He was handed a rake and told to start digging.
In an interview several months before his death last week, NYPD Sgt. Michael Ryan recalled his chilling first assignment at the Fresh Kills landfill on Sept. 13, 2001.
“We drove our cars right up to the landfill. We didn’t know then, nobody knew, that they were dumping truckfuls of debris from the World Trade Center,” he told The Post.
“There were no contamination suits, no masks. I was just handed a rake and told, ‘There’s your pile, see what you can find.’ That first day we found personal effects, credit cards and some small body parts.”
Ryan said sifted for remains for more than 80 hours at the Staten Island dump during 12-hour shifts over the next six months.
The 20-year NYPD veteran and father of four died at age 41 last Monday of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – one of the blood-cell cancers that Dr. Robin Herbert of the WTC Medical Monitoring Program warned in May could be the “third wave” of illness caused by toxic exposure at Ground Zero.
The Queens warrants cop and youth-football coach gad battled his cancer since May 2006, when he found the first of several malignant lumps.