Rebuilding of WTC

[RspctFrmCalgary]

How will generations in the future understand the total impact of that horrific day if the names are not listed as most of the families want them to be, by company? I know I have always spoken out mainly about the firefighters, but it needs to be shown that over 600 people from Cantor Fitzgerald were killed, that 343 of New York's BRAVEST were killed, for example. It needs to be shown who was on each of the planes. Who the restuarant workers were. These people didn't die individually, they died together, some hand in hand.

When I go to pay my respects at the memorial (5 years to build it seems like an awfully long time) I want to be able to stand in front of a wall and see all those names together, to mourn the tremendous loss the survivors from all those companies experienced.

I want to be able to stand in front of a wall that shows the names of the firefighters from each firehouse and run my fingers over their names. I want to see that these are the guys from E40L35, from Rescue 2 etc. who were murdered. That can't happen if the names are individually and randomly listed over a huge site, with no acknowledgment of who they were. They worked together, lived together, laughed and cried together and DIED together. So why can't they be memorialized together????!!!!!

And if I, a stranger, feel this way, how do you think their brother firefighters feel? Why can't the bureaucrats understand that?? *big sigh*

The memorial is to honor the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grannys, grandpas, friends and coworkers that were killed, not for the buildings that were lost.

In years to come, do we want to remember September 11th as a day of numbers? That's what will happen if the names are listed randomly.

[kentbwj]

It seems so impersonal to list the names randomly, and it's also very insensitive to those left behind. For the survivors of the attacks, who lost friends, family, and loved ones, the people they knew were most likely connected to a particular organization or company. When they go to pay their respects and visit the final resting place of the people they knew, they shouldn't have to search in twenty different places. I just can't figure out the logic behind what the designers are trying to do.

[E40FDNYL35]

December 22, 2004 -- Robert D.W. Higley II, 29, has been added to the list of confirmed dead in the World Trade Center attacks.

[E40FDNYL35]

January 10, 2005 -- Families of 9/11 victims rallied yesterday outside the World Trade Center site to press for more openness as officials plan the memorial.
Jack Lynch, a member of the Coalition of 9/11 Families, said no one from his group was tapped to sit on the memorial planning board."We have constantly been disenfranchised," said Lynch, 69, whose son Michael, a firefighter with Engine 40, was killed in the attacks.
The 9/11 coalition, made up of more than 4,000 families and survivors, wants at least two of its members on the memorial foundation's 31-member board.The recently formed private corporation will work to raise about $500 million for the construction of the memorial and cultural center on the site.
There are 9/11-victim family members - including Monica Iken, founder of September's Mission - among the board's ranks of corporate executives, civic leaders and philanthropists.
But the foundation's first meeting, held last Wednesday, was closed to the public, members of the Coalition of 9/11 Families complained.
"The process should be made open to the public so we know what's going on," Lynch said.
Holding yellow carnations and photos of fallen relatives, family members also ticked off other complaints.
Patricia Reilly, who lost her sister Lorraine Lee, an Aon employee, said officials have ignored their plea to alter a plan to list the victims randomly and instead organize them by affiliation.
"We should have a say in how our families' names are listed," she said.
In the most heated issue still unresolved, families continue to press for the burial of material taken from the site of the terror attack to Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
"They deserve to be buried respectfully," said Ann Marie McAleese of Baldwin, L.I., who lost her son Brian, a firefighter with Brooklyn's Engine 226.

[RspctFrmCalgary]

It never ceases to amaze me when you post these articles. Keep up the fight, Ray! I wish there was something I could do to help. I just don't understand why they are being so freakin' blind ... and disrespectful to the memories of both civilians and firefighters. Is it all about politics? Where is the pressure coming from?

