Digging Out

By Joel Stein Reported By David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman, Christine Gorman and Ron Stodghill/New York

There's an arm or a foot or sometimes just a tooth, and they put that tooth in a bag. And they will match that tooth to a victim, and it will be placed in a coffin because it is a human being, or at least part of a human being, and human beings bury their dead. So instead of using backhoes and bulldozers to clear the remnants of the World Trade Center, hundreds of men scoop out the remains with their hands. They put them in 5-gal. buckets and pass them hand to hand down a 200-ft. line before they are emptied in piles in front of an investigator, who sifts through them. The workers will do this for 10- and 12- and 18-hour shifts, kneeling and using their hands to dig, even though they stand next to the Caterpillar 345 Excavator, a $1.5 million, 185,000-lb. behemoth that can reach 105 ft. into the sky.

They are sorting through what used to be two 110-story buildings--more than 2 billion lbs. of steel and glass and concrete--compressed into a mound nine stories high. A five-fingered grapple fixed to the end of a 40-ft. metal arm peels back each layer, gently removing crisscrossed pillars piled like giant pickup sticks. Next welders climb up with acetylene torches to cut through the metal until they find a void, or pocket of air. Then they bring in the buckets.

The workers struggle to identify the debris; most of it has been pulverized to powder. Pieces of leather are often mistaken for skin because here both have turned gray. When a fire fighter's body is found, "there is dead silence," says fireman Jeff Silver, 34. "All the machinery is cut off, and everybody takes their helmets off while a body bag is brought over and brothers from his station come and carry him away."

The estimates for how long it will take to dig it all out are measured in months: one, three, more. The first few weeks alone could cost $200 million. "What makes this so labor intensive is that you can't cut through the debris with heavy equipment," says Bruce Baughman, director of operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "The last thing you want to do is go in with a front-end loader and come out with a victim."

Instead, says Anthony Novello, 26, co-owner of Nacirema Environmental Services, which has sent 30 crew members and 12 pieces of equipment to the site, including one 345 Excavator, his men remove the body parts by hand. Already he has found a severed hand with a wedding band on it. One of his employees pulled out a fire fighter whose neck was snapped so badly he was looking backward. Another employee temporarily lost it Friday morning after finding a dead infant strapped into a car seat in a driverless vehicle.

The remains are put into one of the 30,000 body bags Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered, and taken to staging areas near the blast, including what was once a Brooks Brothers store. From there they are shipped in refrigerated trucks to the medical examiner's office in midtown Manhattan for identification. Because of the number of dead, and the condition of the remains, identification is not always easy. The families of the missing have been asked to fill a seven-page form with information about the victims' dental records, scars, tattoos and inscriptions on wedding rings. Blood relatives have been asked to provide samples of their own DNA, collected with a swab from the inside of their cheeks, along with the victim's toothbrush, razor or comb--anything that might still hold a bit of their loved one's DNA. Since the crash of TWA Flight 800, DNA testing is considered obligatory in any case in which bodies are too burned and mangled to be identified through photographs or forensic dentistry. Any body parts that are unclaimed will be buried in a city cemetery on Hart Island in the Bronx.

Many families won't get anything back, the bodies of their kin already cremated by burning jet fuel and returned to earth and ash and dust. These families will hold a funeral with an empty box.

The remains of the World Trade Center are also being buried. The debris is being trucked from the pit at the center of Ground Zero at a rate of a dozen dump trucks an hour; as of Saturday, the city had already hauled out more than 20,000 tons of debris. It is being driven over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which is closed to traffic, to a 3,000-acre landfill on Staten Island that used to be the city's main dump. The FBI then sifts all the debris for evidence. By the time the operation is completed, an estimated 100,000 dump-trucks' worth of rubble will have been moved there. The name of the 53-year-old landfill, which was closed in March after years of protest, is Fresh Kills.

Much of the World Trade Center will not wind up in Fresh Kills because thousands of tons of it was vaporized and deposited in layers of dust over Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Environmental Protection Agency has been monitoring the area, and while traces of carcinogenic asbestos are showing up in some dust samples at Ground Zero, posing a danger for anyone not wearing a mask, it has not shown up in samples taken in the outlying boroughs. While it is uncertain whether asbestos was used in the towers, which were completed in 1973, it may have been used elsewhere in the area. "We have not seen anything that would lead to long-term environmental or health problems," says EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, who toured the site Thursday. The bodies trapped in the twisted-steel mausoleum also pose no major health threat; undiseased bodies do not spread disease when they decompose.

Even as the search teams lift out body parts and the cranes haul out concrete blocks, other cranes will be rebuilding. While the downtown area west of Broadway will remain off limits until after the cleanup is finished and the crime scene closed down, businesses east of Broadway should be functioning this week. "The infrastructure of New York is laid out along the same grid as the city streets," explains Sam Schwartz, head of an engineering consulting firm and former New York City traffic commissioner. "This means that there are alternative paths to almost any building. If some of the connecting water or sewer pipes are crushed in one direction, the building can still access these services via the pipes entering the building from another direction."

Communications should also be back up quickly. Flying debris punched at least six big holes in Verizon's West Street telephone-switching station, which served the WTC, and the emergency power equipment in its basement was flooded from water-main breaks. Verizon worked over the weekend to bring the New York Stock Exchange back online, and the company hopes to provide at least interim service to most of the area by the end of the week. Gas lines, which pose the greatest risk, will take the longest to turn on, leaving the residents of neighboring Battery Park City homeless for a while longer.

Many of the businesses housed in the destroyed buildings will be moved to the downtown Manhattan space abandoned by failed dotcoms and the midtown offices of the recently laid-off. But megabusinesses that need acres of contiguous space are looking elsewhere. American Express, for example, which until Tuesday occupied a building near the Twin Towers that is now inaccessible, is reported to have signed leases in New Jersey. And the Wall Street Journal, forced to evacuate its World Financial Center headquarters on Tuesday, swiftly regrouped in makeshift offices in South Brunswick, N.J., and came out with an issue the next morning.

Wall Street itself is set to reopen this week. Downtown Manhattan real estate is too valuable, too close to the epicenter of capitalism to be abandoned. And the business of making money can be put off for only so long. So the lawyers and brokers and secretaries will go back to offices and trading floors and restaurants that are eerily close to the twisted-steel mausoleum. And they will look away whenever they can. They will come home this week with soot on their shoes, the earth and ash and dust of buildings that no longer exist.

--Reported by David Bjerklie, Andrea Dorfman, Christine Gorman and Ron Stodghill/New York