I came across this video on YouTube — nearly an hour of footage from Ground Zero during the recovery effort, December 2001 through the following winter. Fires were still burning in the pile months after the towers fell. Around the 49-minute mark, FDNY firefighters search the debris by hand, with rakes.
Most of what we remember from that time is the day itself. Footage from the long months of recovery that followed is much rarer, and this captures what that work actually looked like — slow, methodical, and enormous.
Footage: NIST FOIA Release 10, via YouTube
More from the 9/11 archive
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David Daniels has been writing at DavidDaniels.com since 2001. Download the free life planning workbook, Write Open Act, to start mapping the gap for yourself.