By Richard Pyle
Additional Reporting - Diego Ibarguen
and looked out over the expanse of ground zero, once a seemingly
impenetrable jumble of debris, now a vast plain of empty concrete.
"Unbelievable," he said, over and over. "Unbelievable."
The word stands as a fitting epitaph - for the twin towers that stood at
the site, for what happened to them on Sept. 11, and for what
battalions of workers achieved in the 8 months that followed.
Lyons, 50, was among hundreds of firefighters in the crowd Thursday
as the last steel beam was hauled away, along with an empty stretcher
covered with an American flag, symbolizing the still-missing dead.
With that, the recovery effort came to an end.
Lyons was on a duty the morning terrorist hijackers flew two jetliners
into the World Trade Center towers, causing them to collapse and killing
some 2,800 people, including 343 firefighters.
"We were putting medical gear on the truck and getting ready to go
when we were ordered to stand fast," he said. "I lost five good friends,
about 20 guys I had worked with at one time or another and maybe 50
people total that I was acquainted with in my 20 years on the job."
Lyons and his crew reached ground zero the next day to help look for
survivors. "You could tell right away that there weren't going to be any,"
he said. "Everybody was dead."
Thursday's ceremony began at 10:29 a.m., the moment the north tower
collapsed on Sept. 11, with a fire bell sounding the 5-5-5-5 fire code,
four sets of five rings, traditionally sounded for the death of a firefighter on duty.
The bells, along with bagpipes and a dirge of drums, were the only sounds
in the ceremony. Despite a pack of politicians, there were no speeches,
and prayers were private.
Family members, some weeping, carried pictures of lost loved ones, many
of whom have not been identified. Some tossed flowers into the void that
became a final resting place.
For those overlooking the site, few reminders remained of what was once
the trade center. Among them were the subway tracks that thousands of
commuters rode each day, now laid bare along the floor of the site.
The steel removed from the site was equivalent to 20 Golden Gate bridges,
according to Leo DiRubbo, the site supervisor for AMEC Construction Co.,
one of the two major contractors.
Signs that once marked the grid of streets around the complex are gone,
replaced by orange paint indicating the street numbers of boarded-up buildings.
At the entrance of one building on the edge of the site, a frame remains
intact, but the sheet of glass that once made it a door is gone.
Bright orange letters on the walls recall the early days of the tragedy:
"NYPD,""Hot Food," a cross signifying medical treatment, and the word
"Searched," scrawled on buildings scoured for survivors.
But while the site remains a place of overwhelming sadness, the area
around it has come back to life.
On Thursday, people watched the ceremony from repaired sections of
3 World Financial Center across the street, and from the Verizon building,
to the north. Blown-out windows in the Millennium hotel and Century 21
department store have been replaced. Building facades have been cleaned
and businesses reopened.
Outside One Liberty Plaza, a building that formerly housed a temporary
morgue and was originally thought to be in danger of collapse, people
took smoke breaks, ate lunch and enjoyed the warm weather.
Church Street - scarred in September by a 10-story section of tower now
flows with traffic. Most side streets have reopened to pedestrians.
Still, for those who spent day after day at ground zero, the return of activity
to the scarred area &the end of the cleanup effort don't mean life is back to normal.
"I have mixed emotions about the whole thing," said Port Authority police
Officer Ray Murray, a regular at the site since Sept. 11.
"I'm glad that we get to go on with our lives. At the same time, we'll never
forget what happened here."
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