'Hardhats' mark clearing of WTC site

The men and women who build New York City's skyscrapers aren't a soft bunch, but even the toughest were unprepared for the job that took over their lives in September 2001.

While Americans grieved the 9/11 attacks and U.S. troops went to war in Afghanistan, another army, one made up of ironworkers, heavy equipment operators and mason tenders, toiled day and night to clear away the destruction in lower Manhattan and recover the bodies of the dead.

In just 8 1/2 months, an estimated 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and pulverized concrete were painstakingly removed, transforming a mountainous pile into a 16-acre hole that became known as The Pit.

By Memorial Day 2002, it was all but over. The day after the holiday, workers cut down the last column of steel still standing at the site.

"I remember coming out of the hole," said ironworker Danny Doyle, one of the men to wield the cutting torch. "And it was Fleet Week, and all the sailors and the enlisted men had come down, and they lined the whole ramp on both sides, and as we were leaving . . . they were all saluting us."

Monday marks the ninth anniversary of the formal end of the recovery operation, which concluded with a ceremony to remove the 65-ton column that Doyle and others had cut down. The steel, covered in a black shroud, was driven up a long ramp to street level.

"It was closure, really, more or less," Doyle said. "That was it for us. For me, anyway. From what I saw down there, and to see it finally empty. I thought, 'That's good enough for me.' It was time to move on."

In the end, closure was elusive. Construction workers would continue finding bones and other fragments of human remains for years, hidden in adjacent buildings and beneath manholes.

Demolition work on one heavily damaged tower at the edge of the site, the former Deutsche Bank building, didn't end until this year. Two firefighters died in 2007 when that tower caught fire.

Then, there are the memories to deal with.

When workers first began reporting to the site almost immediately after the attacks, they assumed they were there on a rescue mission.

"In the very beginning, let's face it, everyone was trying to find someone," said Robert Walsh, business manager of Ironworkers Local 40.

It didn't take long, though, for the realization to set in that there would be no more survivors.