An archeologist at Ground Zero

I don't know if this has gotten much attention; it makes rather grim reading:

On Oct. 6, 2001, Dr. Richard A. Gould found himself amid the herd of mourners, tourists and gawkers shuffling past the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.

The crowd's focus was on the mountain of rubble and twisted steel, but Gould's eyes fell toward objects on the ground, scattered in a blanket of dust, lying in the alleys, on Dumpsters and fire escapes.

What he saw changed the course of his life. Over the following months, he would return again and again to New York, bearing urgent messages to the city officials directing the recovery effort in Lower Manhattan. He and his colleagues would invent a new field of endeavor - "disaster archaeology" - that they would eventually put into practice months later, in the ashes of The Station nightclub fire.

What Gould saw that day, he says, were tiny bits of human beings - bits of bones small enough to put in your pocket. . .

In Manhattan that morning, Gould looked around at the other onlookers. No one seemed to notice the remains that he saw. People were grieving, their thoughts far away. A foul-smelling smoke hung in the air. The more he looked, the more remains he saw. . .

In the following months, Gould lobbied city officials to let crews of archaeologists study the remains that lay outside the pile of rubble known as ground zero. . .

Police and emergency-management officials were sympathetic to the archaeologists' plea, Gould says, but they were bent on returning the city to normalcy. City cleaning crews were sweeping the streets; power-washing crews cleaned off building rooftops. Evidence that Gould thought might be useful to the process of identifying victims was literally going down the storm drain.

An invitation from the chief medical examiner's office finally came in March 2002. Gould and a team picked an apparently undisturbed area outside of ground zero, on Barclay Street, and sifted through the material they found there. . .

For the most part, though, the search was disappointing, Gould says. The only biological remains they found were a handful of battered bones; it wasn't clear if they were even human bones. They sent the bones on to the authorities and went home.

But Gould says that if teams of trained volunteers had scoured the rooftops and alleyways of Lower Manhattan earlier, before the street cleaners moved in, many more victims could have been identified. Even without such an effort, the authorities continued to find remains scattered through Manhattan throughout 2002.

Posted by David on September 17, 2003 10:35 AM