New York Sanitation Workers Become a Mournful Cortege

They wait on Houston Street, pallbearers for two buildings that were once among the most recognizable in the world. Their scarred white dump trucks idle, engines groaning, until the signal comes to carry away more from the mountains of jagged concrete and heat-fused sculptures of steel that loom a few blocks away at Ground Zero.

Truckload by truckload, ton by ton, 1,000 New York sanitation workers have started the mammoth, drawn-out process of burying what was once the jewel of the city’s skyline. On Thursday, a day after they hauled off 3,000 tons of refuse, it seemed as if their backbreaking cargo had replaced itself. It had: At midday, another enfeebled skyscraper tumbled to earth.

Lowly and unsung, New York’s trash workers are always the last to sweep away the remains of ticker-tape parades, New Year’s festivities and sports celebrations. On Thursday, they became carters for a grand complex’s demise, heading up a funeral caravan that may rumble through the city for months on end. And a few have been assigned the unenviable job of ferrying the World Trade Center’s dead.

“You have no idea. You can’t imagine what we’re seeing,” said Verlin Gallo, a green-uniformed city sanitation worker who had spent the last two days dragging out the remains of pulverized cars and firetrucks with a massive tow truck.

She saw cars stripped to their frames, twisted like pretzels, welded to slabs of the fallen towers. Fire engines were crushed like accordions to half their size, with melted aluminum ladders glued at the edges. One truck had been crushed by a concrete overpass, flattened out of shape--yet with its hazard lights still blinking.

“The hardest part is that you know you’re the last person in the city that sees it all before it’s gone,” Gallo said.

Until Tuesday, the World Trade Center had been so neat and definable in its titanic presence. Its angular forms contained 200,000 tons of steel and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete--enough to pave five feet of sidewalk from Manhattan to Washington, D.C. Its glass windows covered 14 acres. The 1.2 million cubic yards of earth it displaced when it was completed in 1975 became landfill to expand Battery Park.

All of it is mashed and unrecognizable now, a smoking hellscape destined to be trucked away, bit by bit.

“I saw them buildings every day on the way to work,” Gallo said. “I could tell the weather by looking at ‘em. Sad, when you know you’re the one taking it away.”

The truckloads are being driven to a city-run wharf on the Hudson River at 59th Street. There, overseen by FBI agents and New York police, the refuse is being shipped by barge to the 3,000-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. There, evidence technicians have begun sifting out items they want to save. The rest is bound for the earth.

The Fresh Kills dump--one of the largest in the world--is being considered as a possible resting place for the twin towers, said Sanitation Department spokesman Al Ferguson. But, he added: “It’s still early in the game. It could go to another site, or it could be scattered around.”

City officials and regulatory agencies are still trying to decide where they can safely inter material that might include hazardous PCBs and other toxic waste. Gray soot still coats the streets around Ground Zero like new-fallen snow. There is so much of it that drivers have to wear masks and goggles. And city officials Thursday ordered all sanitation truckloads to be hosed down before leaving in order to minimize the plumes of pollution that have been blowing freely over much of Manhattan.

The city has long had contingency plans for the removal of debris after storms, earthquakes and terror attacks. But the vast amount of wreckage that confronts it now, Ferguson said, “is something none of us could imagine.”

To cope, the city has mustered an armada of trash trucks. More than 50 low-slung “cut-down” trucks and several dozen more smaller dump trucks trundle all day through the streets of Greenwich Village and the ravaged financial district. In all, the department has thrown more than 200 vehicles into the refuse operation.

Each time the crews carry off more loads, their constant traffic weakens the teetering buildings still standing near Ground Zero. Thursday afternoon, walkie-talkies crackled with warnings, and fire department air horns suddenly sounded.

“Sanitation men, get out of there!” an urgent voice shouted over a crewman’s radio. “There’s another building coming down! I heard a guy screaming!”

A few minutes later, “Building 5,” another heat-seared structure, crashed downward.

Several blocks away, on the West Side Highway, another truck waited.

Joe Pispisano, a tense fireplug of a man, sat in the idling cab of a container rig, listening to a news radio station. Among all the trash truck drivers and volunteers who have been shuttling back and forth between Ground Zero and the barge site at 59th Street, Pispisano has the grimmest duty.

He is one of a small team of drivers assigned to carry off the twin towers’ dead.

Wednesday night, he drove to Ground Zero, dropping off a refrigerated truck container. Thursday morning, he was waiting for the call to return and pick the load up.

A grizzled longshoreman from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, he had volunteered his truck when the call went out for rigs capable of hauling heavy containers. The 59-year-old Pispisano thinks himself a tough hombre. He growls instead of talks, swings his thick arms like pistons.

But when he parked at the disaster site just after midnight Wednesday and looked out the window of his cab, he “cried like a baby.”

There, stacked for Thursday delivery in the container he had left behind, were dozens of black body bags, the first load of what Pispisano has been told will be thousands of bags filled with the remains of those who died.

“Most of the time, I just do my job, OK?” Pispisano said. “But this is a morgue on wheels, pal. I don’t care how tough you are. You feel for these people.”