The lab in charge of identifying the victims of the 9/11 terror attack has revealed why nearly half of their work remains unfinished more than two decades later.
The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) said that approximately 1,100 people who were in the World Trade Center still haven’t had their remains confirmed because of insufficient DNA evidence.
According to a former NYPD officer who spent several weeks in the pit recovering the remains, there is almost no chance all of the victims will ever be positively identified now or in the future.
The anonymous source told Daily Mail: ‘Time and air have changed everything. I don’t know if science would ever be able to find them all.’
The 9/11 first responder noted that thousands of police officers, firefighters, and volunteers were working right in the middle of the smoldering debris for months, unintentionally contaminating the crime scene.
On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked two planes and crashed them into New York’s Twin Towers, causing the buildings to collapse and killing approximately 2,753 people.
However, many families haven’t been able to find closure, as their loved ones’ remains were severely damaged by fire, water, and jet fuel after the towers came down.
Despite 24 years of advancements in DNA analysis, much of the remains pulled from the ruins at Ground Zero have degraded to a point that’s keeping scientists from finding genetic matches to their relatives.
Smoke poured from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center after they were hit by two hijacked airliners in a terrorist attack September 11, 2001 in New York City
First responders worked 12-hour shifts each day for months while trying to sift through the rubble at the Ground Zero site
The Daily Mail source added the wind in downtown Manhattan blew away many faint traces of human remains, and the search was further complicated when much of the debris was moved to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island – roughly 15 miles away.
‘You don’t know how it was stored. It wasn’t in a vacuum seal. To go back 20 years later, you’re never going to recover everybody,’ the NYPD veteran said.
Roughly 1.5 million tons of debris were transported by trucks and boats from Ground Zero to Fresh Kills in the aftermath of the terror attack.
According to a 2011 study published in BMC Public Health, the sifting and sorting effort on Staten Island recovered 4,257 fragments of human remains and 54,000 personal items from the victims.
Despite finding a literal mountain of evidence, time has continued to work against forensic investigators in New York.
The news came as OCME’s DNA crime lab announced that three people have been successfully identified through improvements in forensic science over the years, bringing the total of identified victims to 1,653.
In August, the most recent lab testing identified Ryan Fitzgerald, 26, of Floral Park, New York; Barbara Keating, 72, of Palm Springs, California; and another adult woman whose family asked to remain anonymous.
Dr Jason Graham, NYC’s chief medical examiner, said in a statement: ‘Nearly 25 years after the disaster at the World Trade Center, our commitment to identify the missing and return them to their loved ones stands as strong as ever.’
Hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03am on September 11, 2001 in New York City
Ground Zero has been turned into a national memorial dedicated to the victims of the terror attack
The matter of identifying the final victims of 9/11 has been further complicated by the redevelopment of the site where the attack took place.
In 2013, construction workers discovered 60 truckloads of debris that may have contained human remains while building a portion of the new World Trade Center.
The discovery came about 11 years after the main sifting and sorting effort at Fresh Kills Landfill ended in 2002.
Today, 24 years after the attack, OCME still maintains another secure repository of human remains at the bedrock level of Ground Zero.
It houses over 8,000 unidentified bone fragments and tissue samples recovered from the Twin Towers, which experts are still analyzing in the hopes of finding more DNA matches.
However, science may need to provide even more breakthroughs in studying DNA to overcome the growing list of factors that have prevented the OCME lab from confirming the victims.
OCME assistant director of forensic biology Mark Desire told NPR: ‘The fire, the water that was used to put out the fire, the sunlight, the mold, bacteria, insects, jet fuel, diesel fuel, chemicals in those buildings – all these things destroy DNA.’
Desire noted that he’s still counting on those breakthroughs coming in the future, so New York can solve the case of the 1,100 unidentified victims from 9/11.
‘We just keep going back to those samples where there was no DNA. Now the technology’s better and we’re able to do things today that even last year we weren’t able to do.’
This article was originally published by a www.dailymail.co.uk . Read the Original article here. .