NEW YORK - The sights can be astonishing: smashed fire engines, singed credit cards, and occasionally, a bit of a human body.
At Fresh Kills, a reopened city dump on Staten Island, wreckage from the World Trade Center is being sifted, sometimes down to pieces a half-centimetre across, for sorting and identifying.
In the four months since two hijacked jetliners brought down the twin towers, killing nearly 2900 people, more than a million tonnes of debris has arrived, forming a 121m mountain.
The 70ha site offers a clear view of the altered Manhattan skyline 24km away across New York Harbour.
Reporters who visited the landfill yesterday saw investigators in white protective suits and full-face gas masks sifting through the debris.
Derricks unloaded the material from barges on to trucks, which then dumped the debris into machines that separate the large items from the small.
The smallest material goes on to a conveyor belt.
Inside a row of sheds covered with transparent plastic sheeting, other teams of detectives and forensic experts picked keys and other objects from a steady moving stream of stones and dirt, watching for anything that looked like it might once have been, or belonged to, a human.
When such an item is found, the agents shut down the conveyor and bag and label the item for DNA testing.
Rows of grey sheds marked "FBI, Port Authority Property Recovery" line one part of the field. White mobile morgues line another.
More than 3000 human remains have been found at Fresh Kills.
New York City Chief of Detectives William Allee said about 50 victims had been identified through them.
"It is not a garbage dump. It is a closed landfill and it is a special place," said Allee, who runs police operations at the site.
"It is sacred ground to all of us. We're doing God's work and I feel it is an honour to be here."
Yesterday, hundreds of credit cards, driver's licences and identification cards could be seen in alphabeticised bins inside a hut. Eventually, they will go to victims' relatives.
Beepers, shoes, keys and other artefacts that survived the attack on the twin towers are being stored in trailers and will require decontamination before they can be returned to family members.
Allee said 25 guns had been found, most belonging to police officers lost in the attack.
More than 1000 vehicles were in the wreckage, including an array of burned and battered fire engines, testimony of the deaths of 345 firefighters.
The twisted remains of the hundreds of fire trucks is a grim reminder of the force that struck rescue workers who first arrived at the scene.
Some of the wreckage is fixed with signs that say "hold for WTC memorial" in large black letters.
One of the largest pieces of evidence that could be seen was the broken torso of a Rodin bronze sculpture that had once resided in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the securities brokerage that lost more than 700 employees in the attack.
Beside the sculpture were parts of an airliner's flight turbines and its landing gear.
FBI agent Richard Marks, who heads a team of 30 agents at the site, said the Trade Center was now "the largest crime scene in history" and almost everything recovered could be considered evidence.
Some officials still hope to find the jetliners' flight data recorders and voice recorders.
Allee, however, said airplane parts were not considered important.
"We know what happened here," he said.
"You think about your people. You think about the people that you knew that were lost. This is a very special place."
- REUTERS
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
New York landfill becomes 'sacred ground'
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
