NEW YORK (AP) ? Jim Riches pulled his son's mangled body out of the rubble at the World Trade Center, but the phone calls still filtered in years afterward. The city kept finding more pieces of his son.
"They'll call you and they'll tell you, 'We found a shin bone,'" Riches said. "Or: 'We found an arm bone.' We held them all together and then we put them in the cemetery."
Those are the phone calls both dreaded and hoped for among the families of Sept. 11 victims. And as investigators began sifting through newly uncovered debris from the World Trade Center on Monday for the first time in three years, those anxieties were renewed more than a decade after the attacks. But there was also hope that more victims might yet be identified after tens of millions have been spent on the painstaking identification process.
"We would like to see the other 40 percent of the families who have never recovered anything to at least someday have a piece of their loved one," Riches said. "That they can go to a cemetery and pray."
About 60 truckloads of debris that could contain tiny fragments of bone or tissue were unearthed by construction crews that have been working on the new World Trade Center in recent years. That material is now being transported to a park built on top of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where investigators will attempt to identify any possible remains during the next 10 weeks, the city said.
The city's last sifting effort ended in 2010. This time, crews were able to dig up parts of the trade center site that were previously inaccessible to workers, the city said.
Some 2,750 people died at the World Trade Center in the 2001 terrorist attacks, but only 1,634 people have been identified.
"We have been monitoring the World Trade Center site over time and monitoring the construction," said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner's office. "And if they see any material that could possibly contain human remains, we collect that material."
About 9,000 human remains recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center remain unidentified because they are too degraded to match victims by DNA identification. The remains are stored at an undisclosed location monitored by the medical examiner's office and will eventually be transferred to a subterranean chamber at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
Some victims' families expressed impatience that the city has only just uncovered more debris.
"Quite frankly, they should've excavated this and searched it 12 years ago," said Diane Horning, whose son, Matthew, died in the attacks. "Instead, they built service roads and construction roads and were more worried about the building and the tourism than they were about the human remains."
The city's efforts to identify Sept. 11 victims have long been fraught with controversy.
In April 2005, the city's chief medical examiner, Charles Hirsch, told families his office would be suspending identification efforts because it had exhausted the limits of DNA technology.
But just a year later, the discovery of human remains on a bank tower roof and then in a manhole near ground zero outraged families who said the search for their loved ones had been rushed initially. The findings prompted a renewed search that cost the city tens of millions of dollars and uncovered 1,500 pieces of remains.
Meanwhile, some victims' relatives sued the city over its decision to move 1.6 million tons of materials from the trade center site to the Fresh Kills landfill, saying the material might contain victims' ashes and should have been given a proper burial.
The lawsuit was dismissed, and unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As it embarks on combing through debris yet again, the medical examiner's office says it will keep monitoring the site as long as new areas are being dug or exposed.
Charles G. Wolf was pleased to hear about the renewed search, though he believes that his wife, Katherine, was vaporized during the attack. Investigators have never found her remains.
Years ago, it bothered him that he had no grave to visit. Wolf said the opening of the Sept. 11 memorial has filled a hole in his heart, but he'll never have closure.
"You heal. You carry on," he said. "It's not closure."
___
Associated Press Writer Jennifer Peltz contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sifting-sept-11-debris-remains-begins-anew-063305587.html
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It’s no secret that Yahoo! is overhauling all of its flagship products, including mail. The service has gotten a refresh on both the web and mobile, and today, the company has announced a partnership with file-backup and sharing service Dropbox. The partnership will make it easier to send, receive and manage attachments in Yahoo! Mail. In case you’ve forgotten, Yahoo! Mail is still the No. 3 most-used mail service in the world behind Hotmail and Gmail. But the last time we checked, it was No. 1 in the United States. By acting nimbly, the company can add small tweaks and enhancements thanks to partnerships like this that will give it a potential edge against the competition. This is good news for both companies, specifically Dropbox. This brings a new audience to the service, which has become a mainstay in the workplace and small teams of collaborators. The company has yet to crack the pure mainstream consumer, in-home, area, and Yahoo! has those users lined up and waiting to try new things. If users don’t have a Dropbox account, they can simply sign up for one via Yahoo! Mail. That also means more potential revenue for Dropbox once these users fill up their free 2GB. Here’s what David McDowell, Senior Director of Product Management on Yahoo! Mail had to say about the partnership: Starting today, Dropbox is available within Yahoo! Mail. This integration allows you to share and store files more easily, whether they are vacation photos or important documents like tax returns and research papers. And, because files can be stored in your Dropbox account online, it’s easy to find the files you want even when you are away from your desktop. Dropbox is available within Yahoo! Mail for the Web in English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. For those of you new to Dropbox, you can quickly create an account from within Yahoo! Mail. On the Dropbox blog, the company discusses the advantages of managing all of your attachments using their service, including not having to worry about file sizes. Additionally, you’ll be able to share whole albums of photos to emails, no doubt in a push from the recently acquired Snapjoy team, which is really handy. This will all be rolling out to everyone today. This is the second major move that Dropbox has made in the email space, the first being the acquisition of popular, and hard
We?re just getting out of winter ? so driving conditions are good again! Most people are looking forward to no longer having to deal with the dangers of winter driving in the Coeur d?Alene area. The snow, the ice, and the chemicals sprayed on the roads to facilitate melting are a thing of the past for a few months. But spring ushers in another series of driving hazards and poor road conditions.