New York City put 24,000+ documents online about the cleanup of Lower Manhattan after September 11. It did not say what any of them were.
You can open a document if you already know its number. There is no list, no search, no way to ask what is in there. 170,000+ pages, and no way in.
So we downloaded all of them, read every page, and wrote down what each document is: a lab result, a letter, an air test, a sign-in sheet. That list is this site.
Immigrant day labourers cleaned the dust out of apartments and offices in Lower Manhattan, often with wet rags and no masks. The dust had asbestos in it. Many of those workers are still alive and still sick, and almost none of them appear by name in a public record.
The documents here are the city's own paperwork from that time: what was tested, what was found, what was said in public, and what was said inside.
The pages are 2001 to 2003 faxes and photocopies. A computer read them, and it gets words wrong. Every number and quotation on this site links back to the original PDF on the city's website. Open it and look before you quote anything.
Where a computer read handwriting, or decided what a document was, the page says so. About one document in ten was labelled that way.
Some documents have no date, so anything arranged by time only covers the ones that do. A few documents the city published have since been taken down; where one is quoted here, the page says so.
This is an independent project. The documents belong to the City of New York and are not republished here: every link goes to the city's own server. Everything used to build the site, and a fuller account of what it does and does not cover, is in the code repository.