I Was at Ground Zero on 9/11. We Deserve Answers About the Government’s Air Quality Lies

The weather on September 11, as we’ve come to know it in New York City, is strangely perfect year after year — clear, bright and temperate, as though it has come from a movie set.

That endless blue sky, without even the threat of a cloud, became a memorable feature of one of the darkest days in American history, helping remind us how the perfect and the terrible are often stitched together, almost as though one lays the groundwork for the other.

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released some 170,000 pages of long-concealed air-quality documents, forced into view by a lawsuit from the advocacy organization 9/11 Health Watch. The pages, which come from 68 boxes that city officials say were discovered in a municipal office last year, help further expose some of the long-buried truths about the air quality in downtown Manhattan after the attacks. They tell a story of the acrid toxins left over from the Twin Towers’ destruction, but also the lies that followed, and the environmental hazards that by some estimates led to three times more deaths than the attacks of 9/11 itself.

The false claims that the air was safe began almost immediately, as I knew from the 40 hours I spent reporting for The New York Times at Ground Zero and its surrounds, from before the first tower fell to the night of September 12. Even 25 years later, amid all the harm perpetrated against the United States, the environmental lies remain a dark and mystifying self-own, the release of new documents a jarring reminder that there is much we still don’t know.

As a young Metro reporter, I covered Manhattan criminal courts. But on that primary Election Day, my assignment was to head to a nursing home in Staten Island that had recently lost its in-house voting booths.

Shortly before 9 a.m., I stood with a small crowd at the window of my Chelsea Piers gym, gazing at the flames emerging from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I loped back to my apartment, called in to the Metro desk and expected to get the usual news clerk. Instead, Howell Raines, the new executive editor of the paper, picked up the phone. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Hoping to avoid getting trapped on a halted subway, I hopped on my bike and pedaled down Seventh Avenue, past a crowd of nurses in scrubs standing outside St. Vincent’s hospital, their gazes fixed downtown. By then, the second tower had been struck.

Burning skyscrapers have a weather all their own. I could feel the buildings from blocks away. They spit and crackled, the heat intensifying the closer I got. Office papers, thousands of them, fluttered through the air. The sunlight had vanished behind black clouds of smoke.