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New Yorkers Exerting Every Effort to Bring Life to Normal
New Yorkers have entered the second week on Tuesday since the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, making efforts to bring life to normal.
At the site of WTC, where a seven-story tall pile of debris remains as a result of the twin towers' collapse. Though nearly 50, 000 tons of rubble has been moved away, it would take weeks to clean up the rest of a reported 700,000 tons of steel, glass and dust.
Several thousand rescue workers with a total of 3,788 trucks have been used on duty 24 hours a day, according to mayor Rudy Giuliani.
He put the latest figure of those missing for the attacks as more than 5,400, with 218 confirmed dead, 152 of them identified. The bodies of 37 police and firefighters have been found.
The firemen were the backbone force of the rescue effort, which involved 1,200 firefighters, the mayor told reporters Tuesday. Some 300 firefighters were still missing.
Charity and volunteer help were evident, with Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and other states sending their firefighters to assist New York City.
"Tens of millions of dollars and thousands of hours and tons of food and clothing have all been donated to help rebuild shattered lives," President George W. Bush said Tuesday.
Focus has been on finding survivors and the rescuers did pulled five alive in the first 26 hours. However, no more survivors have been found since Wednesday.
Giuliani cautioned that hopes of finding anyone alive in the ruins had almost faded. And once heavy equipment is used, remarkable progress may be expected in the removal of the debris.
Two hijacked passenger planes slammed the 110-story towers, a third crash damaged part of Pentagon in Washington and the fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania the same day. All 266 on board the planes were killed, in addition to thousands of deaths at WTC and 188 missing at Pentagon. Death toll is believed to include nationals of over 60 countries.
Giuliani said that over 70 percent of work-force in the metropolis returned to work on Monday, as transportation was recovering. Roads near WTC remained closed to meet emergency needs. City Hall and other government buildings and courthouses resumed work Tuesday.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), just blocks from the WTC, resumed trading Monday, thanks to the effective recovery work. The opening followed a four-day suspension, the longest since the Depression in the late 1920s.
The impact of the collapse of the WTC buildings reached the adjacent financial district, where electricity and gas supply was cut off, among other losses.
Investors greeted the market cautiously, with major indexes falling to nearly three year lows despite a 0.5 percentage point interest cut announced by the Federal Reserve prior to the opening of stock markets.
Fears over an already fragile economy and a U.S. military retaliation against terrorism sent the blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average down 7 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index down almost 7 percent.
On Tuesday, the market was rather stabilized with the Dow down 17.30 points to 8903.40 and Nasdaq down 24.47 points to 1555.08.
Airlines are among the industries most hit by the terrorist attacks. Announcing layoffs and flight cutbacks, the industry has asked for 24 billion U.S. dollars in aid from the federal government.
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