Posted on 02/10/2008 2:30:51 PM PST by the scotsman
Honestly, it sounds like a barely disguised hit piece on America to me. There are few Americans whose consciences are 'largely undisturbed' by anything having to do with 9/11.
Retrieve what? After an incredible destruction of two skyscrapers we can only do so much to retrieve and sort out every piece of ash.
It means “Clear creeks”, as in pure water.
I appreciate the grief of those who never recovered the remains of their lost family members. But they truly ought to direct their anger at the Islamicist maniacs who killed them, rather than at those who are trying to recover the site of the atrocity on behalf of Western civilization.
“kills” is Dutch for river or waterway.
Thank you for the most sane post on this thread.
Get in line. The Normandy Beach Families for a Proper Burial are still waiting. Then there are the Omaha Beach folks and a ton of unnamed battlefield families who who wished their loved ones had proper burials. Pearl Harbor families had some concerns also.
I am so deeply sorry about your loss. I cannot fathom. Hug.
I have a constituent named Ralph. He was a NY fireman as were two of his brothers and his father. One of the brothers was lost at the trade center. He dropped his life and went back to search for his brother’s remains for a year. Although he found others, he never found his brother. He has had throat cancer subsequently, which he has had to bear the costs of treating out of his own pocket. http://www.sohoblues.com/9-11-Still-Killing.html
He and his wife feel that his brother’s remains are likely at Fresh Kills. He would like his brother’s remains to have a decent burial. I support him in this.
As new bones are found near Trade Center site, many families have no remains.
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/48996.html
By SARA KUGLER | Associated Press
September 10, 2006
NEW YORK (AP) - Ralph Geidel cannot remember a time when he wasn’t obsessed with finding things that had been lost or discarded _ forgotten marbles on the playground, old coins, false teeth and silver jewelry at the beach. And he was good at it.
This is why, on a warm, spring day, Geidel crouched on his knees on the roof of a lower Manhattan skyscraper, his face inches from a pile of gravel, looking for something precious.
Looking for traces of his brother, and others killed at the World Trade Center.
Gary Geidel was one of 11 members of an elite fire squad who died on Sept. 11, 2001. Not a granule of his remains has been identified, and nearly five years later, Ralph Geidel found himself on this roof, still searching.
He stopped suddenly, plucked a small, eggshell-colored object between his fingers and slipped his reading glasses onto his nose for a better look.
“Could be part of a vertebrae,” he thought.
The piece would join a growing collection. Some 760 specks and slivers of human bones have been discovered in recent months, after demolition began on this 41-story former bank tower known as the Deutsche Bank building, just south of where the World Trade Center once stood.
Gary Geidel is not the only one who is still missing. Of the 2,749 people who were killed that day, the remains of some 1,150 have not been found.
Their families have nothing _ not a sliver of a bone _ left of their loved ones. And they have long since given up any hope of finding recognizable human parts.
Searchers recovered whole bodies at first _ 291 victims were found intact. But as they dug into the 10-story mound of debris with rakes and machines, it was mostly just fragments.
Ralph Geidel, a retired firefighter, was among the thousands of searchers at ground zero from the start. Wearing his old FDNY coat, a photograph of his brother fastened to his firefighter helmet, Geidel checked for patterns and signals that might offer clues to hidden remains.
“You look for something that doesn’t belong among that rock, the concrete, the steel, the papers and all the other stuff,” he said. “You just kinda develop an eye for that, something that doesn’t quite mix with everything else _ certain shapes, like hands.
“I found a lot of hands.”
Eventually, more than 20,000 parts were collected as the debris was excavated, sifted and carted away. Many were recovered at a second site, the former garbage dump in Staten Island where debris was hauled and combed again.
Some families, officials and experts are suing the city in federal court, alleging negligence and violation of their religious rights because the sifted leftovers _ more than 1 million tons _ are still at the landfill.
They believe there are human remains entombed next to New York City’s trash, and are asking the court to order the removal of the debris. Mayor Michael Bloomberg contends it was adequately examined and would cost too much to relocate.
“Sift it again, or if you don’t want to take the trouble, just remove and bury it elsewhere,” says Diane Horning, who lost her son Matthew. “We just don’t want our loved ones to be among garbage.”
The search for remains was concentrated at the 16-acre (6.4-hectare) World Trade Center site. But debris, human remains and jet parts also rained down on the surrounding area, and some bones turned up on nearby buildings; authorities checked nearby rooftops for pieces of humanity, but some structures were damaged and could not be inspected thoroughly.
