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“The body of a young woman … her child underneath … an arm they found, a woman’s, and when they pried open her fingers they found inside the fist of a baby.”

“You couldn’t walk more than a few feet in some areas without encountering body parts.”

The charnel house that was the Trade Center would over time yield up 21,744 separate human remains. Chief medical examiner Dr. Charles Hirsch, whose task it would be to collect and identify them, was based on First Avenue, only two miles from the Trade Center. He and aides had rushed to a nearby site early on 9/11, to prepare a temporary morgue, and several of them had been injured by flying debris. Those still able to work then initiated the necessary, macabre process that—as this book goes to press—continues still.

Remains were brought to Dr. Hirsch’s headquarters as they were found. They were analyzed, borne to a white tent nearby. There, a prayer was spoken over them. Then they were stored in refrigerated trailers pending identification. The operation would eventually require the installation of sixteen trailers.

To Hirsch, it came as no surprise that there should be so few complete bodies and so many thousands of body fragments. “If reinforced concrete was rendered into dust,” he said, “it wasn’t much of a mystery as to what would happen to people.”

More remains would be found as the years passed—some as late as 2009—atop the damaged Deutsche Bank building, in manholes, under a service road at Ground Zero. An assortment of remains, from a complete cadaver dressed in a suit to tiny bone fragments, was found at a landfill on Staten Island, destination of the half million tons of debris removed from the site. The landfill’s name, the name it had had since the late 1940s, was Fresh Kills.

Within ten months of 9/11, science and detective work would identify 1,229 of those killed. In the years since, 401 more victims have been identified. It has been an unparalleled forensic achievement. Even so, 1,122 men and women—41 percent of the total who died—remain unidentified. The families of more than a thousand people cannot bury their loved ones.

THERE IS ANOTHER REASON, though, that the true death toll will long remain elusive. Listen again to the voices of those who endured 9/11 on the streets and in the buildings of New York City.

“I see this fifty-, sixty-story dust rolling down the block.” “The ambulances looked like they were covered with gray snow … so thick you couldn’t see a sharp edge from a smooth edge.” “People were just full of dust … looked like zombies.”

“Nobody could breathe. Everything was stuck in their throats and their eyes, mouths, faces, and everything.” “Everybody’s coughing, breathing in mouthfuls of shit.”

“Our face-pieces were on, because the probie [trainee firefighter] was having trouble with chest pains, having difficulty breathing.” “My lungs were filling up with this stuff. I don’t know what it was. I thought I was going to die.” “The sergeant asked me, ‘You think we could die from this stuff?’ I’m like, ‘Right now? No. But eventually? Yes.’ ”

Less than an hour after the second strike, a Fire Department operator had logged a phone call from a woman on Duane Street, near the Trade Center. At 9:59 the dispatcher noted:

FC—CONCERN ABOUT THE RESPIRATORY EFFECT OF THOSE PARTICLES

The person calling about the “particles” must have come across as a fusspot, her call a mere nuisance. Who had time to think, then, about the bits and pieces falling from the towers and wafting on the breeze? The material spewed out by the towers, however, did have significance—a significance that increased greatly once the towers had fallen and the walls of dust had roared up the canyons of Lower Manhattan.

“Dust” covers many evils. 9/11’s dust contained: asbestos (tests after the attacks showed hazardous asbestos levels at sites up to seven blocks from Ground Zero), lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs, and PAHs (potentially carcinogenic chemical compounds) and toxins from perhaps fifty thousand