9/11 Memorial pays tribute to those sickened by toxic air at Ground Zero
By: New York Daily News, policeone.com
NEW YORK CITY — May 30, 2002, saw the Last Column reverently carried out from the World Trade Center site, marking the end of the recovery phase at Ground Zero. The column, like so many human bodies before it, came up from The Pit on a ramp that sloped down from the corner of Liberty and West Sts., angling east towards the center of the site below.
The 36-foot, 58-ton, steel girder now stands in the WTC museum, still with numbers and letters painted on — SQ 41, E 214 and L 111 — for FDNY squad, engine and ladder companies and the first responder death tolls: PAPD 37, NYPD 23, FDNY 343.
Those numbers have swelled with the deaths of others, uniformed and civilian, who succumbed not to the falling towers, but to the poison in the air from gray plume of pulverized concrete and the fires and the smoke.
