No Stone Unturned: Searching for Answers in the Wreckage of 9/11

By Jack Crowe

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

The men and women who went to work at Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island in the fall of 2001 expected to be confronted by identifiable remnants of the lives that were consumed when the planes hit the towers: office furniture, computer parts, clothing. Instead, when they cleared the extensive security perimeter and arrived on “the hill,” as it came to be called, they were met by a great pile of undifferentiated grey-brown dirt and rubble.

 

It would take a team of roughly 1,000 workers, operating in shifts around the clock, until July 2002 to surface the objects and human remains that had survived the collapse and incineration of the towers in some recognizable form.

 

As the public fixed its gaze on Ground Zero in the weeks and months after the attack, sanitation workers transported 1.4 million tons of debris to Fresh Kills, all while continuing to make sure the trash was picked up across the city. Clad in white Tyvek suits and masks, workers representing private contractors and dozens of state, federal, and local agencies painstakingly sifted through the debris to find any identifiable human remains or pieces of personal property that might provide closure or offer some small measure of comfort to the bereaved.

 

Overnight, Fresh Kills Landfill became the largest forensic lab on earth.

 

ID Badges, Credit Cards, and Golf Balls

 

In his role investigating mass-casualty events for the FBI, Richard Marx had been exposed to some of the biggest and most complex crime scenes in the world. But nothing prepared him for the scope of the Fresh Kills operation. (The landfill’s grisly name comes from the Dutch word for a body of water.)   

 

Every day for months, sanitation workers would truck debris from Ground Zero to Pier 25 on Manhattan’s west side, where it would be loaded into waiting barges and brought to the docks at Fresh Kills. There, the debris would be unloaded into massive three-sided bins and eventually moved up to the top of the landfill for sorting. An average 650 tons of debris arrived each day, a feat of manpower, machinery, and coordination. None of the sanitation workers took a day off until Thanksgiving.

 

“There’s nowhere else in the world out of New York City that could have handled this,” Marx said.

 

Initially when the debris arrived, it would be spread out over a flat area at the top of the landfill, where teams of NYPD officers and FBI agents would comb through it with rakes, looking for anything that might be considered evidence, human remains, or personal property.

 

Sorting Shed, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

Eventually, the workers were provided with large sifters that sorted the debris into fine, medium, and large pieces and dropped them onto conveyor belts for examination by NYPD officers and FBI agents. The smallest pieces were just a quarter of an inch wide. Tents were constructed around the conveyor belts, and agents and officers working in 15-minute shifts sorted through it. Working on the conveyor belt was a monotonous task, punctuated by adrenaline spikes, hence the 15-minute shifts. When a worker spotted something worth collecting, they could slow the belt, tag the object, and place it in the relevant area.

 

The devastation was so total and all-encompassing that workers were struck by how little tangible evidence of the thousands of destroyed offices remained.

 

“We didn’t find a single freaking doorknob,” said retired NYPD Inspector James Luongo, who led the police department’s team at Fresh Kills. “Think about the World Trade Center. How many doors were there? And we didn’t see one doorknob.”

 

Articles recovered, WTC Recovery Operation, 2002(Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

But there were a few categories of items that did pop up regularly: laminated identification badges, credit cards, and, oddly, golf balls. Nearly everything else had been consumed by the flames and the compression of the falling towers. Some barely recognizable objects — like a service pistol that had melted into a pool and another firearm that had been sheared clean in half, along with the safe it was being stored in — testified to the ferocity of the heat and the violence of the collapse.

 

Mark Schaming, who went out to Fresh Kills in October to collect artifacts for the New York State Museum’s 9/11 exhibit, spent hours walking around on his first day at the landfill before spotting anything he could put a name to.

 

“I had expected to see some recognizable objects or something. And in all the hours I was there, the only recognizable thing I saw was a FedEx envelope. And that was it. It was just mountains of destruction,” Schaming said.

 

Occasionally, a piece of human remains would come down the conveyor belt. The item would be placed in a container and brought to the medical examiner’s trailer. In some cases, a piece of bone workers believed to be human was actually part of an animal that had been prepared in one of the World Trade Center restaurants.

 

“There was no training for it. You can’t get trained for seeing human remains out in the field. But they did it. And they did it with humanity. . . . I still get overwhelmed when I think about what they’re able to do,” Dennis Diggins, who led the Sanitation Department team at Fresh Kills, said in an interview for a 9/11 Museum oral history project.

 

The workers combing through debris required an incredible amount of logistical support. There were food trailers, heated tents around the conveyor belts, forensic trailers, and an entire team dedicated to ordering supplies. A thousand workers go through a lot of Tyvek suits and masks.

 

“We built a city out of absolutely nothing,” Marx explained.

