Revisionist History - The Fines

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

How did some remains of those who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks end up in what was once the world's largest landfill? In this episode: the battle that continues to this day over what some see as a pile of dust, and what others see as the remains of the dead.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Not long ago, my producer Lucy Sullivan visited one of the largest parks in New York City, not Central Park, not Prospect Park, Fresh Gills Park, on Staten Island. Lucy was there with Ben Nadafafafir reporting for our latest series, The Staten Island Problem. And while she was there, Lucy uncovered a mystery. There was one part of the park, one section, that she wasn't allowed to visit. Why? because of what's buried there. Today the park is rolling green hills,

a beautiful and peaceful place. But Fresh Gills, as you may know, used to be the world's largest landfill. Mayor Rudy Giuliani closed it in the 90s, and the last barge sailed to Staten Island in March of 2001. Or so everyone thought. Six months later,

in September of 2001, it had to reopen. Fresh Gills became the site of a giant operation to sort through the rubble from the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The last thing brought to the landfill was what remained of the Twin Towers and all the people who perished there.

A giant pile of dirt and dust. Today, Lucy Sullivan has a story about that pile of dust and the battle over where it should go. As the saying goes, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But when are we no longer ourselves? When do we become dust? It all began with a promise. Here's Lucy.

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Charles Hirsch rushed downtown to the site of the Twin Towers. Hirsch was the city's chief medical examiner. He knew his team had to move quickly. They would need to set up a temporary morgue. When the North Tower collapsed, Hirsch was hit with debris and badly injured. Mayor Giuliani spoke to the press.

Dr. Hirsch was injured and had to be treated, but he's organized in his office, and they are ready to deal with thousands and thousands of bodies, if they have to. Leaving ground zero, Hirsch was caked in dust. Later, he reached into his pockets and found fistfuls of it. He told the New York Times that's when it dawned on him. If concrete was pulverized into dust,

it wasn't much of a mystery what might have happened. to people. It wouldn't be thousands of bodies, but thousands of body parts. So he made a promise. Charles Hirsch, the medical examiner, says we will never rest until all remains are identified. This is Jay Aronson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote a book called Who Owns the Dead, the Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero. These kinds of issues are a daily occurrence for people in war zones, I wanted to kind of bring that home to Americans. I wanted Americans to understand what people in other parts of the world go through on a regular basis, particularly in conflict zones.

9-11 was the first time in modern history that Americans were dealing with this scale of dismemberment on U.S. soil. And right then, DNA technology had evolved to be able to identify the dead in a way that was never possible before. Really in the context of the Balkan wars, scientists needed to develop ways of dealing with decayed and degraded bone and tissue to match very degraded DNA samples to family samples. And so that early work was really coming to fruition right when 9-11 happened. This meant on the one hand that there was a chance that anything with a trace of the victims

could potentially be identified for families. But it also meant that the promise Charles Hirsch made to identify every remain found and not to rest until they did would lead to big expectations from the public. That, I think, affirms the view in some family's minds that all of the remains are sacred, that the goal isn't just to positively identify

in a forensic sense the presence of a particular individual at the site at the time of. of the attacks, but that there was something sacred about each and every bit of their body, and that all of the bits or all of the pieces that could be associated with a particular person should be returned to that family or should be handled in a particular way. There were rumors in those first few days that tens of thousands of people might be missing or dead. Up to 200,000 people visited the World Trade Center complex each day, and 50,000

people worked there. Matthew Horning worked as a database administrator on the 95th floor of the North Tower. He was 26 years old. On hot July day, I drove out to New Jersey to speak with his parents. Hello, how are you? I am. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. His mother, Diane, and I settled onto the couch. His father, Kurt, showed me a picture of him. Matthew had light brown hair and a goatee. This is why we're in all. Yeah. That's a picture of my son. In your wallet.

Yeah, in my wallet. They carry it all the time. As Diane told me, Matthew was just getting started. Matthew was, I mean, he was wonderful. He had great friends. He was good to me. He was good to the family. He was not flawless.

But he didn't think of himself as anything super special. In fact, his email address was I am a cog. Because you would ask him, what's your job? He was in IT. What do you do? He says, you know those little pieces that if one kicks off the whole cog, the wheel doesn't turn? I'm one of those.

