http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/07/nyregion/07BODI.html

In the Ongoing Search for Bodies, Hope Is Derived From the Horror

December 7, 2001
In the Ongoing Search for Bodies, Hope Is Derived From the Horror
By ERIC LIPTON

The workers were four floors below ground, amid the still-steaming mass of
twisted steel and debris when they made the discovery last Saturday: the
remains of perhaps a dozen people who had been trapped in a stairwell at
the World Trade Center when the north tower collapsed.
In the surreal world of ground zero, the gruesome find was something of a
hopeful development. The group of what appeared to be office workers,
their bodies largely intact, meant that a handful of victims' families
would soon get the confirmation and mild comfort they had long been
waiting for.
And the discovery also seemed to lend support to what has been a largely
unspoken belief among recovery workers — that the deeper they got, the
greater the chance that additional human remains would be found.
The theory that more bodies might be found below ground level resulted
from an understanding of how the towers fell, and how the compression of
floor upon floor of the 110-story buildings might have completely crushed
many of the people on the higher floors and the rescue workers climbing to
them. More identifiable bodies, experts believed, might have remained
entombed in the pockets of space that existed at the base of the towers or
in the underground floors.
"It is a hell of a thing to say, but we are really making progress," said
Deputy Fire Chief Charles R. Blaich, who stood at ground zero for hours on
Saturday afternoon, watching as firefighters used hand tools and shovels
to delicately extract the bodies, one at a time.
The medical examiner's records give a clear indication of the surge in
recovering remains over the last 10 days. Few complete bodies are being
pulled from the site: that number stood yesterday at 225, up only 17 in
the last three weeks. But the number of remains recovered has jumped by
799 during that same period, after leveling off in early November.
"It is encouraging," said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the chief
medical examiner, who is handling the identification process.
And there is more news from the medical examiner's office: recent DNA
testing of recovered remains has produced about 800 distinct profiles of
people killed in the attack.
Assuming that the city has adequate DNA samples from family members to
allow a match, most of these victims should ultimately be identified, said
Dr. Robert Shaler, the director of forensic biology at the medical
examiner's office.
To date, only 492 of the roughly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade
Center have been positively identified, about 60 exclusively through DNA
matches.
"I am optimistic we will be able to make a significant dent into the
number of missing people," Dr. Shaler said, adding that the work will most
likely continue for a year or so. "I don't know if that is 50 percent or
40 percent, or whatever it will be."
The effort to recover and identify remains has been practically difficult
and emotionally intense. In recent weeks, as the cleanup work progressed,
a sense has taken hold among many families of victims that the chances of
finding many identifiable remains was desperately remote.
So the discovery last weekend, and its potential implications for

additional ones, is reassuring to the families who lost sons, daughters,
husbands or wives.
"You still have days you don't believe this has really happened," said
Hans J. Gerhardt of Toronto, whose son, Ralph Gerhardt, 34, called his
parents on the telephone just after the plane hit the north tower, where
he worked in the 105th-floor office of Cantor Fitzgerald. "We want to find
something of our son."
As with other victims' relatives who were interviewed, there was a
palpable sense of gratitude in Mr. Gerhardt's voice for the effort to
identify his son's remains.
"It obviously is a very gruesome task," he said, having traveled to New
York to visit ground zero several times. "I am sure when they go home at
night they cannot just walk away and forget about it."
The process for uncovering remains is both grueling and grisly, Chief
Blaich said.
On Saturday, sometime after noon, crews digging in an area at the base of
the north tower that they knew was a stairwell happened upon the remains.
Their location could not have been in doubt: the B4 wall sign, for the
fourth basement level, was still attached to a concrete column.
As is typical of the trade center site, just next to this wall was a
mountain of super-compacted debris perhaps 70 feet high, steam still
rising. And to the east was a sloping mound of steel and other debris.
Firefighters used pickaxes to dig an outline around the bodies, slowly
separating them from the debris.
Removing just the first victim took well over an hour, Chief Blaich said,
as a variety of garden-like tools were taken in and the firefighters took
extreme care not to cause any additional injury to the corpse.
At one point, earth-moving equipment was drafted to gently pull away a
steel beam that blocked off some victims.
"It was painstakingly slow work," he said. "You can't say anyone felt good
about what they were doing, that is not the right word. But they felt like
the contributed something."
Just yesterday, near the south tower, remains of what appeared to be a
firefighter were found, a sign that the recent string of successes in
finding victims was continuing.
These finds are not surprising to Fire Department officials, as the deeper
they have dug, the farther they have gotten to the base of the buildings.
"We always expected to find, as we got to lower stairwells, more people,"
Deputy Fire Commissioner Francis X. Gribbon said. "There was a stream of
people coming out of the stairwells as the buildings collapsed."
The end result of this effort are scenes like the one on Sunday, in
Pittsford, N.Y., where two Monroe County police officers waited for
Cynthia Duffy to return home from church to tell her that the remains of
her husband, Thomas W. Duffy, 52, a vice president at Marsh & McLennan,
had been found.
"Yes, he really was there," Mrs. Duffy said yesterday, adding that her
religious beliefs had sustained her.
"He really is gone."

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