The Toxic Lie at Ground Zero: 25 Years Later, the Truth Is Still Being Uncovered

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

That endless blue sky, devoid of even a single cloud, became one of the most haunting features of one of the darkest days in American history, a reminder that the beautiful and the terrible are often stitched together, as though one lays the groundwork for the other.

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

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 these new documents is a jarring reminder that there is much we still do not 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 reach the usual news clerk. Instead, Howell Raines, the new executive editor of the paper, picked up the phone.

“Should I go down there?” I asked. “Go down,” came his answer.

Hoping to avoid getting trapped on a halted subway, I hopped on my bike and pedaled down Seventh Avenue, passing 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. I could hear intermittent popping sounds, which I later understood to be people falling to the sidewalks after jumping from the upper floors.

After a police officer tried to shoo me away, I locked my bike to a scaffolding on a side street, fought against a tide of departing office workers, and made my way to an entrance of the North Tower, where I could see a line of employees backed up the interior stairwell, waiting to get out, some of them damp and bloody. The air seemed to be changing, second by second, into a dust-and-ash firestorm.

What began with a low, ominous rumble turned into a roar as the South Tower dissolved, a metal waterfall raining from the sky. Following the waving arms of an FBI agent, I barreled up Fulton Street and dove into a subway entrance, just as the pulverized building thundered over me. I assumed that I would be buried alive.

Ever so slowly, the squall of debris eased, and the blackness lifted. Stinging dust filled my mouth and ears, caked my hair, and covered my clothes.

I padded down a street carpeted with building insulation toward what was then New York University Downtown Hospital, where staff were handing out dampened paper towels in a futile attempt to keep those covered in dust from carrying it inside. A surge of new evacuees pressed in on us as the North Tower fell.

Where was the CIA, I wondered, and how had America been left so ill-protected? In the months and years that followed, these were questions I reported on as a journalist, first for The New York Times and then for Vanity Fair. But I never addressed a reporting question closer to home: What led to the catastrophic failure of the Environmental Protection Agency?

At my boyfriend’s architecture office, 10 blocks north, he washed my hair in the bathroom, soaped my back, and gave me his undershirt, the stinging insulation creeping from my skin to his. Over the next several hours, I worked my way past security cordons with help from a sympathetic cop, a Hatzolah ambulance driver, and a volunteer firefighter, until I returned to the place I had started that morning — a location that would forever be known as Ground Zero.

As I later wrote in The American Journalism Review, “Only Gustave Doré’s drawings of Dante’s Inferno looked anything like it at all. Streams of water crisscrossing giant shards of building, metal piercing through smoke, skeletal crews in the intersection with tools as tragically inadequate as single fire hoses against smoldering rubble heaps seven stories high.”

In the shattered American Express building, someone had set up a supply table with meager defenses: hand sanitizer, eye drops, and basic surgical masks. I found a surviving telephone on a reception desk and spent hours calling in reporting feeds. After a cop kicked me out, I napped fitfully on a lone office chair in the middle of Vesey Street, fashioning socks from a roll of gauze for my freezing feet.

The next day dawned with news of alarming hazards. There were leaking gas mains. The city had designated eight blocks in all directions as a building-collapse zone. The evacuation plan was primitive. “If you see these guys run, then run,” one firefighter advised me.

And then there was the air. Even then, a rescuer on site had mentioned an EPA claim that would become the agency’s official position just one week after the attacks: the air was safe to breathe. Not only was this manifestly false, but it was unsupported by “sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement,” a 2003 report by the EPA inspector general revealed.

I left Ground Zero at around 10:30 p.m. on September 12 and trudged back home up the West Side Highway, leaving the remains of my bike somewhere amid the rubble.

In the days that followed, bruises bloomed on my legs. I dreamed of falling buildings. For weeks, I felt the scratchy insulation fibers, from my lungs to my fingertips. My cough persisted, sometimes producing a dark phlegm.

I didn’t return to “The Pile,” as it became known. But hundreds of brave rescue workers from New York and beyond spent months digging through mountains of toxic debris, some effectively giving their lives to excavate the remains of those who perished on 9/11, as they succumbed to lung disease and cancer.

On September 8 at a press conference announcing the release of new documents, Mayor Mamdani stated, “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.” The documents show that asbestos was still being detected in air quality tests half a mile from Ground Zero — ten months after the attacks, according to The New York Times.

The Mamdani administration has pledged to release more documents in the coming months. And though digging on the pile is long over, the work of excavating the truth continues, 25 years later.

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