The Beer Can at the Twin Towers

Yesterday, I got to meet John Preston at a friend's Ribfest out by the Chain of Lakes here in northeast Illinois.

He is visiting and a sergeant in the NYPD. He said that he had gone out to the World Trade Center site in the days after 9-11 and had helped in the cleanup. He doesn't suffer from any of the maladies that others have incurred from working at the site in the aftermath. But he figures it is because he didn't work there that long. The ones who spent months there are the ones with problems.

They were issued cloth masks at first, and later regular breathing gear, but they stopped wearing them because it got too hot.

He distinctly remembers how beautiful the sky was on 9-11. He had just been at the Towers the day before for a meeting, and it had really stormed on the way out.

He said that every so often, the sirens would go off when there was a fear of a neighboring building collapsing. There wasn't much left of anything in the rubble other than pieces and parts, and that so much had been very compacted.

But one story was of particular interest. I had just finished talking about the Old Style can I found in Fox Lake with the pull tab top, he said that he had found a Rheingold beer can in perfect shape among all that rubble. That surprised him. But even more so, he was surprised at the fact that it was made of steel and had two church key can opener holes at the top. This puzzled him. Why would there be a beer can from the 60s or early 70s at the site? Perhaps someone had a beer can collection in one of the offices.

He thought about taking it, but didn't. But he still wondered about it until he saw a History Channel show on the construction of the Trade Center towers. It said that the workers building it, would, after lunch everyday, would put their beer cans and newspapers into the hollows of the girders. Mystery solved. But even then, how that can survived intact would still be a wonder. I don't think I'd like to be drinking beer and working that high up in the air.

John said that he was based in Brooklyn the day of the attack, and was outside when he heard popping sounds and only found out it was the floors collapsing when he saw it on TV.

This Is One Interesting Story. --RoadDog