Final sift of World Trade Center rubble yields 72 bone fragments

9/11 Blogger

jkeough

Seventy-two bone fragments were found in about two dump trucks of debris that had yet to be sifted by forensics experts, US television's ABC News reported Tuesday, citing the New York Medical Examiner's Office.

The office said DNA testing was likely to identify some of the remains, given the size and condition of the bone fragments. About 1,000 people of the nearly 3,000 victims of the suicide plane hijackings that brought down the two towers of the World Trade Center have yet to be identified.The experts sifted through 645 cubic metres of debris over three months to find the remains. The debris was the last from the World Trade Center that had yet to combed.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/330854,yields-72-bone-fragments.html

Realted:

Only 289 intact bodies were recovered. May-30-2002 - cnn.com

...more...

Some World Trade Center victims were 'vaporized' 01/15/2002 USA Today
NEW YORK (AP) — Three months after the World Trade Center attack, victims' families are being forced to face the ghastly possibility that many of the dead were "vaporized," as the medical examiner put it, and may never be identified. So far, fewer than 500 victims have been positively identified out of the roughly 3,000 feared dead. Sixty were identified solely through DNA. Jan-15-2002 - fdiai.org

They don't even know how many people were in the buildings and stuff. I don't think they'll ever know. I've just been like working in sectors, on overtime in the past weeks, just seeing very few whole bodies going out, pieces of people, shoes and clothing with some bones inside. I never saw anything like that. -Lieutenant Gregg Hadala FDNY EMS Battalion 50 nytimes.com

At the World Trade Center, many of the victims recovered were horribly mangled, and in many cases only parts of bodies were recovered....The number of injured who required extrication, triage, and treatment was relatively small: “Either you were dead or you walked away from it. There was very little in between,” rand.org

I also know that we didn't see large numbers of patients. I think by the end of the day, we had only seen 100 or so patients -James Martin FDNY EMS Division Chief nytimes.com

I was in the military as an Army combat medic, not war time, but I had training in that. It reminded me, everything was perfect man. It was like a MASH unit set up in there, in like a warehouse. We had ambulances lined up in rows and we were all waiting for that call to go down there to save some lives and that call never came. That was the most saddest thing about it, that with a job this size, this magnitude, I was saying to myself there is going to be numerous injured and we are going to have to really depend on our skills. Not a call..... waiting and waiting and waiting for patients. No show. It was like — I think that was the toughest thing, is that a job that magnitude you would expect thousands and thousands of patients. After the first wave, nothing. There were no survivors. -Michael Mejias FDNY EMT nytimes.com