Michael Bump

Opinions are my own

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@bobpockrass @Mark5833MIZ Bob does this punch have lights?

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

After September 11, more than a million tons of the World Trade Center was loaded onto barges and shipped to a garbage dump on Staten Island.

Then hundreds of men and women stood at conveyor belts for ten months and picked through every ounce of it by hand.

They were looking for people.

The place is called Fresh Kills. For fifty years it was the largest landfill in the world. It took its last barge of household trash on March 22, 2001, and shut down for good. New York was finally done with it.

Five and a half months later, at two o'clock in the morning on September 12, the landfill's director got a phone call at home. He had just walked in the door.

Two trucks were at the gate. They were carrying pieces of the World Trade Center.

He drove back.

The man who ran the dump would later say, without any drama, that if Fresh Kills had not been closed, this could never have happened. There would have been no room. The garbage would have been in the way.

The site was empty. So that is where the towers went.

Here is how it worked.

At Ground Zero, cranes and grapplers lifted the debris into dump trucks. The trucks drove to a pier on the Hudson. There, the load went onto barges, six hundred tons at a time. The barges were towed down the harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. More than fifteen hundred barges made the trip.

At Fresh Kills, sanitation workers unloaded them onto a hill.

And then the sorting began.

The debris was mechanically screened into three sizes. Chunks bigger than eight inches. Two to eight inches. A quarter inch to two inches. Anything smaller than a quarter of an inch, the size of a fingernail, fell through the last sieve.

Everything above that size went onto a conveyor belt.

And along the belts stood the detectives.

NYPD. FBI. Port Authority police. Medical examiners. Dressed head to toe in white Tyvek suits, in masks, in gloves, on a hill that stank of jet fuel and pulverized concrete and things nobody wanted to name. Looking down at the belt, hour after hour, as the towers rolled past them a fist-sized chunk at a time.

When they saw something, they reached in and took it, and placed it in a white bucket at their feet.

A wedding ring. A photo ID. A set of keys. A shoe.

A piece of a person.

The white buckets went to a tent that served as a morgue.

The volume was beyond comprehension. In mid-September the operation was processing 1,750 tons of debris a day. By mid-October, 17,500 tons a day. Ten times more. Round the clock. The 200-acre hill was declared a federal crime scene and stayed one for ten months.

A retired NYPD detective later wrote down what a shift looked like, because almost nobody outside knew it existed.

You wake at 3 a.m. You get a giant coffee. You drive two hours in the dark from Orange County, through New Jersey, to Staten Island. You park at the bottom of a hill that looks like the end of the world. You put on the white suit. You go to your belt. You stand there. You look.

Then you drive two hours home and do it again tomorrow.

Sanitation workers pulled sixteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. One of them, a supervisor named Barry Asnes, said afterward what kept him there. We were attacked on our own soil, in the city where I was born. This was personal.

The operation did not stop for weather. It did not stop for Christmas. It ran until July 2002. Ten months.

By the end, the men and women on that hill had recovered thousands of human remains. Tens of thousands of personal effects. Wallets, badges, wedding bands, photographs, all cleaned and catalogued and returned to families who had nothing else to bury.

When they were finished, the remaining material was placed in a 48-acre section of the landfill, a mound two hundred and twenty-five feet high, and covered.

It is a park now.

Many of the men and women who stood on that hill have lung disease. Asthma. Cancer. PTSD. The air they were breathing, eight and ten and sixteen hours a day, was full of the towers. Some of them have died of it.

Almost nobody knows their names. Almost nobody knows the place.

Mention Fresh Kills and 9/11 in the same sentence, the retired detective wrote, and most people will have no idea what you are talking about.

Here is what you should know.

Two thousand seven hundred and fifty-three people were murdered in those towers. Only about six in ten have ever been identified.

Every one of those identifications came out of a white bucket.

Every wedding ring returned to a widow. Every badge returned to a firehouse. Every fragment of bone matched to a name and buried with a headstone instead of a question mark.

Somebody in a white suit, standing at a belt on a garbage dump at four in the morning, reached into the World Trade Center as it rolled past, and picked that person up, and put them in a bucket, and sent them home.

They did that for ten months.

Nobody applauded on the hill. There was nobody to watch.

They did it anyway. 🇺🇸

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@SloppyYellow 100%

[FOX: NASCAR @NASCARONFOX]

Remembering Greg Biffle, with @mikejoy500.

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@AmericanAir I’ve been on hold for almost 3 hours trying to change my flight due to the big winter storm. At the 1/12 hour mark a lady answers I tell her my flight info and what day and time I wanted to change she said ok then silence and back on hold

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@VerizonSupport my service here at my new house is awful. Unless I’m on the river I have no service. About to start shopping around. Get 5G uw everywhere except my neighborhood and you lr map show 5Guw should be right where I’m at. Almost 29 yrs with you and might not make it

[U.S. Senator John Fetterman @SenFettermanPA]

I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that.

This is anarchy and true chaos.

My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement.

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@airmainengineer Is this normal? I was concerned

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@BizNasty2point0 @spittinchiclets 😂😂😂

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@DaleJr @zmaxraceproduc1 @CARSTour @JRMotorsports @budweiserusa @MLB Well looks like I’ll see you there 👍

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@PitBossGrills hey @PitBossGrills your app is the absolute worst. Firmware update ceased and now nothing works. Tried everything now I have to go it old fashioned way. #Lame

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@DennisTFP Why would he go away from the 11-7 lineup that worked so well in game 2? Am I missing something? Ugh

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@Patrick_ONeal In Charleston South Carolina
#LGK!

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@PeteButtigieg You might want to sit this one out after all where was your “outrage” when your administration got 13 service members killed in their botched Afghanistan withdrawal??? Yea I thought so

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@NancyMace Goose Creek!

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@peterbakernyt @CommunityNotes

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@kylenabecker @elonmusk “HUGE” 😂

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@GSD_ASASINATOR 😂

[CODMunity @CODMunityGG]

Call of Duty trying to fix Warzone

[Michael Bump @MichaelBump67]

@SloppyYellow 😂

[Richard Roeper @RichardERoeper]

In case you missed the start of USA v Canada…

[Rock'n Roll of All @rocknrollofall]

Fleetwood Mac performing 'Rhiannon' live at The Midnight Special, on February the 27th, 1976.