Lauren Edminster

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island. Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand. They were looking for people. The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it. Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door. Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center. He drove back. The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way. The site was empty. So that is where the towers went. Here is how it worked. At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip. At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill. And then the sorting began. The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve. Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt. And along the belts stood the detectives. NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time. When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet. A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe. A piece of a person. The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue. The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months. A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed. You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look. Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow. Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal. The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months. By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury. When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered. It is a park now. Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it. Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place. Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about. Here is what you should know. Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified. Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket. Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark. Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home. They did that for ten months. Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch. They did it anyway. 🇺🇸