The Lethal Dust of 9/11

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll get details on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to release thousands of documents about air quality around ground zero after the Sept. 11 attacks. We’ll also find out why a food pantry reinvented itself to look like a grocery store. Think Trader Joe’s.

In a city that was immeasurably changed by the Sept. 11 attacks, even the air figured in the enduring nightmare. Dust lingered after the twin towers collapsed, and people inhaled it.

On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released thousands of pages of documents about air quality around the World Trade Center site in the months after the attacks. The documents contradict the assurances from officials who said at the time that the air was safe to breathe — a point Mamdani highlighted at a news briefing.

“It would be one thing if government had stood alongside survivors and provided them with everything they needed every step of the way,” the mayor said, “and yet we know that could not be further from what actually happened. People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”

He said that the documents show “what the city knew about the toxic air around ground zero, when they knew it and how they acted to limit liability.”

It was an extraordinary moment: It amounted to assigning blame to past mayors, even if Mamdani did not name them. A spokesman for Rudolph Giuliani, who was the mayor on 9/11, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for Michael Bloomberg, who became mayor four months after the attacks, declined to comment. Both mayors said at the time that the air was safe to breathe, as did Christine Todd Whitman, who was then the administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

One former mayor who did comment was Eric Adams, who was in office when workers at the Department of Environmental Protection found the boxes containing the records. Adams, through his spokesman, accused Mamdani of “exploiting the pain of 9/11 families, survivors and first responders for a political headline.”

The disclosures left scientists and health-policy experts raising issues that have little to do with air quality data and more to do with trust in government.

“To think of the workers and the people who live nearby and the lack of transparency about it at the time is frightening,” said Maria Dao, the senior director of chemical policy of the Environmental Defense Fund. “To me, it’s frightening that nobody was really given the proper information or it was not handled in a way in a way that would protect people from exposure.”

Michael Seilback, an assistant vice president of the American Lung Association, recalled that there had been questions about the air “from the beginning.”

“We received calls: ‘I know the E.P.A. is saying it’s safe — is it safe?’” he said. “We don’t do air-quality testing. That’s not something we’re equipped for. This release of these documents really reinforces the idea that it’s imperative that our decision makers are being honest and open with the data that they have and that transparency is crucial.”

Andrew Kirtzman, who was a political reporter with NY1 News in 2001 and later wrote a biography of Giuliani, said that he had followed the mayor to ground zero “countless times” and did not remember “any focus on protecting ourselves from the air.”

“There were masks for the workers in the rubble, thank God,” he said, “but to my memory it was never made a priority. So it doesn’t surprise me that there wasn’t a great deal of effort at the time to protect people from the particles in the air, but it is infuriating. It is infuriating how much they actually knew and didn’t reveal.”

George Thurston, a professor of medicine and population health at the New York University School of Medicine who was involved in setting up a monitoring station at NYU Downtown Hospital, said that government agencies were “monitoring routine things, routine pollutants, and this was not a routine situation.”

“We were seeing a lot more pollutants than they were measuring,” he said, including caustic particles related to a cough that was common in Lower Manhattan. “Meanwhile, the government was saying the air was safe to breathe.”

Much of the research on exposure to the World Trade Center residue has focused on emergency workers. An alarming number have fallen ill with respiratory ailments and cancer. But my colleague Joseph Goldstein notes that children who were nearby have received less attention.

They are grown now, but the federally funded World Trade Center Health Program is moving to track them down and enroll them in a large research cohort. Scientists who have been studying the health effects of the dust exposure welcome the effort, but as Leonardo Trasande, a medical researcher at NYU Langone Health, put it, “I would say it’s a tad late.”

“That might be a nice way to put it,” he added.

Weather

Look for a mostly sunny morning with light wind. The high will be near 86. It will be partly cloudy tonight, with the low in the mid-70s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Saturday (Rosh Hashana)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“We’ve always used trash cans. I don’t like the fact that they made us pay for it.” — Lizette Gonzalez-Ruiz of Staten Island, who said that official “NYC bins” are unnecessary. Residential buildings with nine or fewer units will face fines that start at $50 if they don’t have them.

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Julia Roberts to return to Broadway: “Small Mouth Sounds” will reunite Roberts with Paul Rudd, who co-starred in her one previous Broadway run, in “Three Days of Rain” in 2006.
How the world’s longest-running musical finally made it to Broadway: “The Fantasticks” — which opened Off Broadway in 1960 and is generally considered the longest-running musical in the world — is about to open on Broadway, with a gender makeover.

A food pantry that looks like a Trader Joe’s

The Champion House Food Pantry in Newark got a makeover a couple of months ago. Gone were pre-filled bags. They were replaced by aisles like those in a grocery store and carts to carry the items that patrons took off the shelves. The place got a new name, too — the Market at UCC.

Officials had noticed that people sometimes sifted through the old prepackaged bags and tossed some of the food on the sidewalk. That wasted food “by giving everybody something, and most of the time they don’t need it at all,” said Craig Mainor, the executive director of the United Community Corporation, the nonprofit that runs the pantry.

The new approach lets people “get what they need, not necessarily what we want them to get,” he said. It also lets them “shop with some dignity, as opposed to just the proverbial handout.”

Remaking the pantry into a storelike operation reflects a creative strategy that comes as more people are turning to food pantries amid rising grocery prices and cuts in federal food stamp benefits. The similarity to a grocery store is no surprise: Sarah Allen, a program coordinator, drew on her experience as a Trader Joe’s crew member in designing the new pantry.

But it comes at a price. Operating the storelike pantry costs about $500,000 a year, about $200,000 more than the traditional pantry model.

METROPOLITAN diary

Full freezer

Dear Diary:

I was a single mother living in Brooklyn and working two jobs. Twice a week after work, I put my young daughter in her stroller and headed down the avenue to run errands.

We went to the cleaners, the grocery store, the drugstore and the toy store window before ending at the butcher shop.

One evening, just before closing, the butcher told me he had several lamb chops and two steaks left and no room in his freezer. He offered them to me at a bargain price.

I thanked him but declined. They weren’t in my budget.

He lowered the price.

I hesitated again.

“They’ll go bad otherwise,” he said.

Finally, I agreed. We hadn’t had lamb chops or steak in months.

Walking home, I thought about his three enormous freezers. Were they really full?

I do not remember the lamb chops or the steaks. I do remember the generosity.

— Diane Garofalo

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

Andy Chen and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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