Story of the Twin Towers’ aftermath

IN THE months after the 9/11 attack, which killed thousands of people and cost $40 billion (more than R563bn) in damages, the shock at the Twin Towers’ collapse gave way to the monstrous scale of the rescue and clean-up operation in New York.

Amid the destruction, an improvised team of volunteers, firefighters, police and detection dogs found 21 people alive on the first day, but none thereafter.

The remaining body parts would be painstakingly collected in 21 900 pieces scattered throughout the skyscrapers’ debris.

This uneasy piece of forensic work would haunt the American psyche, with intriguing side-effects and aftershocks.

The authorities designated a Staten Island landfill as a site where the tower debris was transported to be sorted and inspected for human residues.

Evocatively called “Fresh Kills” (from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning “stream”), the suburban landfill served since 1948 as the primary disposal facility for New York City’s solid waste.

Over time, according to NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, it became “the world’s largest landfill”.

The landfill would soon become a site for the most costly forensic investigation in US history, involving DNA identification of damaged bone and statistical analysis of partial profiles.

But, sifting through the melted computers, corroded steel, broken glass, ash and dust, analysts could not systematically identify and separate the human remains from architectural debris.

Fresh Kills became a graveyard for unidentifiable bodies.

The monstrous ruins further escaped the attempt to control them, their toxic vapours proving harmful to the workers on site.

In Manhattan, the death toll escalated, reaching the lives of construction workers, medics and others exposed to contaminants and likely to contract deadly illnesses after the attack.

Thousands of tons of pulverised concrete, construction debris, cellulose, asbestos, lead and mercury, and fire dioxins increased the risk of kidney, heart, liver and breast cancer among first respondents.

Over the next decade, surviving first responders filed workers’ compensation claims and sued NYC for failing to provide proper protective equipment at Ground Zero, until the passing of the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, a law created to provide them with medical care.

Though the site was considered a health hazard, the towers’ structural steel was not. The scrap metal industry bought the buildings’ remains and sold them for profit to Chinese and Indian second-hand metal markets.

One scrap processor under contract with the New York City Department of Sanitation had purchased and cut down the metal at Fresh Kills with torching equipment.

Another company, Shanghai Baosteel Group, bought an additional 50 000 tons of large structural beams auctioned by NYC at $120 a ton.

Despite an early and unsuccessful attempt by Greenpeace to qualify the scrap exports as hazardous and ban their repurposing in the “global south”, the steel reached India within six months of the tragedy.

Several buildings were built with Twin Tower steel across Indian cities, including a college, a car maintenance yard, arcades and … a trade centre. |

Picard is a lecturer in International Environmental Law, University of Edinburgh