Firehouse Bell to Toll End of Ground Zero Cleanup
Thu May 30, 1:31 AM ET
By Nick Olivari
NEW YORK (Reuters) - With the tolling of a firehouse bell, an empty stretcher carrying an American flag and the mournful skirl of bagpipes, New Yorkers will mark the end of the World Trade Center recovery effort on Thursday and a new beginning for the site where thousands died on Sept. 11.
"When we first got down to the job, there was not even water," said Leo Di Rubbo, 55, a 35-year construction veteran who helped oversee the cleanup as a superintendent from day one. "Everyone's face was dirty and black from the dust, and the only places that weren't" were from tears.
Di Rubbo and others have mixed emotions about the end of the recovery phase at the site, which will be observed with the ringing of a firehouse bell at 10:29 a.m. EDT, the minute when the second of the 110-story buildings collapsed in a pile of mangled and broken steel, concrete and glass.
"It's been a rough nine months, and taxing emotionally and physically," said Di Rubbo, who will return to his more usual construction duties with AMEC Corp. one of the last two cleanup contractors at the site. "It was cutting, burning and lifting -- and something I will never forget."
The tolling of the bell in four sets of five chimes each, the traditional firehouse code for a fallen firefighter, will be followed by an honor guard of city, state and federal personnel flanking a procession carrying a stretcher with a folded American flag symbolizing those killed but not found.
Almost 1,800 of the 2,823 victims have yet to be identified.
Police and fire department pipers and drummers will march behind the stretcher up the ramp from the pit bottom. At the tail of the procession, a truck draped with a black cloth will drive up the ramp, carrying the last steel girder to be removed from the site.
The procession will pause at the top of the ramp, near where Di Rubbo will stand with eight colleagues, while a lone bugler plays "Taps" and a helicopter flyover occurs. The procession will then travel 15 blocks north along the West Side Highway.
There will be no speeches by public officials.
Although Thursday's rites mark the official end of recovery efforts, the observance is the second of three ceremonies that officially shuts down the search for victim remains at the site.
On Tuesday night, the last steel girder standing -- known as the Stars and Stripes beam -- was cut down, ready to be removed in Thursday's ceremony. The girder had stood at what was the lowest level of the south tower's sub-basement.
A third ceremony will be held for families of the victims on Sunday at a church close to the site. The service was a city compromise for families unable to attend the weekday ceremony.
The New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites) will halt trading and observe two minutes of silence at 10:29 a.m. on Thursday.
'CHAOS, CONFUSION AND PANIC'
The dust was still settling at "ground zero," site of the collapsed World Trade Center twin towers, on Sept. 11 when the first emergency and recovery workers began to move 1.6 million tonnes of debris -- the equivalent of 20 Golden Gate Bridges.
Within hours, the site was filled with thousands of fire, police and medical officials, more than 1,000 sanitation workers and an undetermined number of construction workers and other volunteers.
"If you weren't working (on shift), you were there," New York firefighter Paul Iannizzotto told Reuters of those first few days at the scene.
It was "chaos, confusion and panic," Iannizzotto said, and "disbelief as you looked around and saw the ... devastation."
In the months between Sept. 11 and the closing ceremony, a mini-city sprang up around the site to feed the thousands who labored to find survivors and, as hope faded, to find the dead and clear the way for new construction.
At the peak of its commitment on Oct. 11, the American Red Cross (news - web sites) had almost 2,500 volunteers and staff feeding workers at the site and those displaced by the attack. It and the Salvation Army served almost 17 million meals and snacks in the past eight months. The Red Cross also provided beds, clothes and even massages for workers at the site.
AI
