Ground Zero ceremony marks end of recovery efforts 20 years ago
On Memorial Day 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered remarks at the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the formal end of recovery operations at Ground Zero. Afterwards, she and first gentleman Bill Hochul laid flowers at the 9/11 Memorial Glade monument. Credit: Office of the Governor / Kevin P. Coughlin
A bell tolled Monday at the World Trade Center memorial to mark almost exactly 20 years since the formal end of recovery operations at Ground Zero.
On May 30, 2002, one last stretcher, with just a folded American flag, had been carried away from Ground Zero by 10 people. The stretcher symbolized the countless others that had been removed with flag-draped remains in the 260 or so days after the 9/11 attacks eight months earlier.
And on Monday, the end of recovery efforts were commemorated by a delegation including Gov. Kathy Hochul and U.S. Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler.
"For many, the devastation, the loss occurred on that day, 9/11, but there's so many who know the bigger story. That for 260 days, people showed up here, exposed to toxins and contaminants," Hochul said above the whoosh of the nearby reflecting pools commemorating where the Twin Towers once stood.
Like the ceremony 20 years ago, a slow-marching bagpipe unit opened the commemoration, capped with a bugler's "Taps," and attended by more than 100 survivors, police, fire and sanitation personnel, as well as families of those who died.
Nearly 1 in 5 people who perished in the attacks in lower Manhattan were Long Islanders — two-thirds from Nassau County and the rest from Suffolk.
The number of those who died in the actual attack — 2,753 — has been eclipsed by the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 sickened by and dead from toxins pulverized into the air when the towers crumbled.
Memorial Day commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the formal end of recovery operations at Ground Zero. Credit: Office of the Governor / Kevin P. Coughlin
For more than eight months after 9/11, hundreds of workers dug through the rubble to search for remains of the dead. About 40% of those who died at Ground Zero have yet to be identified, CNN reported last year.
Some remains were never found, and rubble was taken en masse to Staten Island's Fresh Kills landfill where further recovery was pursued.
"The brave people, the sanitation workers who showed up and had endured the unthinkable, what they saw. The private contractors, the city agencies, everybody who showed up and made sure that everything that was drawn from this site was honored in place in a hallowed ground," she said.
John Feal, a first responder from Nesconset who lost half of his left foot after working to clear rubble from Ground Zero, noted how so many lives have been lost, or changed forever. He recalled a recent trip to the memorial.
"I was reminiscing about my journey: 42 surgeries, 320-plus trips to D.C., over 2,000 meetings with members of Congress and the Senate and the countless funerals," Feal said at the ceremony.
Nadler, speaking Monday at the ceremony, criticized the federal government for assuring workers at Ground Zero, as well as lower Manhattan residents, in the attacks' aftermath that the air was safe, when in fact it was poisonous.
"The air was not safe," he said, adding: "Our courageous first responders, lower Manhattan residents, students and workers were not being afforded proper protection from dangerous toxins as they were in and around the pile."
Hochul said the aftermath of 9/11 demonstrated New York's resiliency.
"People said we could not come back, 'Close it down. Lower Manhattan is dead now because of that day,'" the governor recalled. "But if that had happened, that would have meant the terrorists would have won. And by our strength and determination to bring this city back, we demonstrated no, they did not win."
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
