The men and women who went to work at Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island in the fall of 2001 expected to be confronted by identifiable remnants of the lives that were consumed when the planes hit the towers: office furniture, computer parts, clothing. Instead, when they cleared the extensive security perimeter and arrived on “the hill,” as it came to be called, they were met by a great pile of undifferentiated grey-brown dirt and rubble.
It would take a team of roughly 1,000 workers, operating in shifts around the clock, until July 2002 to surface the objects and human remains that had survived the collapse and incineration of the towers in some recognizable form.
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