[E40FDNYL35]

LOST SOULS

The heartbreaking effort to identify all 2,749 victims of the World Trade Center terror attacks is over.After an agonizing wait of 3 ½ years, the families of 1,164 of the dead are being told by the Medical Examiner's Office that it has exhausted all the DNA technology currently available. But the office held out hope that scientific advances will allow its efforts to continue and that some time in the future, names can be put to all of the unidentified remains. "We have every expectation that the technology will [improve]," said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the ME. "We will never stop trying to trying to identify the remains," she vowed. Borakove pointed out that "there have been great strides in the technology since the disaster." And that gave hope to family members who still have not been able to bring their loved ones home. "I'm not going to give up," said Bill Doyle, who lost his firefighter son Joseph in the attack. "I have faith." Doyle said he got a call last week notifying him that work has been temporarily stopped. "It hurts," Doyle said. "We have a plot in the cemetery for him."
The medical examiner also plans to send letters to all the families. Being able to have a positive ID is something that weighs heavily on a lot of the families. "What happened? Did he just go up in smoke? Disintegrate?" Doyle said. "You'll always live with that." But despite his pain, Doyle said he knew this day would come. "We realized at some point they were going to run out of technology," he said. Of the people who have been officially reported as missing from the World Trade Center and the innocent victims who died on the planes that hit the buildings, 1,585 have been identified, according to the Medical Examiner's Office. Recovery workers found 19,916 body parts on the site and forensic experts were able to identify 10,190 of those remains. The number of people identified by DNA alone is just 844. Forensic experts used a combination of DNA, dental X-rays and fingerprints to identify another 530 people. Monica Iken's husband, Michael, worked on the 84th floor of the south tower. He still hasn't been identified and Iken has made peace with that. "Three years later, I'm at the point where I've accepted the reality where I might not get any remains back," she said. Even for those who did get remains back, it may not heal wounds. "It's not a person," Iken said. "It's not significant enough." And though Iken has accepted the fact that she might not get any part of her husband back, she is still hopeful that his wedding ring or his company ID will be found. "One day I will find something of Mike and take him home," she said. "I still have hope." But the news from the ME may be reason enough to finally bury the remains that some of the families have already received, and not wait for more to be identified. "I'm certain that some people are going to take the remains that they have and bury them," Doyle said.

[E40FDNYL35]

The end of the effort to identify World Trade Center victims will bring a sad new surge of funerals and burials, as families claim the remains of 419 identified people from the city medical examiner's office."I want to go through it once. I want my husband's remains to rest in peace," said Marilyn Reich, 57, of Forest Hills, Queens. "I wouldn't have wanted to bury [a coffin] and then have to reopen it."
The medical examiner identified 31 fragments of her husband Howard's body. But her rabbi said she could wait to bury him until they were sure no more remains would be matched to him."I just wanted them to tell me that they're finished, that it's over," said Reich, who is planning a traditional Jewish burial.
Now that scientific efforts to identify remains have been exhausted, hundreds of other families also are preparing to bury or cremate their loved ones' remains."They're calling and saying they're ready to make arrangements," said Kevin Mack, general manager of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on the upper East Side. "I expect that more families will be getting in touch with us."
For many families the end of the identification process brings no finality - just fresh pain. Advanced DNA techniques failed to identify 1,161 of the 2,749 killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001."Almost 3-1/2 years later, you still hoped that something would happen," said Jill Abbott, daughter of victim Michael San Phillip, 55, of Ridgewood, N.J. "I guess I always thought that there would be something to bury, but we don't [have anything]. We never will. That door is closed now."
It also is stirring new anger among those who want WTC debris dug up from the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island and returned to Ground Zero, saying that ash and dust is all that remains of their loved ones."My son is in a garbage dump. I can't live with that," said Rosemarie Foti of the lower East Side, whose firefighter son, Robert Foti, was never found. "I want him buried where he died and where he was cremated."
The 9,720 unidentified remains, too decayed for DNA testing, will be preserved and entombed in the permanent Ground Zero memorial, so they can be retrieved if, someday, new technology offers the possibility of identification."We are doing everything we possibly can to maintain the remains in an appropriate way, both from a respect point of view but also from a science point of view," Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday. "When down the road technology gets better, we will go back and try to do the next level of technology."
But even families that recovered some fragments of their loved ones were left wishing they could find more."Many of my sister's remains were found, but where is the rest of her?" asked Alyson Low, whose sister Sara Elizabeth Low was a flight attendant on one of the doomed planes. "Hopefully they will be able to start up again someday."
Yet Louisanne Diehl, 53, of Brick, N.J., warns those families to be careful what they wish for, because her family was devastated when her husband Michael's right hand was identified in November 2001."I wish they wouldn't have found anything of him; I really do," she said yesterday. "You'd like to think of your loved one whole, not in pieces."

