This NYT article asks, "What Happened to That Cloud of Dust?"
When Dr. Lioy talks about what the dust is made of, his tone also changes drastically. "I try to be very careful about how I say it," Dr. Lioy said. The powdery dust on his laboratory table, he says, "contains everything we hold dear."The analysis done by Dr. Lioy and his colleagues produced a long list of elements and compounds they identified in the dust. They found microscopic traces of nearly every element - chromium, magnesium, manganese, aluminum, barium, titanium and lead, lots of lead from the paint used in the buildings.
They found some of the volatile components of jet fuel, along with a long list of unburned or partially burned hydrocarbons. There was slag wool from the towers' insulation, along with fiberglass and asbestos, wood and glass, plastic and colored specks of paper, bits of cotton fiber and organic compounds too infinitesimal to record.
And there's more. "Everything we hold dear" also includes the essence of those who died in the collapse. Dr. Lioy talks about it with reluctance. When pressed, he says minute amounts of organic material are probably mixed with the dust.
"If we're talking about the number of souls we lost, and every one of them was valuable, they would represent a tiny portion of the material in the dust," Dr. Lioy said. The ability to find anything in the dust that can be traced to a specific item - a desk, a chair, a computer - is extremely limited, and identifying material as human is, he said, "almost impossible."
He's talking about the dust of September 11, of course. And I know what happened to a bit of it - it's in a Progresso artichoke hearts jar, up in my office. A small piece of disaster in my house.
I wonder how many others who were there that day or who lived in downtown Manhattan have similar jars?
