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Rescue turns into brutal excavationGround zero, the epicentre of the disaster that struck New York, has changed. It is no longer a place of rescue or even recovery, but one of brutal excavation. Last week I saw that for myself as I entered the collapsed ruins of the World Trade Center and descended into its abyss.
Entering the site near the ruins of building seven, where FBI agents were combing the wreckage searching for missing files and safes from their former station post, I slipped first into the ghostly remains of building five and looked directly into the crushed twin towers. I could see for the first time what lies behind their skeletal facades. The 110 floors are so compressed they look like geological strata.
This "hot zone" is still on fire. The flames have been put out many times, but as pieces of debris are removed, oxygen rushes in and ignites the mess all over again. The central plaza has caved in 50ft deep and there are terrifying craters in the mangled metal into which some brave rescuers have been lowered.
"It's as if somebody took pick-up sticks and just threw them on the ground," said one construction worker.
But there is nothing down there. As one firefighter said: "I've been down 80ft and seen nothing but body parts." Another emergency rescue worker said he wished he had found more remains. More body parts would have meant more hope of survivors.
Where air pockets have been discovered, temperatures of up to 900F have been recorded. The people trapped on the top floors are assumed to have been vaporised by the intense flames from the aviation fuel; those who fell to earth with the towers have most likely been pulverised.
I headed past the remains of a nursery that had mercifully been evacuated, and picked my way down a buckled escalator into the pit of rubble. In this underworld, some shops are virtually intact and looters have been at work, stealing watches from a dust-strewn boutique, raiding a designer sunglasses store and trying to prise cash registers open. I paused by a drug store where stacks of ash-coated household cleaning goods remain on display amid the choking filth. Further still into the darkness was a mobile phone shop, a bookshop and a newsagent's. Cars still stand in the car parks. If there were body parts, I did not see them in the half-light, but the rank odour was unmistakable.
A construction worker remarked that he was grateful for the cooler, autumnal weather. On one hot day last week, before the rain came, his stomach heaved. He was exhausted, having spent only one night at home with his family since the attack. The absence of anyone alive in the ruins sickened him.
On the underground walls I saw red-painted graffiti, a sign that the area had been searched for survivors. Even in this relatively accessible section, the date was September 18, a full week after the tragedy.
Then it dawned on me. The rescue effort, after all this time, has been largely confined to the outer perimeter of the World Trade Center. Though workers have been climbing over the rubble like ants, they have barely penetrated the mounds that were once the twin towers.
I saw construction workers with blow torches cutting through enormous steel girders, but most of the search and rescue teams have melted away. The dogs from the K9 section of the New York police have mostly returned to their kennels; the volunteers who rushed to the scene in the first few days have been replaced by contractors for big construction firms.
The firefighters who remain are pumping water from huge hoses into the void, trying to contain the pockets of flame. Where body parts are found, they are taken by bucket to makeshift morgues. But the long lines of men clawing at the rubble in response to what they thought were sounds of tapping are gone.
The most complete remains show that life has literally been squeezed out of them: the bodies are almost boneless, like those of animals found on the roadside.
A 300ft-long crane, weighing 700 tons, has been assembled next to the smouldering site. I was told its big sister, weighing 1,000 tons, was on its way. "We've moved into the rapid recovery phase," said a building engineer.
In the gloom, I heard a solitary voice of optimism. A building worker claimed there just might be survivors in the stairwells, not those in the middle of the towers but in the storeys below ground, where the stairwells were located on the stronger, outer rim. Others scorned that theory. It has been 12 days since the inferno and the limits of human survival have surely been reached.
Equally far-fetched hopes that those caught in the blasts may have walked through the subway and commuter train tunnels to safety have been dashed. Rescue workers tried to reach the site from New Jersey on Thursday, but got no further than a slurry wall.
Construction engineers are now worried about flooding: the wall is like a bathtub keeping the water of the Hudson River out. Once the rubble is removed, there may be nothing with which to shore it up.
The atmosphere at ground zero is palpably different from that of a week ago. The day after the disaster I hitched a ride into the closed zone with a medical team. They had been told a survivor had been recovered, "a false alarm as it turned out", and thought they could be useful. They ended the day serving food to exhausted rescue workers. There was nothing better for them to do.
Even so, there was hope on that day. It had yet to dawn on the firefighters, police and medics that the rubble would be so pitiless. The heroism of the missing firefighters and the courage of the search and rescue teams helped to humanise the tragedy. It was possible to think of them and to feel comforted and inspired.
Construction workers in hard hats hacking away at the debris lack that poetry. Ground zero has lost some of its dignity.
Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor, has said the wreckage will take at least six months to move; it may be longer. The inaptly named Fresh Kills dump on Staten Island is already beginning to fill up with debris from the 16-acre site, but barely a dent has been made in the mounds of rubbish.
That is all they are now: giant, mouldering piles of rubbish. The site still has the power to chill, but the spirit of the victims has departed.
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