[RspctFrmCalgary]

Thanks for the updates, Ray.

[E40FDNYL35]

The family of World Trade Center victim Azael Vasquez is reeling from a horrible forensic mistake: He was buried with someone else's foot.
"After three years, I was doing a little better, and then this took me right back," his devastated father, Ismael, 43, told the Daily News.Now the Staten Island father must exhume his son's coffin from a Queens cemetery more than three years after he buried what he had believed were the 21-year-old's remains."They want the foot. My family's more than happy to do that," said Ismael's sister, Carmen Vasquez. "But why does that have to happen after 3-1/2 years? That person in the coffin was supposed to be my nephew."The medical examiner has apologized profusely for the error and has found Azael Vasquez's correct foot, said spokeswoman Ellen Borakove."We're going to do whatever we can to make it right," she said. "This is something you never want to see happen, but unfortunately errors occur. When they do, we want to notify the family immediately, and apologize and rectify it."The error is the fourth such mistake the medical examiner's office has made during its unprecedented attempt to identify almost 20,000 World Trade Center remains - an error rate of less than 1%.In one case, the bodies of two firefighters from the same engine company were misidentified because each had an identical, highly unusual spinal defect.Last March, the body of Michael D'Esposito of Morganville, N.J., was exhumed to remove a leg that officials discovered belonged to someone else."I can't blame the medical examiner's office at all, because they were doing so much and doing the best they could," said D'Esposito's father, Ralph, 61, of Staten Island. "There's not much you can do."
The previous mistakes were caused by a combination of clerical and scientific errors, Borakove said, but she could not immediately say what happened in Vasquez's case.The medical examiner's office officially ended its difficult efforts to identify the victims of the 9/11 attacks last week, having exhausted all scientific methods.

Of the 2,749 victims, 1,161 are still unidentified.

Forensic anthropologists in the medical examiner's office discovered that Vasquez had been buried with the wrong foot last week when they were finalizing their files.When an anthropologist opened Vasquez's file to record that his right foot had been identified in the lab, the scientist found that Vasquez had already been buried with a right foot.Vasquez's father said he hasn't been able to return to his son's grave since the Jan. 19, 2002, funeral. The prospect of reopening the grave, then reburying his son, a food service worker from Cantor Fitzgerald, is too much to take, he said.Borakove said the medical examiner's office will pay for a funeral director to make all the arrangements, and will add some newly identified remains of Vasquez to the coffin before it is buried again.She said the foot in Vasquez's coffin has not been identified but will be retested to see if it can be properly matched to another victim."I don't have a choice but to let them take him out of there," Ismael Vasquez said. "I know that they had a tough job. I don't take that away. But they assured me that when I was burying Azael Vasquez, that it was my son."

[E40FDNYL35]

