and other documents that would paint a fuller picture about the hazards around ground zero. And so they started agitating mayor after mayor to get the release of these documents. They were suing, they were getting the city council to pass a bill into law that would mandate an investigation into who knew what when. And during the process of that, in the offices of the Department of Environmental Protection, someone discovered 68 boxes and they contained these air quality reports, these memos, everything we've been discussing.

24:06And when Mamdani took over as mayor January 1st of this year, he and his corporation council, the city's lead lawyer, Steve Banks, decided very quickly in a late night phone call in January or February that they were going to release the documents of these boxes. Good morning, everyone. I want to thank all those who have joined us this morning at City Hall. And this week, after putting all of these documents in an online portal that's searchable to anybody.

24:35Mayor Mamdani held a news conference Tuesday morning. 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. And he said very plainly these show that leaders lied to New Yorkers and they got sick as a result. Right. I mean, in essence, what Mayor Mamdani seem to say during that news conference is that the previous mayors, the people who held this job before me and he didn't necessarily name their names, but we all know who he means. Aren't that many mayors since sign 11? He's saying they, they duped you. They told you that New York, lower Manhattan was safe and these documents say that it was not. That's right. Sally, when Mayor Mondani talks about people getting sick,

25:34Can you just remind us how big that universe of people is? We spoke to one woman, Dana Nelson, who, along with her father, ended up getting cancer, both of them, years after the attacks. But they are but two of a very large number, is my sense.

25:51That's right. You know, in the initial years after September 11th, people were getting sick and there were doctors tracking that, but it wasn't until the founding of the Victims Compensation Fund, which was set up by federal law 10 years later that the federal government was really in an organized kind of comprehensive way tracking this. And there's a statistic that I looked up last night that I think is telling by the end of last year, 2025.

26:188,996 deceased claims had been paid out by the Victims Compensation Fund. To put that in scale, we're talking about roughly triple the number of people who died on September 11th, close to 9,000 people. And all of those people or the vast majority of them died because of the health aftermath of 9-11. We're not talking about the people who died in the attacks on that day. That's right.

26:47That number just given its scale is clearly not just first responders police or fire It's hugely broad that's right, and you see more and more people who were either students or workers or Pedestrians who were in and around the area Applying to the victims compensation fund and very sadly getting sick the emphasis early on was of course on the first responders because they were working for hour after hour day after day often without masks on this pile pulling out bodies And they were getting sick, you know pretty quickly But since then the universe has expanded tremendously and the victims compensation fund extended the filing deadline until 2090 So if you were born in 2001 you would be 89 at the point at which you could file a claim I mean that feels like such a clear Acknowledgement by the government

27:45of just how long the tale of this is, that they expect that people will be getting sick through the next many decades. That's right. And as we know, that is how some of these diseases operate. That is how cancer behaves. It takes a very long time sometimes to form after exposure to a carcinogen. Sally, what have city officials who were in positions of authority back in 2001 back in 2002, 2003, all the way through and who offered these often very simplistic assurances of safety that brought so many people back to lower Manhattan. What have they said about these new documents that were sitting around that their aides may have created? I mean, do they now express regret? No.

28:44Mayor Bloomberg has not responded to requests for comment. We started calling him when we were looking through the documents. The Times broke the story of the documents and started looking through them last week. His staff did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Mayor Giuliani initially didn't comment, but an aide to Giuliani did send us a statement not really saying anything specific. The statement did acknowledge that the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency, issued public reassurances. You know, I think that was a way of saying, look, there was someone above us telling us it was okay. Other than that, the statement really didn't deal at all with what we're talking about here. And as for mayors, Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, both of them put out statements in the last couple of days basically saying they didn't know about these boxes. They did nothing wrong. They weren't hiding anything from the public. So basically nobody is saying

29:42the buck stops here. No one's really taking responsibility for this. That's exactly right. So what do we think that accountability is going to look like here? I mean, given what these documents tell us that we could have known and should have known early on, does this information trigger a new wave of lawsuits? Does it increase the city's legal liability? Like what would accountability look like going forward and maybe what should it look like? So I think first and foremost, people who maybe weren't aware of the victim's compensation fund and what's available to them can now look at this portal, put in the address of wherever they were on September 11th. They can use any number of search terms to find out more information about their own health conditions and take that to the victim's compensation fund and apply.

30:38for grants. You're saying that this portal lets people literally find out if they were likely exposed and if they didn't know, now realize that they're eligible for some compensation. That's potential, sure. In terms of litigation, the city has a fair amount of immunity as I understand it from a number of lawyers I spoke to because this was considered an act of war and an appellate court upheld that and that does provide some measure of immunity.

31:08But regardless of what happens legally, this is now part of the legacy of a number of mayors and two in particular who took a great amount of pride in how they handled the aftermath of 9-11. I mean, Rudy Giuliani was called America's mayor. He was on TV every day in everyone's living room, standing with New Yorkers, reassuring them, bringing the city back from the brink.

31:35Mike Bloomberg took over and put a ton of his own political and personal capital into both the remembrance at the museum and memorial down there, and into rebuilding and driving the economy back to lower Manhattan. They did a lot. This isn't all of what they did, but now it's on the record. And it can't be forgotten. Well, Sally, thank you. Pretty much appreciate it. Thank you. I would not have gone back.

32:17if I knew then what I know now. And my parents for however much information they may have lacked, if they knew, if the people in power were sharing the information that they had about how unsafe it was, they would have pulled me out of that school. Do you think your father would have ever returned to his office in Lower Manhattan? Absolutely not. And it's not like this is an easy thing I'm saying. You know, I didn't grow up with a lot of money. My dad at that time was the only one working in my household like he needed his job, but I still think he would have looked for work somewhere else or he would have encouraged his company to move. He was working for a startup at that time and he was the one who located office space. He's the one who moved even closer to the World Trade Center the following year when their lease was up and there were so many deals on buildings in the area. And so, if he had had this information, if he had known how dangerous this was in real terms,

33:17there's absolutely no way that that's the least he would have encouraged the CEO to sign for his company. I mean, I think I know how you'd answer this, but is there any question in your mind that if you had been able to read these documents as a kid and your parents had been able to read these documents back in 2001, 2002, in those months and years afterwards, and you had been able to make different decisions that you would have not?

33:48And your dad would have not gotten sick. There is a chance that our exposure on the day itself could have contributed to illness. And I can't pretend that that's not true. But we know that for so many things in the world, the poison is in the dose, right?

34:10And there were things that could have been done and information that could have been shared that could have allowed me to Reduce the harm and instead I was a teenager and I was Right next to a burning pit of chemicals every day After school with my friends playing sports doing clubs You know just the hours I spent there breathing that in I think about it now, and I'm just absolutely horrified I don't think people realize that this is not something that just triggers me and upsets me on 9-11 because I'm remembering that day. This is the fact that this coming Monday, I have to go have a nodule on my thyroid biopsied. And as a cancer survivor, I am freaking out about that. I don't get to just assume that something has been nine or just wait until results come back for something.

35:06I have to investigate every symptom that I have. I do not trust my own body. There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about cancer. There is not a day that goes by that I don't think about September 11th. And unfortunately, there's not a day that goes by where I don't wonder what the next problem will be. Well, Dana, thank you so very much for taking the time to talk to us. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day.

36:14For the second time this week, the Supreme Court acted to prevent Missouri from using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans in November's elections. The ruling sought to end the legal confusion that arose a few days ago when a lower court ruled that Missouri officials could use the redrawn map, even after the Supreme Court said that they should not.

36:41But the ruling now creates a new problem, because the redrawn Republican-friendly map was already used in Missouri's primary elections, which were held in August. That means that some nominees who won those primaries may now run in different districts for the general election. Tiddy's episode was produced by Anna Foley, Jack DeSidoreau, Eric Krupke, and Asta Chaturvedi.

37:14It was edited by MJ Davis Lin. Contains music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Marion Lazano, Chelsea Daniel, Diane Wong, and Sophia Landman. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Wonderling. Special thanks to Joe Goldstein. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Babarro. See you on Sunday.