City Discloses New Location of 9/11 Victims’ Remains

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Memorial Park, on East 30th Street, near the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, leads to a chapel in a large tent under which the remains of World Trade Center victims were stored until October.

For more than a decade, relatives of World Trade Center victims had been accustomed to walking through Memorial Park on East 30th Street on their way to a tranquil chapel under a big white tent. There, they could pay their respects to the dead, knowing that the victims’ remains were nearby, carefully stored â€" though out of sight â€" beneath the same tent top.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times On the wall of Memorial Park.

On Memorial Day, a number of victims’ relatives accused the Bloomberg administration of having “snatched” the remains from Memorial Park and surreptitiously moving them to an “undisclosed location.”

A day later, Nazli Parvizi, the Bloomberg administration’s commissioner of community affairs, informed family members by e-mail that the remains had in fact been moved in October 2012 â€" in advance of Hurricane Sandy â€" to the DNA Forensic Biology Laboratory Building at 421 East 26th Street, which is run by the office of the chief medical examiner.

“The Memorial Park area at East 30th Street was damaged during the storm, and given the vulnerability of the park to future storms, we have determined that the location is no longer suitable as storage for the remains,” Ms. Parvizi wrote.

“The DNA building is a brand new, state-of-the-art facility where scientists are continuing their efforts to identify those killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” she continued. “This new location is not vulnerable to storm damage.”

The medical examiner’s office still holds more than 8,000 body fragments from the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. They are stored in vacuum-sealed plastic pouches, with bar codes and identification numbers.

Ms. Parvizi said the remains would stay at the laboratory until the completion of the National September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center, when they will be placed in a repository near bedrock level.

Opponents of the plan to enshrine the remains in the museum were angered by the new disclosure.

“They moved the remains, without notification and consultation to the 9/11 families, because of possible flood concerns,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer who represents the opponents. “Yet, they will ultimately place the remains in the museum, 70 feet below ground in a flood zone, which was flooded during Hurricane Sandy. It is hard to discern the logic behind this.”

Museum officials and a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office have said that the remains can be evacuated with enough notice and that the repository will be watertight in any case. Ms. Parvizi said that victims’ relatives could arrange to visit the DNA laboratory and that the memorial chapel would reopen “for quiet reflection.”

But on Wednesday, the park and the entrance to the chapel were still in a state of disarray. Within sight of a memorial flier for James M. Cartier, an electrician who was working on the 105th floor of the south tower when the building was hit, are uprooted chunks of concrete and sawed-off tree limbs.

“Memorial Park in itself holds no value to us,” his brother, John C. Cartier, wrote in an e-mail to other victims’ relatives, “but it is the remains of those we lost that mean everything.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Remains of World Trade Center victims were stored under the tent until the approach of Hurricane Sandy.