By Ellen Wulfhorst
recovery work at the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York will come
to a symbolic close on May 30, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on Thursday.
The solemn ceremony at the site known as Ground Zero will begin at 10:29 a.m.,
the time the second of the twin towers collapsed after the deadly attacks by two
hijacked planes on Sept. 11, he said.
But the mayor noted the recovery effort in fact will continue, as workers will not
stop searching through pockets of debris, and other rubble will still undergo
careful sifting at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
Also, he said, the process of trying to identify body parts from the rubble would
continue at the city Medical Examiner's office for the next year.
"The recovery effort will not finish on May 30,"
the mayor said at a news conference at City Hall.
"There is no date when we will really be finished with either the recovery,
the identification or the rebuilding. It is a process that goes on.
"It is not complete, and it never will," he said.
The ceremony, he said, "is a symbolic end, however, of the process and a
way to say thank you to those who have worked so hard and taken such
risks in an effort to recover those that we lost."
SOLEMN REMOVAL
The ceremony will include the solemn removal of an empty, flag-draped
stretcher to symbolize those victims whose bodies were never recovered,
he said.
It also will feature the ringing of bells in a traditional signal used by the
Fire Department of New York to honor those fallen in the line of duty.
Finally, he said, workers will remove the lone steel beam that still stands at
Ground Zero like a totem pole, painted with the letters and numbers
PAPD 37, NYPD 23, FDNY 343 - an accounting of those lost by the
Port Authority Police Department, New York Police Department and the
New York City Fire Department.
The attack killed 2,823 people in New York. Of those,
1,017 are confirmed dead.
Picking a day to hold a ceremony at Ground Zero,
Bloomberg said, was "a compromise."
"A slow transition has been taking place between recovery and renewal,"
he said. We will not stop ever if we find any debris that needs to be sifted
through and we will not forget those that we lost.
"At the same time, we have an obligation to those left behind to continue
the rebuilding that has already started, and we will fulfill both of those
obligations," he said.
He called the tireless recovery effort since Sept. 11 "an amazing thing."
"We've done it safely and we've done it efficiently and we've done it as
respectfully as anybody could ever expect us to do," he said.
Workers have removed 1.8 million tons of debris - 100,000 truckloads
from Ground Zero where the two 110-storey towers once stood, he said.
The precise fate of the World Trade Center site remains undetermined.
City officials plan to announce in July the process by which they will decide
upon a memorial, Bloomberg said.
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