New York stood still for a minute on Tuesday to silently mark the exact moment at 8:48am one week ago when the city's skyline and its psyche was forever changed by the attack of two hijacked passenger planes on the towering World Trade Center.
Local radio and TV stations stopped broadcasting regular programming, people stopped working or stopped in the streets as the country's biggest city of 8 million halted in respect for more than 5,500 feared dead and hundreds of others killed in crashes of two hijacked planes into the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania.
PHOTO: AP
The moment of silence was also observed across the US.
A week after the destruction of the World Trade Center, New York is facing the wrenching question of when to call off the search for survivors and focus instead on recovering the dead.
At the mountain of rubble dubbed "the pile," an army of firefighters and other emergency workers toiling through the darkness under giant arc lights continued yesterday to pick cautiously through the debris seeking signs of life.
"It's like trying to move three yards of dirt with a toothpick," said one firefighter coming off a shift.
No one has been pulled out alive since last Wednesday, and city officials are readying family and friends of the more than 5,000 people feared dead in the concrete and steel sarcophagus for the worst.
"We want everyone to prepare themselves for the reality that we are not going to be able to recover significant numbers of people," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said.
"We are trying to recover human beings, and we haven't had success since the second day in that effort. So that also has to tell you something."
New York's Roman Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan sounded a similar note at a service in St. Patrick's Cathedral for the more than 300 firefighters and other uniformed workers killed or missing since the Trade Center's twin towers collapsed.
"Our prayer tonight is to give rest to those who have gone to him and to give consolation to those who are left behind," he said.
A shift from rescue to recovery at the World Trade Center would allow heavy equipment to be used more vigorously than until now to break into the compacted remains of the towers.
The grim toll of the missing at the World Trade Center stood at 5,422 on Monday, with 201 people confirmed dead.
"It affects me worse now. I've got more time to think about it. It's more real now. The funerals are starting, and you don't see your friends any more," said Brooklyn firefighter Bruce Jacoby, who lost a close colleague when the buildings fell.
Many rescue workers and relatives of the missing are still hoping against hope for a miracle, but some of those seeking news of loved ones are moving to a search for closure.
"If there was a little, God forbid, piece of her left, I'm taking my daughter back. No matter what," said Christine Barton, who drove to New York from Florida a week ago to search for her missing daughter Jeanmarie Wallendorf.
New York officials estimated that up to 85 percent of the normal workforce was at work in Manhattan on Monday. Numbers were likely to be lower on Tuesday for the Jewish New Year.
"A lot of our city got back to normal life, as it should," said Giuliani, calling the reopening of financial markets "very significant to the city's recovery and the country's recovery."
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