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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