I'm a cog in the wheel. Diane said Matthew could be funny. He had just started dating a nice girl who we hoped to marry someday. He liked to play dungeons and dragons with his friends, and he wanted to be a fantasy writer. He was signed up to take a writing class on September 12th. He lived the way most guys in their late 20s do. As we used to say, he lived in a place that everybody used to want to move out of. And his roommate, you'd go and you just go, okay, is this how I raised you?

Kurt and Diane Horning reminded me a lot of my own parents. They live in the same house they raised their children in. They've been married for 56 years, and they've lived here for 53 of those. They have another child, a daughter, and grandkids now. Show you this. In the corner of the room, there's a makeshift memorial to Matthew. Diane took a wooden bowl off of a bookcase and emptied it onto the couch. This is his wallet.

His wallet was dissent. These are all the things that were in his wallet. And when they found these things, they sealed them and put them, you know, like they sealed. This was the money that it was in his wallet, and it was sealed in this. packaging that was found in Fresh Hills. During the sorting operation at Fresh Hills, victims' families could schedule visits to see what was going on there. Diane doesn't remember when exactly she first visited,

but she remembers what she saw. She showed me some pictures she took on one of her trips. This looks like just a crack in the earth and some grass with like hay maybe. Yep, that was something I put on top of it. But you could see pieces. of the fire hose. Oh, wow, yeah. It's like a fire hose in the dirt

with some flowers on it. Yeah. You could see pieces of the building. You could see, you could see this, which was a huge piece of cloth. We found shoes. They said everything

to a quarter of an inch has been sifted out. They did not sift down to a quarter. They lied. Diane was shocked. Fresh kills was not supposed to look like this. Something didn't seem right to her. This was the beginning of a fight for the Hornings, and other families too,

over what exactly Charles Hirsch's promise meant and where the remains of the dead should go. Music you love, radio stations, everywhere you go, the podcasts everyone's talking about, all in one place, and it's free. High Heart Radio. Whatever you want to hear. Listen anytime. Music, radio, podcasts, unlimited audio. It's on the free IHurt Radio app.

Just go! One app, no subscription. Always free. Grab the free app. IHard Radio. Download the free IHard Radio app today. Dennis Diggins was the superintendent of the Fresh Kills Landfill. He was in charge of overseeing its closure and then its reopening in the early morning hours of September 12, 2001.

So we got the first load at the first load. Fresh Kills, I got around 2 o'clock in the morning. And then I just shot home. And I looked like somebody dumped a load of Sacrete on my head. So I actually got undressed in the garage and ran into the shower. And then I was back at Fresh Kills the next morning by 7 o'clock. Diggins helped manage the cleanup for the sanitation department. City officials started meeting at a school down the street from Ground Zero.

It became the de facto command center. You went in and you saw all these top ingenious from all over the city sitting on these little seats. They were like kindergarten seats. And you knew once those egos were checked and sitting there, you knew we were going to get through this. But it was still a daunting experience. The world's largest garbage dump was now an active crime scene.

The sorting and searching operation was all going to take place at Fresh Kills. Which really made the most sense because Fresh Kills is a, it's a city-owned facility. It's secured. It's fenced in. It's a marina loading facility. So if you want to barge material there, you can barge material. And again, we had 170 acres of flat plateau to work off of. 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 off. 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. The men and women who worked in press kills were never trained for anything like this. Tractor operators who were moving material around in the sorting fields, they saw human remains on a daily basis. And you would see it as you were walking by. They would walk by with a pale, and you knew it was inside,

but I think everybody stepped up and did what they had to do and treated it with the utmost respect. 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, 24-7.

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 pile of material had lots of human remains because seagulls would circle above, and they'd have to fight them off. By July of 2002, the city thought the operation at Fresh Hills was finished. It ended ahead of schedule and under budget, rare for a government project. All told, they sorted about 1.5 million tons of material from ground zero. That's about 600 Olympic swimming pools worth of stuff. But then there's this fact of the fines. What are the fines?