Then, in the last year, workers preparing to tear down the Deutsche Bank building found so many new bone fragments that officials sent a group of experts, including Geidel, to comb the roof, which is covered with a layer of gravel that authorities say camouflaged many of the smaller pieces.
“Now there’s this faint glimmer that perhaps we might have something,” says Lynn Castrianno, whose brother, Leonard, has not been found.
“It’s almost as though he existed, and then he didn’t _ there’s no real tangible proof that he was there, and that makes a difference in the grieving process ... it’s like that final goodbye has never been said.”
But many aren’t sure that they want to reopen that wound. It seems like so long ago that they were told the DNA in many of the remains was too degraded by time, heat and humidity to yield a match. Many stopped hoping for an identification and went ahead with memorial services _ burying caskets full of memorabilia instead of bodies.
The Vigiano family had to do both. Detective Joseph Vigiano was found, but his brother John, a firefighter, was not. Twice a month and on every Sept. 11, their parents visit the incomplete grave site of their only children.
Many families without identified remains numbly came to nightmarish conclusions: Maybe he was vaporized, scattered by the wind or reduced to flecks that were accidentally carried out of the site on a truck or a worker’s boot.
“You don’t want to, but your mind goes there and after a while you start to wonder, was he totally incinerated? But even then there’s little pieces,” says Claire Dawson, who lost her brother, Maurice Kelly.
“I’m sure there’s some kind of bone fragments or something, but does it matter to me anymore? I don’t know _ he’s gone and I don’t know what help bone fragments would be.”
Still, scientists are trying to identify more victims. Bode Technology Group, the Virginia company contracted to work on 9/11 remains, has developed new and encouraging processes to extract identifications from bone samples which previously came up blank.
Families and some elected officials are calling for the intervention of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military forensic unit known for finding missing soldiers from long-ago wars.
But Bradley Adams, the city’s chief forensic anthropologist, used to work for the military unit and insisted that this was “the most meticulous recovery project that I’ve ever worked on _ the size of the fragments that are being recovered is really impressive, and I have complete confidence. You couldn’t do a better job.”
Ralph Geidel is renowned among the searchers. In his retirement, the 48-year-old lives in Northern California, where he looks for gold in old mines and waterways. His lifelong passion for treasure hunting even landed him in South Dakota, looking for dinosaur bones.
At ground zero, he had an uncanny knack for finding remains.
“He picked things out _ it was amazing _ that nobody else could see,” said Bill Butler, a retired firefighter who spent months in the rubble, searching for remains of his son, Tom. “We’d go through stuff and you’d glance over it, thinking it was part of construction material or furniture or items from the building, but Ralph seemed to have a special eye for body parts and remains.”
Geidel’s father and younger brother, both firefighters, were also there, and the family suppressed their grief to look for any remains of Gary, the oldest of four siblings. Obsessed and tormented, Geidel imagined he heard the dead screaming.
“I’d follow the scream until I found somebody and then the screaming got less and less,” he said. “The more people I found, the better I felt.”
But he never found any sign of Gary.
“Who knows what’s where, what’s been lost?” he says. “There’s a million reasons he could still be missing, and a million places he could be.”
Thank you. I used to work in WTC Tower 2 (South). Those who died there are forever etched in the memories of the survivors. It is our duty to make certain it never happens again. Let us not quarrel over the remains but dedicate ourselves to the task of defeating those who took them from us.
I hope she's saving her ire for the ones who visited that horror on her family. I believe the Fed. Govt., and State and City of New York did the best job they could do with the situation they had. There is no way ALL of the remains are going to be found, and the authorities, when when they made that statement, probably thought they HAD recovered all they were going to be able to recover.
I’m sorry. You lost me at the end there.
Amen!
You are so right.
I actually got out on the roof of WTC 2 back in 1988. I’ve never forgotten the experience.
I will never forget the view of Manhattan from the 78th floor of the World Trade Center. I lived in New York for only three years before moving back to New England in the pursuit of a quieter and less frenetic existence. Not being magnificently wealthy or of tempestuous nature, I never really cared for the quality of life there. But the city truly is a wonder to behold, especially at night with a million brilliant lights ablaze like a universe of twinkling stars. The creative forces that produced such a spectacle are at once a mystery and a threat to our backward adversaries, whose destructive energy we must eventually meet, head on.
Nah.
The Sunday Post is about as conservative a newspaper as you can get on the planet.
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