Calls for NYC to release information on air quality after 9/11 attacks

NEW YORK - Mariama James still wants to know what toxins she was breathing in on September 11th 2001.

"We deserve to know. I mean, you know, family members, friends, neighbors, all dying. We deserve to know why. What happened?," James asks.  "I was covered head to toe in white dust, and so was my home, because our windows had been open."

She lived in Lower Manhattan when the twin towers fell. Her entire family has been suffering for years from 9/11-related cancers.

"They told us the air was clean, the air was safe," James says.  "People like my mother was sent back to work within days, you know, of the attacks. And people like me and my kids, we were continuing to live in it and to, you know, to clean things."

New York Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman also want answers.

They sent a letter to Mayor Adams asking that after 20 years the city finally "fully disclose what the Giuliani administration knew about the harmful impacts of the toxins released in the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent cleanup, and when it knew this information."

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Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York City on 9/11.

Kimberly Flynn is the director of the non-profit 9/11 Environmental Action. She thinks the city owes it to 9/11 families to release records from the Giuliani administration.

"People were needlessly, preventively exposed over many months to toxic dust and smoke," Flynn says. "The city should have been acting in a much more precautionary fashion so we kind of would like to know why all of these disastrous decisions were made."

Lawmakers have tried and failed before to get these records released starting with the Giuliani administration again with De Blasio's and now with Mayor Adams.

The mayor's office tells FOX 5 News it plans to review the congressmen's request and respond directly to them.

For now, all these families can do is hope that after all these years they may finally get some answers.