Changes continue at World Trade Center site as visitors get more of a glimpse into wreckage

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Posted 8:45AM on Friday, January 4, 2002

NEW YORK - Just as the first public viewing platform opens for business, a series of changes is altering what visitors can see at the former World Trade Center site now known as ground zero. For three months, the 16-acre site had the look of post-World War II Berlin with its buildings skeletonized and reduced to piles of bricks by Allied bombing raids. Two weeks ago, workers dismantled the last standing remnant of the trade center's 1,350-foot north tower. The pipe organ-like section of vertical columns had become the symbolic motif for the Sept. 11 attack by two terrorist-hijacked jetliners. Eventually, parts of the much-photographed latticework may be incorporated in a memorial to the nearly 3,000 people who died that day. Without it, ground zero looks more like a construction site -- an undulating moonscape with a few girders jutting upward, diesel-powered derricks and backhoes lifting debris into trucks that creep slowly along improvised roadways and ramps. "Now that the ground is flat, it's more devastating than it was before," said Deborah Roberson, a receptionist from Petal, Miss., as she exited the new visitors' viewing ramp. The 13-foot-high stage opened last month, giving visitors an unobstructed view of the wreckage. It holds between 300 and 400 people. From the vantage point of a 35th floor apartment two blocks away, the site remains a stunning panorama of devastation, revealing the outlines of building foundations. Diggers, bulldozers and loading cranes are at work, but there is little sense of the feverish, round-the-clock activity that began there just after Sept. 11. The focus of recovery has shifted to areas below the fallen twin towers, where scores of victims' bodies have been found in the past three weeks, many in stairwells and other locations that were partially protected as steel girders fell. The two largest cranes -- one capable of lifting 1,000 tons at a time, the other 500 tons -- are being dismantled this week, city officials said. They're no longer needed since all major buildings on the surface have been cleared away, said Matthew Monahan, spokesman for the city's Department of Design and Construction, the government agency in overall command at the site. Officials also said Thursday that all ground zero operations will be combined under the direction of Bovis Lend Lease, one of the four demolition contractors that have worked the site since Sept. 17, a week after the twin towers collapsed. The companies, working in separate zones, had removed 951,272 tons of debris and steel as of Thursday, according to city officials. That is roughly three fourths of the 1.2 million tons that covered the area at the outset, according to estimates by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While recovering human remains is still the top priority, "it is time to streamline the management and removal operations," Monahan said. "We have made tremendous progress in clearing the site and the work is now moving into a new phase," Monahan said. The rubble created by history's worst act of terrorism is delivered by trucks and barges to the reopened Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where it is combed by FBI agents for human tissue and potential criminal evidence. Monahan said the city did not formally embrace the FEMA estimate of 1.2 million tons of debris at the trade center site. "We don't know how much there is," he said. However, he said the city's projection that the cleanup would take up to nine months is on target. "If you deduct four months you're talking about early summer," he said.