With Sept 11 coming up...

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Gemini Cricket

My own thoughts? Well, I wonder how 2 buildings hit differently fall the same way. Also, I heard that the rubble was sent to China. (I don't know if that's fact or not.) But why there? It's like the ending of 'Raiders' or them dumping the body in the junkyard in 'Pulp Fiction'... never to be seen again...

Initially all of the rubble was removed to the aptly named Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island. Fresh Kills was a very famous landfill (the largest in the world at one point) and had just been permanently closed a few months before 9/11. After 9/11 it was reopened for the WTC debris and everything was taken there for forensic examination and body part searches.

Once that was complete salvagable recyclable materials (such as steel and whatnot) were sold as scrap. China is a huge processor of scrap metal recycling so I wouldn't be surprised if much of it did end up there. Everything else still remains in Fresh Kills Landfill and has been covered with earth so that the area can move forward with the original post-closure plan to turn the area into reclaimed wetlands and recreation area.

There is a vocal minority group of 9/11 family members who are trying to get the area declared a burial ground or have the remaining debris dug up and removed to another location that can be treated as a burial ground. They feel that even though all larger body parts were removed that the ashes must contain bits and pieces of people. The official position is (or was when I last heard about it) that such a move would be way too expensive, that it would be impossible to get all the debris, and that the dead have been memorialized in many ways already.