Eight months after two hijacked jetliners flew into the Twin Towers, New Yorkers today marked the end of the recovery effort with a sombre ceremony at the site of the attacks which has become known as ‘Ground Zero’.
The service, marking the official end to the clean-up, got under way at 10:29 a.m. - the exact moment the second of the 110-story skyscrapers collapsed after being hit on September 11th, 2001.
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The last steel beam left standing at the World Trade Center is carried from Ground Zero.
Photograph: Reuters |
The other tower, also struck by a hijacked airliner, had collapsed moments earlier. Some 2,823 people were killed in the New York attacks.
The truck carrying the skyscrapers' last-standing steel girder, cut down Tuesday and draped in an American flag, was expected to slowly leave the pit on the back of a flatbed truck, followed by an empty flag-draped stretcher symbolising some 1,700 victims whose remains have never been found.
The families of the victims, those who worked at the site, and a handful of officials attended the ceremony, which was also to feature the ringing of fire bells, the mournful strains of bagpipe music, an honour guard salute and the singing of ‘America the Beautiful’.
At fire stations across the city, firefighters and their families are also marking the end of the recovery.
Initial estimates after the attacks predicted that cleaning the devastated site would take one year and more than $1 billion.
Instead, thousands of construction workers and rescuers, inspired by the wave of patriotism that swept the nation, flocked to Ground Zero and worked in shifts around the clock, completing the job in 8 months for $750 million.
By the end the crews had removed nearly two million tonnes of metal, concrete and general debris, first aboard trucks and later aboard barges bound to an old dumping site on Staten Island, which became a giant sorting centre.
On the island each load was passed through a sieve, allowing workers to retrieve some 20,000 pieces of human remains which are being submitted to DNA tests. Currently, according to official numbers, only 1,092 remains have been identified, leaving more than 1,700 families still hoping to find some remains of their loved ones.
AFP