BROCKPORT, N.Y. — Friday marks 25 years since the September 11th terrorist attacks.Nearly 3,000 people were killed when hijackers crashed four planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Hundreds of local people answered the call to help in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.One of them was Peter Spagnola from Brockport. He spent months sorting World Trade Center debris to help identify bodies, return possessions to families and aid in the criminal investigation into what happened.The more years that go by, the harder it is for Spagnola to reconcile what happened on 9/11. “It seems like it gets more emotional with time because I can look back with all this experience in life,” Spagnola says. Spagnola was glued to the TV from his home in Brockport on the day of the attacks. When he went to work the next day, his boss came to him with a request. “My boss came to me and said, we need as many heavy equipment operators as you know and we need to respond to the World Trade Center cleanup,” Spagnola recalls.And so that’s what he did. Spagnola was a site superintendent at the World Trade Center Forensic Debris Recovery Site at Staten Island. Everything from Ground Zero went to that site. “All 1.8 million tons were brought and dumped right in front of us,” Spagnola says. The debris had to be sorted and screened.“Four things they wanted to find, human remains, personal effects, the black boxes from the planes and then evidence of what happened that day,” Spagnola tells News10NBC.They worked around the clock for months.“I had the landing gear of the airplane in my grapple one day,” Spagnola says.Every day, every pile, was different.“The inside of the airplane is green and that would stand out when you saw it, so you would see airplane parts from a mile away, I mean I found a wet nap from American Airlines, still in the package, I could not believe it, I don’t know how it wasn’t burned up” Spagnola adds.But it’s the thousands of personal belongings that were recovered that are most memorable for Spagnola, “it was wallets, purses, an award, you know salesman of the year award on a desk,” he says.
Nearly 55,000 items were able to be returned to the families of those who were lost in the attacks.Today, there is a display inside the Brockport Library that shares a bit about Spagnola’s experience. He hopes that it gives people, particularly of a younger generation, an idea of the depth of these attacks and the lasting impacts. He’s also hoping that people take the time on 9/11 to stop by one of the local memorials that honor those who died.
How a Brockport man helped find victims and return belongings after World Trade Center attacks WHEC.com.
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