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Ceremony to close 'Ground Zero' cleanup

The cleanup of the World Trade Center site will officially end Thursday.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The last piece of steel from the World Trade Center ruins will be ceremonially carried off the site Thursday after a brief ceremony marking the end of cleanup efforts.

The ceremony is to begin at 10:29 a.m. ET, the same time the trade center's north tower collapsed on September 11 after being struck by a hijacked jetliner.

Eight months and 108,342 truckloads of debris later, the 50-ton steel column will be taken away in a symbolic farewell to those killed that day.

Authorities put the final death toll from the twin towers' destruction at 2,823. The remains of 1,731 victims never have been recovered.

The ceremony will give families such as Anna and Roman Gertsberg a chance to say goodbye their daughter, Marina, whose body has never been found. She was 25, the Gertsbergs' only child, and had started work at the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald only a week before.

"I'm going to be closer to Marina," Anna Gertsberg said. "So it's like going to the cemetery, and of course it's going to be a lot of people ... who have what we have."

Roman Gertsberg said he calls the medical examiner's office frequently in hopes that his daughter's remains have been identified.

"They have lots of parts which still have to be DNAed, and I still hope they will find something, because it hurts," he said.

Among the dead were 343 New York firefighters and an estimated 70 police officers from various departments, including 37 from New York's Port Authority and 23 from the New York Police Department.

Hundreds of workers labored around the clock since September 11 to reclaim the bodies of those who died in the attack and to remove the 1.6 million tons of steel and concrete left behind. The debris was moved to a Staten Island landfill.

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Many of those who worked on the cleanup were volunteers. Lee Ielppi joined the search in hopes of finding his 29-year-old son, Jonathan, a firefighter lost in the disaster. Ielppi continued the work long after losing hope that his son remained alive.

"I helped out in a lot of situations where people were found. ... We didn't find them alive, but we found them," he said.

"And when we found somebody, that it made it easy for somebody out there. But I said, 'I'm staying here until I find my son.'"

Jonathan Ielppi's body was discovered on December 11, one of 289 found intact.

The final column -- part of the southeast corner of the south tower -- was hoisted onto a flatbed truck and shrouded in black cloth after its removal Tuesday night, completing in eight months a cleanup effort originally estimated to last a year.

There will be no speeches at Thursday's ceremony, which will begin with the sound of a fire bell ringing for a fallen firefighter.

A procession of police and fire department bagpipe and drum players are to follow a stretcher -- empty except for an American flag -- up a ramp leading out of the site. The truck carrying the beam will follow them out.

Reminders of the attack remain nearly everywhere around the area.

In addition to the 16-acre World Trade Center site itself, light poles still bear banners urging New Yorkers to "Salute our heroes."

The fence surrounding St. Paul's Chapel, just a block from the site, has been turned into a makeshift shrine where visitors have left flags, T-shirts, teddy bears and other mementos.

Another 189 were killed in Washington on September 11 when a third hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon, and 44 more died aboard a fourth jet that crashed into a Pennsylvania field after passengers apparently tried to overpower another team of hijackers.

-- CNN Correspondent Michael Okwu contributed to this report.