Stardate 20011204.1312 (On Screen): It's natural when someone dies for their relatives to want the body back; they need a sense of closure. If a loved one vanishes without a trace, then there will always be the nagging doubt that maybe they didn't die. So it's not surprising that the families of the people who died in the WTC towers are not happy to learn that some people will never be found. The workers trying to clear the rubble have been doing the best they can, and many bodies and body parts have already been found. But for many of the victims there won't be anything to find.
Marian Fontana, president of the Sept. 11 Widows and Victims' Families Association, said: "My fear is that financial incentives will cause the city to clean up the site quickly, rather than to treat it as a retrieval site and do things in a dignified way."
Her firefighter husband, Dave, is among the missing.
In particular, families are worried that remains will end up at the Staten Island landfill where trade center debris is taken and sorted.
"The remains shouldn't end up in the garbage heap," Maurer said.
There's over a million tons of wreckage there; she wants them to go through it with tweezers looking for pieces of bodies? How many decades does she want them to take? It has to be cleared rapidly not for financial reasons but because of public health: that debris is dangerous to everyone around it. The reason we bury or burn corpses is that they become a source of disease which can sicken or kill the living. There's also the fact that the kind of search she's asking for would imperil those doing the work. I sympathize with her for the loss of her husband, but I have to wonder if she's willing to risk making another woman a widow just to get back a few pieces of her dead husband. (discuss)
