After the sifting of wreckage from the World Trade Center was completed last year, what was left was largely a mixture of pulverized concrete and ash, the last traces of the furniture, paper and people consumed by the fires that burned for months following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The dust and ash were buried where they had ended up, at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, once the largest garbage dump in the world.
The fact that ashen human remains from one of the most wrenching tragedies in the nation’s history have been consigned to the same place as New York’s discarded tin cans and milk cartons outrages some family members of the nearly 2,800 people killed in the attack. They want what could be a large amount of material dug up and placed at the memorial that will be part of the rebuilt site in lower Manhattan.
“It’s a dump,” said Diane Horning, whose 26-year-old son was killed at the trade center. “We do not want their memorial at a dump.”
Horning is one of the founders of WTC Families for Proper Burial, whose numbers include family members of Sept. 11 victims from across the country, including Chicago, as well as such distant places as Lithuania.
The group’s petition calling for excavation of the ashes has garnered more than 31,000 signatures online and on paper, and elected officials, including New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), have endorsed the idea. But New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has the ultimate say in the matter, so far has shown little interest.
“9/11 Kin Rip `Heartless’ Bloomberg” read a recent New York Post headline on a story about Horning’s brief meeting with the mayor, at which he said that what happens to a body after death was of little concern to him because he intended to leave his body to science.
The Sept. 11 hijackings resulted in the deadliest terrorist assault in U.S. history and created a daunting scientific challenge in identifying victims’ remains. In New York, the explosions of two fuel-laden jets, the collapse of two 110-story buildings and the months of fires that followed resulted in fewer than 300 intact bodies being recovered.
Sifting 1.6 million tons
An estimated 1.6 million tons of mangled wreckage was taken by truck and barge to Fresh Kills, a closed landfill that was reopened for the sorting operation. Workers sifted through the debris as it moved along conveyor belts, picking out personal effects, valuables, forensic evidence and human remains. The smallest debris, including cremated remains, fell through a quarter-inch screen and was set aside at the landfill, Horning said.
By the time the work was done, the operation had collected 19,938 body parts. As of last week, the New York medical examiner’s office said that remains had been identified for 1,506 victims. With a death toll of 2,792, that means 1,286 people killed at the trade center have not been linked to any remains.
Dr. Charles Hirsch, New York’s chief medical examiner, has said his goal is to identify as many parts as possible, and innovative DNA identification techniques have been pressed into service in the hope of assigning names to ever-smaller bits of flesh and bone.
As much as family members say they appreciate the effort, the tiny remains they have received do not provide the sense that their loved ones have been returned to them.
“My husband has been listed as identified, but we’re talking about a 4-inch bone fragment,” said Sue Mladenik, whose husband, Jeffrey, a publishing executive in Chicago, was a passenger on one of the hijacked planes. “That means that 99 percent of him is in a garbage dump.”
Laura Walker of Suffern, N.Y., said the pulverized material at the landfill should be part of a memorial at the former trade center site. Walker has only received three small bone fragments from the body of her husband, Ben Walker, who worked as a broker on the 94th floor of One World Trade Center.
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“Staten Island dump stinks for miles around,” Walker said. “Yes, that ash contains computers and buildings, but it also contains the remains of my husband and thousands of others. I just don’t see how you could leave it at the dump.”
No place `to pray’
Thomas Meehan, whose daughter Colleen died at the trade center, said city officials assured family members that the collected piles of mixed ash and other fine material would be preserved, but sometime after the site closed last summer, all of the trade center debris was buried in a 40-acre tract at Fresh Kills.
“It’s really not the way we honor our dead,” Meehan said. “We don’t have a cemetery to go to. We don’t have a place to pray over.”
A spokesman for the mayor did not return a call seeking comment.
Because of different circumstances, the question of unidentified cremated remains has not arisen at the other Sept. 11 sites in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.
The especially brutal conditions at the trade center account at least in part for the raw emotions of those who lost close relatives there, according to an expert who studied Oklahoma City’s reaction to the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building.
“Particularly in the case of violent death, what you do when there is not much left becomes that much more important,” said Edward Linenthal, a religion professor at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. “People feel a debt to those who are gone to deal with their remains in a respectful manner, and when there isn’t much left, it becomes more difficult to repay that debt.”
Horning said that when she wants to visit Fresh Kills, she must make an appointment through the city’s Sanitation Department. While at the site, she is accompanied by a city official, who stays in the background but whose presence makes it impossible for her to feel she is alone with her son, Matthew.
She notes bitterly that the remains of the terrorists that have been identified have been treated with more respect than her son’s ashes. As hijacker remains are identified, the body parts are kept separate from those of victims, but they are preserved.
“I think my dead son deserves at least the same treatment that the terrorists are getting,” said Horning, who lives in Scotch Plains, N.J., a New York suburb.
Since founding their group in December, Horning and other Sept. 11 family members have barraged officials across the country seeking support for their goal: to excavate the trade center debris at Fresh Kills and sift it a second time to retrieve as much ash as possible.
The sifting would yield an unknown quantity of material that would inevitably be a mixture of human ash and fine particles of trade center debris. Meehan estimates the cost of the work at up to $10 million, which group members say should come from federal disaster funds.
The group’s ultimate aim, as explained in its online petition at www.petitiononline.com/WTCASHES/petition.html, is to bury the excavated material in containers at the trade center memorial. Current plans call for remains that the medical examiner cannot identify to be buried there.
With the international competition to design the memorial under way, group members feel time is short for them to make their case.
“I have found that most people that I ask to sign the petition are stunned,” said Mladenik, a resident of Hinsdale in Chicago’s western suburbs. “They had no idea the remains have been left in a landfill. Most people are appalled.”