NewsMV
A cache of more than 170,000 pages of city and environmental records made public by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday contradicts the official line, held since September 2001, that air near the World Trade Center site was safe to breathe.
The documents, found in 68 boxes at the Department of Environmental Protection in 2025, arrive just days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, in which 2,977 people were killed.
The numbers on contamination The starkest readings in the records come from Stuyvesant High School, located less than half a mile north of the World Trade Center site.
A carpet sample from the school's auditorium, tested in August 2002 using the EPA-recognized ultrasonication method, registered roughly 2.5 million asbestos structures per square centimeter.
Keep reading