The Inside Story of the Recovery Operation after 9/11
National September 11 Memorial & Museum Auditorium, May 15 2023
Panelists included FBI Supervisory Special Agent and Incident Co-Commander Richard Marx, former Director of the Bureau of Waste Disposal of the Department of Sanitation Martin Bellew, and former NYPD Lieutenant Commander of Detectives Roger Parrino, who discussed the Fresh Kills operation. This should be required viewing for all Americans.
The following needs to be read with the utmost respect for these people, the victims, their families, the workers, and the general American public; it's not meant to be sensational or exploitative in any way, and this information is being repeated here in an effort to keep alive in our memories the sacrifices made, especially by the people who did this work to ensure that families of victims would be given closure. Granted nothing like this had ever happened before in America, but certainly nothing like this recovery effort had ever been attempted, not at this scale, not under these conditions, and not in response to such a national tragedy.
*Also, for those not from the area, it should be pointed out that the word Kill means river in Dutch, who were the first people to start naming things on the East Coast in the 1700's(?), and so we have rivers named Arthur Kill or Kill van Kull, etc. This is where the name Fresh Kills comes from. There is no association between the name and death; that's all just historical coincidence.
- It just so happens that Fresh Kills, the oldest largest landfill in the United States (maybe the world) had just been decommissioned in March 2001, only six months prior to 9/11
- 700 people identified either by their remains or personal effects
- 1,000 remain
- They could see down to 1/4 inch; the one guy kept a marble in his pocket to show the families how hard they were looking
- Anthropologists got called in, they had to differentiate the humans from the food; there were 15-20 restaurants at the World Trade
- Everything was pulverized so that all you saw was wheel casters on office chairs and credit cards; ID cards too but less
- 17 operating unions at Fresh Kills, 24k people working or volunteering, 30 city, state and federal agencies
- There were cars at Ground Zero, some driven away some towed
- They're wearing asbestos monitors and seeing 4x the limit ... outdoors (that's 4x the indoor limit but outdoors, which is really hard to do because the air is always blowing around and being diluted...)
- Ground Zero was called The Pile
- They talk about the extent of decon and PPE at 40 minutes
- The smell, prompted by an audience question: The canines got depressed. It smelled so strongly of dead people they couldn't use their sense of smell to find them, and since they couldn't do their job they got depressed
- They built tents on top of the landfill, for admin purposes etc., and the methane accumulated in them because it comes right out of the ground, also it bubbles when it rains in a landfill, again from all the methane coming out of the ground
- The idea of building structures on a landfill is crazy, both from a structural, and just a general safety point of view
Image credit: Christopher Payne Brother Island maybe a Sanatorium
The image above is almost totally unrelated to 9/11, except that it's from New York City, except that it's not. It's a photograph taken by Christopher Payne, who takes really cool pictures of industrial sites and sometimes abandoned sites. This was taken on Brother Island, one of the very few deserted islands off New York City. It was inhabited at some point, by people looking to get away from the city almost a hundred years ago, and later by a sanatorium, and maybe some other City entities. It's been closed down since the 1970's and nobody except a handful of research scientists and photographers have been allowed to visit since.
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