May 31, 2002	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 18,1423

NEW YORK, May 30: What began on Sept. 11 with the scream of crashing jetliners, the roar of falling steel and the deaths of thousands ended on Thursday in a silence broken by the solemn tolling of bells, the wail of bagpipes and the sobs of those mourning the loved ones they lost.

With an empty stretcher bearing a folded American flag, New York marked the end of the mammoth recovery of human remains and the ruins of the World Trade Center with a brief 20 minute ceremony, nearly nine months after two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers, destroying them and killing 2,823 people.

Police and fire department pipers and drummers marched behind the stretcher, born by ambulance up a ramp from the bottom of what workers once called “the pile.” At the tail of the procession, a truck slowly carried the last steel girder to be removed from the site, wrapped in black muslin, an American flag and draped with a bouquet of flowers.

There were no speeches by politicians, no prayers by the clergy. At 10:29 a.m. (1429 GMT), the moment on Sept. 11 the second of the 110-story buildings collapsed in a pile of mangled and broken steel, concrete and glass, a firefighter tolled a bell in four sets of five chimes, the traditional code for a fallen comrade.

Thousands of family members, firefighters, police officers, rescue workers and politicians, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, credited with holding the city together after the attacks, his successor Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. George Pataki, stood by in silence.

An honour guard of city, state and federal personnel flanked a procession carrying a stretcher with a folded American flag, symbolizing those killed but not found. More than one in 10 of those who lost their lives on Sept. 11 were firefighters, police officers or rescue workers.

Almost 1,800 of the victims have yet to be identified. Every human remnant, over 19,000 body parts, has been taken to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island for sifting by investigators and medical staff to identify victims.

The procession paused at the top of the ramp, and buglers from the uniformed services played “Taps” while five helicopters flew in a phalanx over the heads of the mourners and north over the city. The procession then travelled 15 blocks north along the West Side Highway as the Port Authority Police Department, the New York Fire Department and the New York Police Department corps played “America the Beautiful”.

People broke into applause as the ambulance and truck bearing the steel girder passed the crowd and groups of workers, police and firefighters walked up the ramp, sometimes led by a family member holding a picture of a lost loved one.

“Today I think is bittersweet. It is the end of cleanup effort, but it also reminds us of all the people who perished here. Our condolences go out to the families,” said Leslaine Lambert, a 44-year-old ironworker who was part of the recovery effort for about five months.

“I have been here since Day One. I think we did the best we could do. I would do it again 100 times,” said crane operations engineer Rich Streeter, 34, from The Bronx, a member of the honour guard.

The dust was still settling at “ground zero,” site of the collapsed World Trade Center twin towers, on Sept. 11 when the first emergency and recovery workers began to move 1.6 million tonnes of debris — the equivalent of 20 Golden Gate Bridges.

Within hours, the site was filled with thousands of fire, police and medical officials, more than 1,000 sanitation workers and an undetermined number of construction workers and other volunteers.

MINI-CITY TO FEED WORKERS: In the months leading up to the closing ceremony, a mini-city sprang up around the site to feed the thousands who laboured to find survivors and, as hope faded, to find the dead and clear the way for new construction.

There was no further loss of life and no major injury in the massive cleanup, that came in three months ahead of schedule and under budget.

At the peak of its commitment on Oct. 11, the American Red Cross had almost 2,500 volunteers and staff feeding workers at the site and those displaced by the attack. It and the Salvation Army served almost 17 million meals and snacks in the past eight months. The Red Cross also provided beds, clothes and even massages for workers at the site.

Thursday’s ceremony signified the symbolic end of that effort, but it also marked a new beginning for the 16-acre (6-hectare) site.

Plans for some kind of memorial and redevelopment of the site are being discussed and could be announced as soon as July, city officials said.

“I remember coming over here when I was five or six years old and it was a huge hole like this. Here I am, 37 years later, in front of the same hole I was in in 1965. It is really tough but we are going to build it again,” said fourth-generation ironworker John Finamore, who has been at the site almost since the beginning of the recovery effort.—Reuters