One of the fines? The fines were the material that came through the sifter. After it was searched out to a quarter of an inch, those fines were then taken. Everything that was landfilled was put into an area that about 45 acres on the western side of the landfill. so that it was determined that at the end of the day we would be able to cordon off this area that was all world trade center material. The fines, F-I-N-E-S, unidentified dirt and dust,

the last stuff to be left at fresh hills. Not garbage, not debris, but nothing to be salvaged, at least from the city's point of view. Of course, not everyone saw it that way. they treated my son like garbage. This was the largest garbage dump that had been recently closed. So while the people who killed my son,

I have certainly an animosity for them. I have a huge animosity for the people who were running New York and at running our federal government also, who allowed my son to be. be putting a garbage dump. Now we've got to do this fast, clean it up, and get it out of our sight. Out of sight, out of mind. When I went to visit the Hornings, New Jersey, the first thing I noticed was a bumper sticker

on their car out front. I had Diane read me what it said. The Fresh Hills Garbage Dump is no resting place for the WTC 9-11 victims. We need your help. Before Matthew was killed, Diane said she was not an organizer, not especially political. But in the face of insurmountable grief over losing her son in a terrorist attack, she decided to fight the only people she really could.

The city of New York. The Hornings had one demand. Do not leave the remains of our son in the Fresh Kill's garbage dump. From their kitchen table, the Horning started a group called WTC Families for a proper burial, with others who had lost loved ones. They were fighting to have the fines, that big pile of dust left over from the sorting operation, moved out of the landfill and into a more dignified place. The group met every month at the Union Library in New Jersey.

They attended public planning meetings and protested at others. So I became the spokesperson because I wasn't afraid to speak. So you could say, well, we couldn't meet the mayor. I don't care. You know, that's okay. I'll talk to anybody. And they did meet the mayor. Kurt and Diane told me they had a private one-on-one meeting with Mayor Bloomberg.

He was on his way to a basketball game, so we had to make it fast. And he said, well, I'm giving my body to science, so burial doesn't matter to me. We said, we think that's great. That's your choice. But we need a choice, too. And our choice is to bury our children. On May 30th, 2002, a ceremony was held at Crown Zero, marking the end of the recovery effort there. But then, a couple years later, during a construction project, additional human remains were found.

Across the street from the towers on the roof of the Deutsche Bank building, this kicked off a new effort, which led to the discovery of over a thousand bone fragments, human tissue, and other remains over the next few years. Some were discovered by accident, like when con-ed workers were digging in a manhole. It was clear that certain areas had been missed. The WTC Families Group thought there was a chance that things might have been missed at Fresh Kills, too. After all, Diane had taken those pictures of stuff larger than a quarter of an inch, like the fire hose. In 2002, a bill was introduced in the New Jersey legislature that would have required officials to remove the fines from Fresh Kills and place them containers to be stored at ground zero. The bill never really went anywhere. The fines were

determined to be somewhere between 360,000 and 480,000 tons. If you picture it, that's about one football field in length, piled 200 feet high. Promises were made to the families by city officials, saying that the fines would be dealt with somehow, that they wouldn't be forgotten. But those well-intentioned promises sent the hornings spinning in circles. They sent us to the coroner's office. He was a wonderful man, by the way, but the person we had to deal with was Barbara Butcher. And then they sent us to... Wait, I'm sorry, that was her name?

Her name. And then we go to Fresh Kills and we deal with Dennis Diggins. And there were other names like that. We're going, what is going on here? We felt like we were in a Dickens novel. We really did. And if we didn't laugh, we cried. We laughed a lot.

We cried a lot. Dennis Diggins, the person in charge at Fresh Hills, remembers the last meeting he had with the Horns in his trailer. It didn't go so well. At one point in one of the meetings, he says, well, who ultimately told you to come and bring this material to Fresh Kills? So I said, well, it was determined by the mayor and the Office of Emergency Management determined that it should come here.

So you just blindly followed orders like Nazis, you just follow them. And at that point, I just said, listen, this meeting's over us. If you're going to equate the work that we're doing here to Nazi Germany, and it says, I'm done, I'm not talking to your people anymore. The Hornings got some politicians to sign letters of support for their cause. Plans were starting to be made for what the memorial would be, and the city held sessions for the public to attend and share their input. Diane wanted to make one thing clear.