'IRONMAN' TRAGEDY

Firefighter Robert Ryan was an Ironman — competing in grueling triathlons across the globe as well as tackling fires. But his days of swimming 2.4 miles, cycling 112 miles and running 26.2 miles in succession, and fighting fires are over.
The World Trade Center disaster, he said, has destroyed his health.
These days, Ryan can't climb the stairs without running short of breath — one of the symptoms he attributes to breathing foul air and dust for months while working on the search and recovery efforts at Ground Zero. "I tire easily now," said Ryan, 46. "It's a scary situation. I have to be on medication the rest of my life." Ryan, a firefighter with Ladder 30 in Harlem, is assigned to light duty. He has applied for a retirement disability pension due to work-related illnesses caused by working in an environmental disaster zone. Ryan was diagnosed with asthma, and said he suffers from sinus conditions, chest pains and persistent throat problems and acid indigestion. "It's like heartburn multiplied by 100," he said of the burning sensation in his throat and chest that sometimes wake him in the middle of the night.
Now, he worries about providing for his 5-year-old son, Matthew.
Because his serious respiratory and asthmatic conditions didn't surface until 2003, the federal 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund rejected his application for benefits. The fund had distributed $627 million to 1,388 injured firefighters and $84.7 million to 205 cops. Stunned and angered by the lack of support, Ryan is one of a growing number of municipal workers and other volunteers who've filed multimillion-dollar negligence suits against the city and Ground Zero operators, claiming the bosses failed to provide adequate respiratory gear to protect them from pollutants. I was the first person in my firehouse to get sick. I know guys who are getting the same symptoms," said Ryan, during an interview with his lawyers. Ryan said workers were driven by saving lives and helping put the city back on its feet during the five-month rescue, recovery and cleanup effort — not obsessed about their own health.
"If you had trouble breathing, you went to get a drink of water. It was tunnel vision. We had a job to do. That's all that mattered at the time," Ryan recalled. "No matter, breathing this stuff couldn't be good for you. We were constantly getting bombarded with dust in our face." But while firefighters were trying to save people and restore the city, Ryan said, the unprepared brass didn't protect them.
Dr. Michael Weiden, a medical officer in the city Fire Department, has likened breathing WTC dust, consisting of pulverized concrete, fibrous glass, carbon particulates and asbestos, to "swallowing or inhaling Drano."

[E40FDNYL35]

February 28, 2005 -- Retired firefighter Jimmy Boyle was frustrated by the FDNY's unreliable radios long before 9/11 - but after his brave son died in the terror attacks, his battle turned personal.
Firefighter Michael Boyle was rescuing victims inside the north tower when FDNY brass sounded a call to evacuate. But few of the Bravest heard the orders over the patchwork of failing frequencies.
Inspired by the memory of his 33-year-old son, Jimmy Boyle is bringing his fight for better radio equipment to Congress as a homeland security adviser to New York Rep. Peter King."I was yelling for years," said Boyle, 66, who lives in Westbury, L.I. "The radios didn't work in 1993. The radios didn't work in 2001. And guess what? The radios don't work today. That really gets to me."King (R-L.I.) was named chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee on emergency preparedness this month, and has hired Boyle to help him investigate radio flaws and communication troubles that endanger rescuers.
"He has such a strong personal motivation, and he has incredible sources," King said. "I'm getting a lot of advice and a lot of knowledge about the radios from Jimmy. He really knows this issue inside and out."King plans to hold hearings on the radios as soon as this spring, using the city's problems as a worst-case example of communication failures that hinder cops and firefighters nationwide.
Boyle said he will not stop his campaign until better equipment is made available to firefighters, cops and other first responders."It has to be a national effort, but New York should be where they try it out," said the gregarious 25- year FDNY veteran, who served two terms as the city firefighters union president."I've spoken with people who were in the north tower, and they never had a sense of urgency that the collapse was imminent," Boyle said. "My son died there."

[Pretender764]

Originally posted by E40FDNYL35
February 28, 2005 -- Retired firefighter Jimmy Boyle was frustrated by the FDNY's unreliable radios long before 9/11 - but after his brave son died in the terror attacks, his battle turned personal.
Firefighter Michael Boyle was rescuing victims inside the north tower when FDNY brass sounded a call to evacuate. But few of the Bravest heard the orders over the patchwork of failing frequencies.
Inspired by the memory of his 33-year-old son, Jimmy Boyle is bringing his fight for better radio equipment to Congress as a homeland security adviser to New York Rep. Peter King."I was yelling for years," said Boyle, 66, who lives in Westbury, L.I. "The radios didn't work in 1993. The radios didn't work in 2001. And guess what? The radios don't work today. That really gets to me."King (R-L.I.) was named chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee on emergency preparedness this month, and has hired Boyle to help him investigate radio flaws and communication troubles that endanger rescuers.
"He has such a strong personal motivation, and he has incredible sources," King said. "I'm getting a lot of advice and a lot of knowledge about the radios from Jimmy. He really knows this issue inside and out."King plans to hold hearings on the radios as soon as this spring, using the city's problems as a worst-case example of communication failures that hinder cops and firefighters nationwide.
Boyle said he will not stop his campaign until better equipment is made available to firefighters, cops and other first responders."It has to be a national effort, but New York should be where they try it out," said the gregarious 25- year FDNY veteran, who served two terms as the city firefighters union president."I've spoken with people who were in the north tower, and they never had a sense of urgency that the collapse was imminent," Boyle said. "My son died there."

