Finding a hand or a mere bone fragment is considered a success at the former landfill where hundreds of workers are picking through the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Discovering anything that might identify one of the thousands of people still listed as missing can boost the morale of search crews, said Deputy Police Inspector James Luongo, who is in charge of the ghastly work.
PHOTO: AP
"You may not be able to help the dead, but you can help the living," he said.
Unlike the well-publicized recovery operation in Manhattan, the city's other ground zero is on a desolate, wind-swept plateau of household waste on Staten Island. Fresh Kills, one of the world's largest dumps before it closed last year, was reopened last month as arguably the world's largest crime lab. There are 800 people at work here, looking for human remains and potential clues.
The landfill has yielded a grim harvest of body parts and personal belongings. The work here is expected to take months.
At the feet of Linda Klepinger, a volunteer anthropologist from the University of Illinois, sits a bucket labeled "ANIMAL BONES." She uses a toothbrush to scrub the bone fragment found one recent day, deciding it might be part of wrist instead of a chicken bone from a restaurant meal.
"When you're working, you're OK," she said of her task. "It's later you have to worry."
As Detective Darryl Hayes put it: "If you're a human being, you're going to feel some emotion. But you suck it up and deal with it."
The search effort once relied solely on workers armed with rakes and pitchforks, crews that had to fight turf wars with seagulls. But over the past five weeks, an assembly line has emerged.
Barges deliver the debris -- 273,000 tonnes of it so far -- and huge dump trucks haul it to the 52-hectare search site. Cranes separate steel beams and other heavy wreckage: flattened fire trucks and police cruisers, an engine of one of the doomed jetliners, an elevator motor the size of a washing machine.
The rest ends up in mechanical sifters and conveyer belts, or spread on the ground so detectives and federal agents in protective gear can examine it.
The seagulls have been scared off by firecracker-firing guns. But the debris still brings with it the acrid smell familiar at ground zero.
The stench "sticks in your throat," said one detective, Tony Rivera. "It's hot out there. It smells. But you want to do the work."
One recent day, search crews found an ace of diamonds playing card, a doorknob, a pair of security guard pants, a woman's black wig and a pink toothbrush.
Personal effects are catalogued in hopes they can be returned to families of the victims. But investigators fear that many items, including flight recorders from the two jetliners, were destroyed.
The search crews wear mandatory jump suits, goggles, gas masks and earplugs, making the work feel like "something out of the X-Files," Hayes said.
He once discovered a severed hand. But most of the 2,000 body parts found to date are smaller and less obvious. There have been arm and leg bones, pieces of ribs and shoes. Lots of shoes.
Also found: driver's licenses, credit cards, wallets and, in one case, a box of wedding invitations, sealed, addressed and never sent.
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