Lucy Sullivan
speaker
311 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Lucy Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The sorting and searching operation was all going to take place at Fresh Kills.
At first they were sorting through the material by hand, with shovels and rakes.
And by the way, someone I spoke to for this story made clear that material was the best word to use.
Not debris, the word I'd been using.
Eventually they brought in these sifting machines, which could take the material and separate it out through screens to pieces that were a quarter of an inch.
That's about half the size of your thumbnail.
Everything else that passed through was considered inconsequential dirt and dust, leftovers.
Whenever human remains were found, and they were found often in those first few months, they were immediately sent to the office of the chief medical examiner.
They found lots of personal items too.
Wallets, ID cards, watches,
There were certain kinks to work out in the searching process.
One of them was getting the speed of the sifters right, so that people could catch things without getting motion sick.
Another was accounting for the fact that people were working around the clock, twenty four seven.
It didn't take a day off until Thanksgiving of that year.
And then there were the seagulls.
An NYPD official said they knew which piles of material had lots of human remains because seagulls would circle above, and they'd have to fight them off.
By July of two thousand two, the city thought the operation at Fresh Kills was finished.
It ended ahead of schedule and under budget, rare for a government project.
All told they sorted about one point five million tons of material from ground zero.
That's about six hundred Olympic swimming pools worth of stuff.
Showing 61–80 of 311 · page 4 of 16
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