We’ve all heard of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
But in the case of the 911 victims’ remains was it a case of “ashes and dust to fill city potholes?”
A contractor in a deposition says it was:
The pulverized remains of bodies from the World Trade Center disaster site were used by city workers to fill ruts and potholes, a city contractor says in a sworn affidavit filed Friday in Manhattan Federal Court.
Eric Beck says debris powders – known as fines – were put in a pothole-fill mixture by crews at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., where more than 1.65 million tons of World Trade Center debris were deposited after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it onto tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts,” Eric Beck said.
Beck was the senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling, a private contractor hired to sift through debris trucked to Fresh Kills after the trade center attacks. Before the arrival of Taylor’s equipment at Fresh Kills in October 2001, the debris was sifted manually by workers using rakes and shovels.
Beck’s affidavit was filed by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims who are suing the city in hopes of creating a formal burial place for debris that they say contains human remains.
“It’s devastating,” Norman Siegel, an attorney representing the families, said of Beck’s statement. “When the 9/11 families found about this, they were wiped out.”
The families argue that the cleanup was hurried and slipshod, with the result that more than 400,000 tons of debris weren’t properly combed for human remains.
This is one of the more eyebrow raising tidbits to come out of a court case in recent years. If it turns out to be true (is there confirmation?) it should strengthen the 911 victims’ case.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.