The idea of releasing the $300 million as part of a bargain for possible legal immunity, Carboy says, “is an obscenity.” Since then, the federal Victims Compensation Fund has reimbursed the vast majority of new claims New York’s fund has received only about four claims in the past eight years. Most of the cash was distributed in a 2010 settlement applying to about 10,000 plaintiffs. That money is left over from a $1 billion FEMA grant allotted in 2004 to cover the city against possible health care lawsuits resulting from 9/11 illnesses. The mayor’s representatives also mentioned the roughly $300 million sitting in a World Trade Center insurance fund. “But the mayor just wanted to reopen Wall Street, and so he lied.” “We knew within a week that the air was toxic and that people shouldn’t return to Lower Manhattan,” Nadler tells me. That wasn’t true, and though the city of New York and the EPA urged workers to wear masks, the recommendations weren’t enforced, and more people are estimated to have died from Ground Zero–related illnesses than were killed on 9/11. In the days after the attack Giuliani and Christine Whitman, then the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, made reassuring statements that the air was safe to breathe. The life-and-death fight over the chemicals swirling through downtown New York began raging shortly after the towers fell. ![]() “Here, it’s the city’s secrets that made these people sick.” “I’m reminded of an old phrase: ‘You’re as sick as your secrets,’” says Andrew Carboy, who is handling the legal paperwork pro bono, along with fellow attorney Matt McCauley. If asking the nice way doesn’t work yet again, they are prepared to sue the city. ![]() On Friday, they will file a Freedom of Information Law request. Twenty-two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, significant questions remain unanswered: Did Saudi Arabia help fund them? What was the ultimate target of United flight 93? Yet it’s one of the seemingly smaller mysteries that may be the strangest of all: Why is current New York City mayor Eric Adams withholding documents concerning what City Hall knew about the toxicity of Ground Zero’s air, effectively shielding former mayor Rudy Giuliani?Īs the annual day of remembrance approaches, four relatives of people killed by Ground Zero–related illnesses, organized by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch and with the encouragement of New York congressmen Jerry Nadler and Daniel Goldman, are pursuing a newly aggressive strategy to gain access to the hidden documents.
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