Rescuers comb wreckage using pails as survivor search continues

NEW YORK -- Cranes and bulldozers picked away the heaviest pieces of what's left of the World Trade Center, but the real work was unfolding on a smaller scale: rescuers with plastic pails, toiling in the muck and stink, only able to look forward to more over the weekend.

Exhausted but determined, hundreds of volunteers Saturday slogged their way through tons of rubble that became a mammoth mud pile after heavy rain the previous day. Plummeting temperatures before dawn sent workers rummaging through Salvation Army clothes for sweaters.

"I think the cold is great," said Kevin Kossi, a mechanical engineer who volunteered for the rescue effort. "You're working real hard and you're hot, so the cold energizes you."

So far, another day of effort offered little encouragement: no new survivors found, 124 bodies recovered, a total of 184 confirmed dead and more than 4,700 missing. Only five people have been pulled out alive since the collapse along with more than 400 body parts.

One rescuer found the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound, The New York Times reported Saturday. Another worker told the paper he had found the remains of people strapped to what seemed to be airplane seats.

Among the missing are 23 New York police officers and hundreds of firefighters. Among the dead found so far were 13 city firefighters, three Port Authority police officers, two emergency medical technicians and a New Jersey firefighter.

Pedestrian movement

A few blocks east of the disaster site, initial steps were taken to return at least part of lower Manhattan to normal. For the first time since the attacks, pedestrians were allowed into an area south of Canal Street that includes many financial businesses scheduled to reopen Monday.

Elsewhere there were glimmers of hope. Authorities on Friday announced the first arrest in the investigation of the attacks -- a man held in New York as a material witness, meaning he was thought to have information relevant to the investigation.

But as the hours wore on at the site where the 110-story World Trade Center towers stood it became disturbingly clear: finding the victims was going to take a long time. And much of it was going to be done by hand.

Human chains -- firefighters, police, National Guardsmen, construction workers and doctors -- passed empty buckets into holes in a breathtaking pile of rubble.

Moving a million tons

Somewhere inside, helped by search dogs and flashlights, were rescuers looking for bodies and survivors. The pails re-emerged, each containing a few chunks of debris. So far, more than 10,000 tons have been removed, a tiny fraction of the skyscrapers' ruins -- a combined total of 220 stories of gleaming steel weighing some 1.25 million tons, plus an unknown number of surrounding structures.

Working 12-hour shifts, rescuers found things turning worse in Friday's downpour.

"You're cold, you're hands are numb, the steel is slippery," said Jesus Agosto, 40, a construction worker who volunteered from New Jersey.

Jerry Shike, who also works in the construction industry, volunteered from Connecticut. The muck, he said, was "just making things very difficult."

"You've got to move slower," he said, and negotiate "a million little pieces of this and that."