500 hours of dramatic, never-before-seen footage of 9/11 and aftermath to be unveiled at New York Public Library

Hundreds of hours of harrowing, never-before-seen first-person footage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath will soon be unveiled at the New York Public Library in a new historic archive — and The Post got an exclusive first peek Thursday.

A total of 500 hours of new footage includes striking images from Ground Zero recovery efforts,  destroyed subway tunnels and pet rescue missions, library officials said Thursday, on the 24th anniversary of the attacks.

Never-before-seen footage released exclusively to The Post, titled “Nighttime Recovery,” shows smoke rising in gloomy gray plumes at Ground Zero as first responders dig through piles of rubble with an orange excavator.

One firefighter enveloped in smoke sprays debris with a firehose as a stunned observer declares, “It’s amazing, huh?”

“How does he breathe?” another observer ominously wonders about the smoke, which would later be found to be extremely toxic.

Other camerawork, released exclusively to The Post, shows workers trying to fix a leaky, blasted-out subway tunnel at the Cortland Street station, near the World Trade Center.

Other new footage — shot largely on hand-held cameras, before the proliferation of smartphones — shows a bomb scare at the Empire State Building on Sept. 12, 2002, a light tribute from the Westside Pier and a nighttime time lapse of World Trade Center shots.

The 1,200-plus hours of video in the archive documenting the unthinkable tragedy won’t be unveiled to the general public until 2027, said Brent Reidy, director of the research libraries for the New York Public Library.

“By preserving these firsthand accounts, we are ensuring that future generations can study Sept. 11 as it was experienced by New Yorkers in real time,” Reidy said.

The collection, dubbed the CameraPlanet Archive, was donated by Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder and is the largest contemporaneous video collection of Sept. 11.

 “At a time when misinformation, denialism, and revisionist history circulate widely, timestamped and contemporaneous video records carry renewed civic importance. The CameraPlanet Archive is not simply a record of tragedy; it is a safeguard against forgetting and distortion,” said Rosenbaum.

To mark the donation, the New York Public Library will host a screening of “7 Days in September,” a film by Rosenbaum, on Sept. 11, 2025, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.