Ray,

I didnt have too much time to look through the 9/11 commission report, and it sounded to my like they were blaming the FDNY for not doing anything about the radios, which I really dont think is true. I dont think there is any reason the government should just stand by and let this happen in the next high rise incident. If it would help, I think high rise building owners should be required to have radio repeaters in their buildings, and get a insurance break for it. I would really like to hear more on this story or how it could be fixed, because there is no reason that every firefighter should not be hearing the evacuation order.

[E40FDNYL35]

March 13,2005 -- For 3 1/2 years, the city medical examiner's staff has lived in the grip of the World Trade Center dead.
They've studied the fragments of shattered bodies, catalogued the razors and toothbrushes of those who never returned home and told the harshest truths to thousands of grieving relatives.But with the effort to identify 9/11 victims officially wrapping up, the 2,749 dead are finally releasing their grasp on dozens of investigators, doctors and scientists."It's like there's a huge rock off my shoulders," said Dr. Robert Shaler, the medical examiner's director of forensic biology. "I feel free. I feel free to be able to pursue everything else in my life."
Barbara Butcher, the medical examiner's director of investigation, said it feels strange to forsake a mission that reshaped the rhythms and meanings of the office."This is where the feelings begin to come out - when you stop," she said. "I wonder: How will my colleagues go on? How will they return to their ordinary jobs?" The medical examiner's office threw itself into the task of cataloguing and identifying the dead from the moment the first plane struck the north tower of the trade center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Working what seemed like weeks without end at an incomparable task, some poured themselves into cataloguing and identifying the 19,916 parts of remains that would eventually reach the morgue.Others sat down to write software that could match thousands of body parts against thousands of DNA samples brought in by victims' relatives, tracking where every item had come from and where it was stored.And scientists started pushing the edges of DNA technology, pioneering new techniques to ID ever-smaller stretches of genetic material on fire-scarred remains.
For Shaler and many of his colleagues at the medical examiner's First Ave. building, the catastrophe turned a dispassionate, technical job into a personal quest."It became pretty clear that we had to talk to the families," said Shaler, who spent months explaining DNA to them, ordering that new work be done for them, even asking some to provide new samples of their DNA.
By the end, his lab had successfully pulled DNA profiles from some remains that didn't match any of the samples on file - in some cases because heartbroken relatives wouldn't provide DNA samples for testing."There were some families that didn't want to be notified. Ever," Shaler said.
Last month the medical examiner's office conceded reality and said it was indefinitely suspending the ID effort until new DNA technology allows it to return to the task someday.The staff had identified 58% of the 2,749 victims - including 844 by DNA alone. Doing so has cost $80 million, with perhaps another $20 million in bills still due.
The end of the effort means the medical examiner's office will reassign staffers to other tasks.And it means workers can no longer cloak their emotions in a heavy curtain of work."Things will never be the same," Butcher said. "I have no excuse to be sad anymore."

[distchief60b]

Ray.....

Thanks for keeping us up to speed on all these issues.

[E40FDNYL35]

March 23, 2005 -- Three more people have been identified from the World Trade Center rubble, even though the Medical Examiner's Office said recently it was halting the process.
Luis Manuel Lopez, 39, George L. Merino, 39, and Hector Luis Tirado, Jr., 30, were added to the list of identified victims, the ME's office said yesterday. They were identified on March 11.
Last month, scientists admitted current technology would not identify any more bone fragments and the ME's office said it was suspending further identification efforts. But the office didn't entirely shut down its identification process last month — leading to yesterday's three new cases and one more name could be released as early as this week, according to ME spokeswoman Ellen Brooke.

This brings the total number of victims identified to 1,588 of the 2,749 people who were murdered at the World Trade Center.