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Excerpts

From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

At Ground Zero, Brian Lyons called the boss at his construction management firm on Thursday morning and told him that he needed to take some vacation days from his job (supervising construction for an investment bank's renovation) so that he could continue to look for his fireman brother. Then he went back to worrying about keeping the bulldozers moving, hoping that as they cleared away the beams, the dust, and whatever stray pieces of anything else that was left he might see some sign of Michael Lyons. Later that morning, he noticed that the bulldozers were loading the debris onto a truck. When he inquired about where it was going, he was told something about Fresh Kills.

Fresh Kills? The name, he found out, was not intended to have any kind of sick double meaning. Rather it was the site of a garbage landfill in Staten Island. Beginning the night before, trucks and boats had begun loading up with debris to be driven (or in the case of the barges, shipped from the West Side docks past the Statue of Liberty and through New York Harbor) to what until recently had been New York's major garbage dump. Fresh Kills had now been reopened. And a group of FBI agents and New York City police were on hand waiting to receive the "evidence" from this "crime scene."

Deputy Police Inspector James Luongo had arrived to take charge of the effort that morning. As he surveyed the 175 acres, some of it still bubbling with leaks from the methane gas produced by the tons of garbage underneath, he had no idea how he was going to handle all the wreckage that was fast arriving in a place so desolate, so spooky that another cop, who was a Vietnam veteran, likened it to a scene out of Apocalypse Now. Luongo needed structures for dressing rooms, refreshment centers, and cleanup areas for what he was told would be a crew of hundreds, working for what he assumed would be a year, sifting through it all. Who was going to build all that? Who was going to organize the crews? What about protective equipment? Food? Water? Electricity?

Brian Lyons had a different concern: Were the remains of his brother and everyone else, now being shunted off to a garbage dump, to be lost forever?

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill