In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
Dust was everywhere in Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists flew two jetliners into the World Trade Center, destroying the 110-story towers.
Paul J. Lioy, a renowned environmental scientist at Rutgers University, was among the first to tackle the urgent question of what was present in all that dust. To what had residents and rescuers been exposed? On a molecular level, what was it they were breathing?
Five days after the attack, Dr. Lioy and some associates drove into Manhattan to search for undisturbed dust deposits. They found them on automobiles parked near the East River, not the Hudson, all the way across Lower Manhattan from ground zero. “It was easy to get a sizable sample,” Anthony DePalma wrote in The New York Times of Nov. 2, 2005. “Dr. Lioy and his colleagues just shoveled it off the windshield of cars.”
Analysis revealed that the fine gray powder contained traces of chromium, magnesium, manganese, aluminum, barium, titanium, lead, components of jet fuel, unburned or partially burned hydrocarbons, slag wool, fiberglass, asbestos, wood, glass, plastic, paper, cotton fiber and “organic compounds.”
Almost certainly, these included an infinitesimal trace of human remains. Dr. Lioy, who died in 2015, handled the dust “delicately, almost reverently,” Mr. DePalma wrote. Reluctant to be any more explicit, Dr. Lioy told Mr. DePalma that the samples contained “everything we hold dear.”
Mr. DePalma’s acquaintance with Dr. Lioy continued after Mr. DePalma left the newspaper in 2008 to work on “City of Dust: Illness, Arrogance and 9/11,” a book that documents the toll on human health resulting from official indifference to the environmental fallout after the attack.
During a visit to Dr. Lioy’s office in 2008, Mr. DePalma was given a small vial of World Trade Center dust. In turn, he donated the vial to the Museum at The Times this year, together with a rubber bullet that struck him during a demonstration in Quebec and other mementos of his 22 years as a Times reporter.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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