Every night, when visitors left, Jim Maroon wears a waterproof suit and descends into one of the two large tanks of the 9/11 Memorial in New York. She is 54 years old and since 2012 she has been working on their cleaning. He works five nights a week, from 23 to 6, passing an aspirator on the bottom while a colleague brushes the stone and another controls the pump. It is a job that takes a lot of time: Maroon has calculated that to clean a bathtub he must walk 44 times in one way and 44 in the other. His turn ends shortly before the memorial opens to the public.
The tanks occupy the perimeter of the two Twin Towers, destroyed in the attacks of 11 September 2001. Each has an area of about one acre, just over four thousand square meters, and is located about nine meters below the level of the road. The water descends along the walls of black granite and reaches a central square opening, about six meters deep. The system is the largest artificial waterfall in North America. When Maroon works, however, the water is stopped: in silence the aspirator’s noise remains and, occasionally, the voices of the security guards coming from above.
The cleanliness mainly concerns the leaves of the trees of the park, which are about four hundred. At the bottom end also coins, cans, toys and some camera. The coins are destined for the memorial. About five years ago Maroon even found a turtle as big as a lunch door: he did not know how it came there, but the workers took her to the offices and called her Lucky. For algae, instead, intervene the chemists who treat water with bromide; Maroon removes those growing on the stone.
The place also has a personal story for him. His father worked at the World Trade Center and Maroon, as a boy, spent a lot of time. On 11 September 2001 he had a job a few hundred meters from the towers and was going there when the first plane hit the complex. Remember the noise of the impact and, later, the people who threw themselves from the windows. During the work he tries not to go back to those memories, but in the days of the anniversary it is more difficult, especially when he sees the names of the victims engraved on the parapets. “If I thought about it every day, I would have the heart broken,” he told the New York Times.
Maroon says he feels a special responsibility for the families of the victims. He wants those who come to the memorial find a nice place, also because he knows that for some visitors those tanks mark the place where a family member died. After fourteen years, the greatest difficulty is not so much physical fatigue as repetition: go forward, go back and start again, night after night. He says he has no problem working alone and not wanting to leave the place, at least until the physicist will. When he finishes his shift, he takes off his suit and goes home to Staten Island. Soon after the first visitors arrive, who will see the clean tanks without knowing who is occupied during the night.
L’articolo The man cleaning the tanks of the Memorial of September 11 comes from IlNewyorkese.