A landfill could never be a memorial in her eyes. I remember going to one of these symposiums, and I took a box, and it put garbage in the box, and then I gift wrapped it. That old pretty beau and whatever. And then I opened it, and I said, I put it in a pretty box, but it's still garbage. Soon, a judge would weigh in on this fight. That's after the break. The music you love.

I heart radio. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about. All in one place. And it's free. I heart radio. Whatever you want to hear.

Listen anytime. Anywhere. Music, radio. Podcasts. Unlimited audio. It's on the free. IHurt Radio app. One app.

No subscription. Always free. Grab the free app. I heart radio. Everywhere you go. Always free. Download the free IR Radio app today. Around the middle of the 4th century BC,

the dog philosopher Diogenes was chatting with friends about what should be done with his body after he died. Here's cultural historian Thomas Laker. You know, he's called the dog philosopher because dogs live naturally. Diogenes is if you have dogs, well, they do all this stuff in public that I'd like to do in public. He was sort of famous in antiquity

as being sort of a truth-telling street person. Laker is author of the book, The Work of the Dead. It begins with the story of Diogenes, a man who lived in a barrel on the street and was opposed to all that was decent. He thought that humans should be able to masturbate and defecate in public the same way we eat in public. And so, when Diogenes was talking about what should happen to him after he died, he said that he'd like to be thrown over the city walls and disposed of like debris. I'm paraphrasing here, but the story goes that his friends pleaded with him, saying animals would dismember his body. Diogenes said, okay, then put a stick in my hand so that I can fight them off.

His friends said, well, you wouldn't be able to use the stick because you'd be dead. To which Diogenes replied, exactly. Diogenes is right in that a human body is in no material way different from an animal body, which get eaten by vultures and dealt with in the ordinary course of ecology. And he's also right that he won't notice it. So it's nothing to him what happens to his body. But of course, Diogenes is very wrong. For thousands of years before and for thousands of years after,

humanity has rejected his logical proposition. Although we know we can't use a stick to fight off vultures when we die, most people would never throw someone out like trash. There are only four ways you to get rid of the dead, right? air, fire, water, and earth. So you bury them in the earth, you burn it with fire, you throw in water, we're going to leave in the air. So all of these have, all these have been done.

The place of the dead has always mattered. Starting in the 8th century, to be a church was to have the body of a martyr, or a relic from one. And the worst fate imaginable for the faithful was to not be buried near them in the churchyard. Then, of course, there's the public cemetery, cremation, open caskets, scattering ashes in the river. The general point is that no one throws them away.

To Diane and Kurt Horning, it seemed like the city was doing just that, throwing away the remains of their son in a landfill. In the best case scenario, WTC families wanted the finds taken out of fresh kills, moved to ground zero, and incorporated into the memorial there. If that was impossible, WTC families had other suggestions. governor's island, or maybe a section of fresh hills that was not on top of garbage. In 2004, the city finally said outright, the fines would not be moved from fresh hills. I asked Dennis Diggins about this. To me, it seemed logistically challenging, but not totally out of the question to move the fines somewhere else.

Was it purely a logistical impossibility to put the fines somewhere else, like to make a cemetery somewhere or to put them in a place that was not fresh kills. Like, why was that not possible? Well, at the time, fines were just another product of the material itself. There was never any thought that this material should be brought somewhere else and treated somewhere else. Just didn't enter into the equation. Because would look, would the fines just look like a pile of dirt to someone who didn't know what they were?

Yep. After years of meetings and sessions and bills that went nowhere, WTC families for a proper burial sued the city. They hired legendary civil rights attorney Norman Siegel to represent them. In August of 2005, they filed their two-count complaint, alleging that leaving the fines and fresh kills violated their 14th Amendment right to due process. They claim it also violated New York burial laws, which state that family members have certain property rights when it comes to their. dead. At some point, the Hornings reached out to Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner. They wanted information about what remains had been found and where. Hirsch sent Diane Horning a letter in response. He wrote, due to the close physical resemblance

