The city’s environmental department opened a case file on buildings across Lower Manhattan after 11 September 2001. Indexed here: 824 addresses, merged from 1,020 folder entries, covering 4,564 documents and 25,556 pages — roughly 65 per cent of the building files, on my own count of how many there are. Search by street, number, block, lot or building identification number, then open the documents directly. The first document listed for an address is often a portal cover sheet — one page giving the address, block and lot, and nothing else. Many of the files are handwritten inspection forms, which are legible on screen but do not respond to text search.
If you were in Lower Manhattan. The World Trade Center Health Program offers monitoring and treatment at no cost and was still enrolling as of September 2026 — responders, and also people who lived, worked, studied or were present in the area on 11 September 2001 or in the months after. The Victim Compensation Fund is separate and has registration deadlines. Neither requires finding a record here. If there is no file for your address, that says nothing about your health or your eligibility.
The WTC Health Program and the Victim Compensation Fund.
Before you search. A file existing does not mean a building was contaminated, and no file does not mean it was clean. Most of these are contractor records — inspections, abatement paperwork, and air monitoring worn by the workers doing the cleaning. Worker samples are taken in the breathing zone of someone disturbing dust and run far higher than the surrounding air. They do not describe what a resident breathed.
Coverage. Roughly 7,300 building documents are in the release, by my own survey rather than a published count; this index covers the 4,564 whose folder labels could be matched to an address, which is not all of them.
Personal information. The city has redacted names from these files, including by hand over scanned handwriting. In one document I found pages where that appears to have been missed, and I have reported it. If you come across something similar, please report it rather than share it.
Fixity. Document numbers were retrieved on 11 September 2026. The release is rolling, so files may be amended or added; if a link fails or a document differs from what is described, that is a change at the source, not necessarily an error here. Sizes and version tags were spot-checked on a sample of documents; full coverage of all 4,545 is not recorded.
Back to A Way In, or see the corrections. Browse the index. Built by Vasu Raman. Corrections via the corrections page. Last updated 11 September 2026