City Gets First $2 B in U.S. Aid

Funds to help in recovery as hope for survivors wanes

Reported by Elaine S. Povich, Sean Gardiner, Joshua Robin, Bobby Cuza, Curtis L. Taylor, and Monte Phan; written by Pete Bowles.

September 22, 2001

As exhausted rescue workers continued their grim tasks in the smoky rubble of the World Trade Center, the city received the first installment of a federal aid package Friday and officials began to talk about building a fitting replacement.

Ten days after two hijacked airliners crashed into the Twin Towers, throwing the city into unprecedented turmoil and grief, President George W. Bush on Friday sent $2 billion to New York as the first installment for search, rescue, recovery and family assistance. In addition, New York's two senators said a distinctive office and memorial complex should be built on the site.

At the heart of the destruction site - where the trade center's plaza was once used for brown-bag lunch gatherings - four workers on Friday could be seen being lowered by a basket into a huge pile of debris. They were using infrared imaging and listening devices, hoping against hope to find survivors of the Sept. 11 attack.

But a police official at the scene, who did not want to be named, said the search by hundreds of workers had become mostly a formality. He said it would take a miracle for someone to still be alive, considering the intense heat of the explosions of the two airliners and the three fires still sending acrid smoke up from the wreckage.

Firefighter Tommy Prin Jr. of Holtsville, who had just finished another 10-hour shift on the pile, said morale is beginning to run low.

"I almost didn't come in this morning," he said. "Once I go home, I don't want to come back. Once I get here, I don't want to go home. It's a weird cycle."

Reacting to reports that the search for survivors might soon be called off, Prin said he planned to find a nearby spot to sleep last night. "That's why I don't want to go home for the next couple of days," he said. "It's like the last mile of a marathon."

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the chance of recovering anyone alive is "very, very small."

"We're not going to recover significant numbers of people," he said. "We know that. We recognize that."

While conceding that many New Yorkers are still gripped with depression, Giuliani urged them to move on. "You can mourn and you can be very, very sorrowful, at the same time you can go on with your life," he said. "It is okay. It is part of grieving."

The mayor said the number of missing remained at 6,333, but indicated it could go up or down as officials try to determine how many foreign citizens were lost. At least 63 countries have said their citizens are among the missing, including 250 from Britain.

Giuliani said the city was sorting through a list of an additional 1,200 foreign nationals who might be among the missing. Asked if the number could be lower, the mayor said: "I don't think anybody knows. I don't know. It could be higher, too."

Officials reported Friday that the number of confirmed dead had gone up to 252, compared with 241 the day before.

Among the dead was John P. O'Neill, once one of the FBI's top terrorist experts, whose body was identified Friday. O'Neill, 50, was killed in the terrorist attack just two weeks after taking a job as head of security at the trade center. He reportedly escaped One World Trade Center, where his office was on the 34th floor, but re-entered the building to help others.

"He was a great guy," Giuliani said. "He was a very patriotic American. He had a great career in the FBI, and this is part of what we are going to go through, finding all these wonderful people."

In an effort to determine the number of missing, Giuliani said authorities had collected 6,063 DNA samples - taken from toothbrushes, hair brushes and razors dropped off by 2,100 people.

The crash site attracted an assortment of visitors Friday, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, Wall Street workers, tourists and some gawkers.

"Only standing in the midst of the twisted, torn and shattered rubble can one appreciate in any respect the scale, the scope, the difficulty that this act of war perpetrated on the people of America," said Ashcroft, who was accompanied through Ground Zero by FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Ashcroft praised the selfless courage of the rescue workers and called New York "the capital of the world for spirit." He also announced that another $10 million would be coming from the Justice Department to cover police costs in the wake of the attack.

Farther back, on a crowded street as close as he could get to the disaster zone, Michael Goldfarb of Manhattan snapped pictures of the devastation to "chronicle it as a reminder." He was surrounded by pedestrians who held handkerchiefs to their mouths and noses.