between cremated bone fragments and pulverized concrete, I believe it virtually certain that at least some human tissue is mixed with the dirt at the Staten Island landfill. But the problem was, none of the plaintiffs could prove that the ashes of their loved one specifically was mixed in with that dirt. Nearly three years after litigation began, the judge in the case issued his decision. He ruled that the plaintiffs lacked a constitutionally protected right

to what amounts to quote, an unidentifiable mass of dirt. He wrote, All human remains that could be identified were identified. only dust remains. Almost 3,000 people died on September 11th, 2001. Over 20,000 fragments of human remains were found. Families didn't just receive one notification

that their loved one was among the dead. Some of them received visit after visit, phone call after phone call, each time a new body part or piece of tissue was identified as a match. But there are still over 1,000 people whose remains have never been identified. Charles Hirsch passed away in 2016, but the city is still looking for ways to match the remains they keep to the dead.

In 2025, forensic scientists had a breakthrough and identified three new 9-11 victims. DNA matching technology continues to get better. It's possible this process will never end. Diane and Kurt Horning have received a few notifications over the years, small fragments of Matthew. They buried what they're in. were given, but pieces of their son are not enough. Toward the end of our interview,

I finally asked Diane a question I'd been wondering since I walked in. I haven't asked about your pin. Tell me about your pin you're wearing. Um, these are, we, we got these. Somebody wrote, and I wish I could remember. It was a picture of the towers with a heart in the background, the same image I'd seen on the Horning's car when I was walking up. I assumed she'd put it on because I was coming. I swore I'd wear it every day until he was out of the dump. and he's down out of the dump, so I'm wearing it. You wear it every day?

I wear it every day. My husband wears his every day, too. The fines are still at fresh hills. The city has already begun converting the whole place into a park, and plans are in the works for a 9-11 memorial there. The hornings say they'll never go. The story began with a very well-meaning promise, a commitment to honoring what remained after a massive tragedy,

a promise that Charles Hirsch hoped could give comfort to thousands of families who were never going to see the person they loved again. But it was always going to be an impossible promise to fulfill. And I think the reason why can be found in a personal story, the cultural historian Thomas Lakerr told me, about his father, his grandfather, and maybe himself too. Laker's father, a Jew, had to flee Germany in the 1940s. He and his family settled in Virginia.

He was a doctor, a pathologist. his father thought of the dead how any pathologist would in a detached medical way. When he died, he was cremated and his ashes were spread in a flower bed next to a lake in Virginia. Ten years later, Lecour was invited to give a talk in Germany

and his wife suggested that maybe he should take some of his father's ashes with him and spread them over his grandfather's grave in Hamburg. The two were very close, both doctors. One problem. I literally had no ashes. What I had was the dirt in this flower bed. which I've been fertilizing over the years.

So there were his ashes, the phosphorus, the nitrogen, and support. But there was also the stuff you buy and miracle grow or whatever in this bed. I realized that my father would have said this was complete nonsense. My father was a man of science. But LeCur did it anyway. He traveled with a Ziploc baggie in his carry-on and emptied it onto his grandfather's grave in Hamburg. And I felt this was actually kind of an emotional. meaningful experience.

It felt like I was connecting them again. I felt, you know, I brought them together. You know, but if you asked me, what was me? Did I think, if you asked me, did you take your dad's ashes and put it on my your grandfather's grave? Let's be kidding. Humans care for the dead. It's what we do, even though we know better.

Le Kerr borrows a quote from the art critic David Hickey, calling it a magic we can believe in. In other words, I'm a modern person. I don't believe any fragment of anyone has any particular relevance. My father's ashes differing no way from the fertilizer we put in, but act as if I do. At a certain point, things become something else. Alive, dead, a body, dust, two buildings, rubble, ashes, miracle grow, a garbage dump, a park. But there's always a stuff.

period in between. The transition. When two things are true at once. Provisionous history is produced by me, Lucy Sullivan, with Ben Adafafafri and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chikurgy. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Sam Russick.

Original music by Luis Gara and Stellwagen Symphinet. Mastering by Marcelo de Oliveira. Special thanks to Robin Nagel, Marty Ballou and Norman Siegel. And thanks, of course, to Malcolm Gladwell. I'm Lucy Sullivan.