Twin Towers attack: debris and human remains mix in a gigantic dump in New York

For some, the hill represents the New York resilience; for others it is a open wound. Below are debris from September 11, 2001 attacks mix with human remains.

The site located at Fresh Kills and Staten Island, was the external discharge largest in the world until it closed in March 2001 and reopened for shelter the rubble of the World Trade Center, after what Al Qaeda pirates decrease Twin towers of steel and concrete piles.

Today it is a place that generates great consternation for the relatives of the victims.

The first trucks arrived on the night of September 11, 2001 and for ten months Dennis diggins directed the 600,000 ton transfer work debris from “Ground Zero”.

“I don’t know what it would be like if I had a relative here. But I can tell you that the material has been treated with the utmost respect “remembers Diggins 20 years later. “It does not mix with garbage, there is a separation”he adds from the top of the hill from where you can see Lower Manhattan.

The neighborhood has become a small town with thousands of sanitation workers, police, FBI and Secret Service agents.

They all searched the site for clues, valuables and remains that could help identify the victims.

Kurt and Diane Horning were part of relatives of those killed in these attacks who quickly visited the area. Her son Matthew was a database administrator who died when the North Tower collapsed an hour and 42 minutes after being hit by one of the hijacked planes.

They were stressed as soon as they arrived: the site was full of seagulls and mud. They found a credit card, a shoe, a watch.

A worker told them that during the first 45 days, lack of material, they worked with rakes and shovels.

“The idea was to work within budget, quickly (…) ‘We will show the resilience of the country and not stop dead.’ And that’s what they did, ”explains Diane.

Diggins instead assures that neither he nor his workers treated the area as a normal dump and operated “with respect”.

“We always knew there were human remains. You never stop thinking about it, ”he confides, visibly excited.

He also states that once the trucks left the site, he hired divers to search the surrounding quay and make sure nothing has been left uninspected.

“It’s a dumping ground”

Between the start and the end of the operation, the hill, which offers a breathtaking view of Lower Manhattan, where the Towers were located, rises to more than 25 meters. Separated from the rest of the hill by an insulating layer, the pile of rubble was covered with plastic sheeting.

The Horning believe that some Matthew’s remains are buried there. To date, only a fragment of her son’s bone has been recovered.

His attempts to remove all the remains were rejected by the city government, then headed by the mayor. Michael Bloomberg.

“It was a double defeat. Some fans decided it was a good idea to blow my son up. But then my own government decided that it was not enough to bury him», Diane dice.

The Horninges and other families proposed that leftovers were sent to other sites at Fresh Kills that they had never sheltered from garbage, but that was not the case.

In 2005, 17 of them have taken legal action. They tried to take the case to the Supreme Court, but the judges refused to consider it. “I felt personally responsible for bringing the other families into this. Now they have no more hope and I have to live with that, ”deplores Diane.

The place still discharges more than 40,000 cubic meters of methane per day from garbage decomposition has been deposited there for many decades.

When it’s sure New York authorities they plan to open in the site of a commemorative park in 2035. But the Horning are not interested.

“It’s a dumping ground”said Diane. “It’s like on Christmas morning you give your son a nicely wrapped package and he opens it, there’s trash in it.”