 

‘A Different Planet’

 

Slowly, as the weeks passed, the workers began to impose some degree of order on the chaos. There was the flat area at the top of the landfill with all of the loose debris being sorted. At the bottom of the hill, sanitation workers lined up 1,300 cars that had been parked under or around the towers when they fell. Those cars acted as sponges, absorbing everything that had fallen from above, Schaming explained. Each of the vehicles told a story. In the trunk of one vehicle, workers found a birthday gift that a husband had purchased for, but would never give to, his wife.

 

Vehicle Recovery, WTC Recovery, Fresh Kills, 2002 (Courtesy of Mark Schaming/Collection 9/11 Memorial Museum)

 

The ruined fire trucks that were hauled to the landfill stood as a testament to the incredible bravery of the men who threw themselves headlong toward the danger — and the sheer randomness of the destruction they confronted. Mark Wagner, lead architect for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, went out to Fresh Kills to select vehicles that would eventually be displayed in the museum. The burn patterns on the trucks revealed the razor-thin margin between life and death.

 

“I see one end of a fire truck, and it’s completely burnt. There’s not a speck of paint on the front end of the fire truck, and the back end almost looks intact,” said Wagner. “If I was standing at the front end of the fire truck, I may not be standing here today. And if I’m standing near the back, I could be totally fine. This loss of life was random. It was instant. It was unpredictable.”

 

Wagner, who had visited Ground Zero just days after 9/11, was struck by the sense of dislocation he felt upon arriving at Fresh Kills. It was like a “different planet.” Seeing the vast piles of debris that had been transported from Ground Zero truly revealed the scale of what had taken place.

 

“You know it wasn’t just this cleanup effort at Ground Zero, it was moving to other locations because of the enormity of the event and the sheer amount of material that had to be processed and understood,” Wagner said. “So, Fresh Kills in some ways was even more difficult emotionally.”

 

That sense of dislocation, the feeling that the items piling up at the landfill shouldn’t be there, was especially poignant at night, as activity at the site died down and the remaining workers could hear the crackle of fire and police radios still running in their destroyed vehicles.

 

Looking for Answers

 

Inspector Luongo said they never found any evidence relevant to their investigation, so ultimately, the months-long debris-sorting effort was really about bringing a measure of closure to the families of the deceased. Once a week, on Wednesdays, groups of family members would come out and tour Fresh Kills and witness for themselves all that was being done to identify their loved ones. Some of the family members were appreciative, while others demanded answers the workers could not provide.

 

“Families started coming there looking for an answer,” Gloria Coletti, who worked as an executive assistant to the Fresh Kills director, told an interviewer for the Memorial Museum’s oral history project.

 

“I don’t know how I would react if something happened to one of my children, and I had nowhere to go and nothing to show. I also knew — the logical side of me knew — that when those explosions happened, the people who they never found and never got nothing back from, they disintegrated. They went up in the air. They went straight to heaven. But I could never say that to these mothers. So I would just talk to them and grieve with them and hold their hands.”

 

Some family members were never able to accept that the remains of their son or father or sister could not be found and would ultimately be interred in a landfill. They kept showing up at the site until as late as 2006, some demanding to know what more could be done. A group of family members filed suit against the city in federal court in 2005 in an effort to force the city to relocate and continue sifting through the debris. A judge dismissed the suit.

 

When the Fresh Kills project began, “they did not trust us. They did not trust the process. They thought we were just burying stuff, and . . . that naturally was not true,” Luongo said of some of the families.

 

But the men who led the sorting effort are confident they did all they could to make sure no possible trace of human remains was missed. As the operation was wrapping up, workers went back through the debris that had been sorted first, when their procedures hadn’t been as reliable, just to make sure nothing was overlooked. Sanitation workers even power-washed the barges and collected the resulting dust. They also excavated the roadsides in the landfill to make sure nothing had fallen off the front-end loaders and trucks and been missed.

 

“We did the best job we possibly could,” Luongo said.

 

For some families, seeing the extraordinary effort being made in their behalf did make a difference. Some families arrived asking critical questions and left “our biggest fans,” Luongo said. One woman who had lost her husband arrived with a big bag of candy for Luongo and his team — a thank you from her young daughter.

 

The events of September 11, 2001, transfigured the most unlikely of places — a landfill in Staten Island — into sacred ground. Before the towers came down, Fresh Kills was an eyesore the residents of Staten Island had for years urged the city to shut down. The government eventually relented: The site was slated to close at the end of 2001. Instead, it became the final resting place for an untold number of New Yorkers, closing down in August 2002 as the work moved off-site. Today, the rubble from Ground Zero is covered by a grassy hillside, part of a city park that replaced the defunct landfill.

 

The Fresh Kills team would ultimately identify 4,500 human remains and 73,000 personal effects. Roughly half of those killed in the World Trade Center attack still have not been identified, and efforts to bring that closure are ongoing: Thousands of unidentified human remains are kept in a designated secure area in the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.