BS BULLETIN:

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani has released more than 170,000 pages of long-hidden records on toxic conditions around Ground Zero.
• The documents show asbestos and other contaminants persisted after New Yorkers were assured the air was safe.
• Some records had remained out of public view for more than two decades.

New Yorkers were told the air around Ground Zero was safe.

Twenty-five years later, a massive trove of newly released city records is providing another look at what officials actually knew.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday ordered more than 170,000 pages of September 11-related air-quality reports, contamination records and government correspondence made public, just days before the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

The records had been stored in 68 boxes in a city office and, according to officials, were discovered only last year.

A review by The New York Times found records showing asbestos and other contaminants in Lower Manhattan months after the attacks, sometimes at levels exceeding acceptable limits.

At one location near the World Trade Center, inspectors were still detecting asbestos in July 2002 — 10 months after the towers fell. Records also documented benzene spikes near the towers and asbestos contamination at Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill.

Meanwhile, government officials had repeatedly reassured New Yorkers about the air.

Then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman famously said the air was safe, a statement for which she later apologized.

Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani also publicly vouched for the air based on assurances he said he was receiving. His successor, Michael Bloomberg, said in February 2002 that testing showed air quality was within acceptable limits.

One internal memo is particularly striking.

The so-called Harding memo discussed the city’s potential legal liability connected to September 11 air quality.

The newly released documents do not represent every air-quality record from the period, and the material does not establish that every official who reassured the public personally knew those assurances were false.

But the records add to longstanding questions about whether New Yorkers were encouraged to return to Lower Manhattan before conditions were truly safe.

Getting the records released has itself been a years-long fight.

9/11 Health Watch sued New York City over records requests and said earlier this year that the city had repeatedly claimed it could not locate responsive records. A New York judge ruled in May that the city’s Department of Environmental Protection had acted arbitrarily and capriciously in denying an identical records request.

Mamdani has now ordered the records published through an online portal, with additional documents scheduled for release over the next year.

“The very least our city owes the families, survivors and first responders whose lives were forever changed by the horrific terror attack of September 11 is transparency and accountability,” Mamdani said.

The stakes extend far beyond settling a historical argument.

More than 10,000 FDNY members alone are currently certified as suffering from at least one physical condition related to their World Trade Center exposure, according to a 25-year health report released this month. More than 4,200 have cancer certifications.

Twenty-five years later, the people who breathed that air are still living — and dying — with the consequences.

MY QUICK TAKE:

Whatever you think of Zohran Mamdani — and regular readers know I’m not exactly shopping for the T-shirt — he’s right to release these records.

Politics can wait on this one.

First responders, workers and ordinary New Yorkers were told the air was safe. If their government possessed information that called those assurances into question, they deserved to see it then.

They damn sure deserve to see it now.