![]() Several buildings were built with Twin Tower steel across Indian cities, including a college, a car maintenance yard, arcades and … a trade centre. Keiser/POOLĭespite an early and unsuccessful attempt by Greenpeace to qualify the scrap exports as hazardous and ban their repurposing in the “global south”, the steel reached India within six months of the tragedy. Horrifying destruction: Ground Zero two days after the al-Qaeda terror attack destroyed New York’s World Trade Center. Another company, Shanghai Baosteel Group, bought an additional 50,000 tonnes of large structural beams auctioned by NYC at US$120 (£87) a tonne. One scrap processor under contract with the New York City Department of Sanitation had purchased and cut down the metal at Fresh Kills with torching equipment. The scrap metal industry bought the buildings’ remains and sold them for profit to Chinese and Indian second-hand metal markets. Though the site was considered a health hazard, the towers’ structural steel was not. Over the next decade, surviving first responders filed workers’ compensation claims and sued NYC for failing to provide proper protective equipment at Ground Zero, until the passing of the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, a law created to provide them with medical care. Thousands of tonnes of pulverised concrete, construction debris, cellulose, asbestos, lead and mercury, and fire dioxins increased the risk of kidney, heart, liver and breast cancer among first respondents. In Manhattan, the death toll escalated, reaching the lives of construction workers, medics and others exposed to contaminants and likely to contract deadly illnesses after the attack. The monstrous ruins further escaped the attempt to control them, their toxic vapours proving harmful to the workers on site. But, sifting through the melted computers, corroded steel, broken glass, ash and dust, analysts could not systematically identify and separate the human remains from architectural debris.įresh Kills became a graveyard for unidentifiable bodies. The landfill would soon become a site for the most costly forensic investigation in US history, involving DNA identification of damaged bone and statistical analysis of partial profiles. Over time, according to NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani, it became “ the world’s largest landfill”. Evocatively called “ Fresh Kills” (from the Middle Dutch word kille, meaning “stream”), the suburban landfill had served since 1948 as the primary disposal facility for New York City’s solid waste. The authorities designated a Staten Island landfill as a site where the tower debris was transported to be sorted and inspected for human residues. This uneasy piece of forensic work would haunt the American psyche, with intriguing side-effects and aftershocks. The remaining body parts would be painstakingly collected in 21,900 pieces scattered throughout the skyscrapers’ debris. ![]() ![]() In the months after the 9/11 attack, which killed thousands of people and cost US$40 billion (£29 billion) in damages, the shock at the tower collapse gave way to the monstrous scale of the rescue and clean-up operation in New York.Īmid the destruction, an improvised team of volunteers, firefighters, police and detection dogs found 21 people alive on the first day, but none thereafter. ![]()
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