Posted on 03/31/2006 9:22:32 PM PST by Teacher317
NEW YORK - Emergency operators listening to trapped callers' heartbreaking pleas from the burning World Trade Center repeatedly said help was on the way while they struggled with crashing computers, utter confusion and their own emotions, several hours of 911 calls released Friday show.
In releasing the 130 calls, city officials edited out the voices of those who sought help. But the police and fire dispatchers often repeated the callers' words, reflecting the fear and chaos of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
The first call came seconds after terrorists flew a hijacked jetliner into the north tower of the trade center at 8:46 a.m. A second plane struck the south tower 17 minutes later, and by 10:28 both towers had collapsed, leaving 2,749 people dead.
Dispatchers assured the callers — most of them on floors above the burning plane wreckage — that help was coming, or already there. In many cases, they had little to offer but compassion.
"OK, ma'am. All right," a fire dispatcher told a caller at 9:05 a.m., two minutes after the second tower was hit. "Well, everybody is there now. We're trying to rescue everybody. OK?"
Twelve minutes later, another dispatcher told a frantic caller trapped on the 105th floor of the south tower to instruct people to put wet towels over their mouths, lie on the floor and not open the windows.
"We are trying to get up there, sir. Like you said, the stairs are collapsed, OK?" the dispatcher said. "I know it's hard to breathe. I know it is."
The transcripts and nearly nine hours of audio recordings were released after The New York Times and relatives of Sept. 11 victims sued to get them. An appeals court ruled last year that the calls of victims in the burning twin towers were too intense and emotional to be released without their families' consent.
As a result, the transcripts held long blank spaces where the callers' words would have appeared.
Often, it was clear from conversations between police and fire department operators that they were not sure what had occurred. At one point a police operator told a fire dispatcher that a helicopter had hit one of the towers.
The operators managed generally to maintain their composure even as word spread that what initially appeared to be a tragic accident was actually a choreographed terrorist attack involving two planes and both towers.
Sirens screamed in the background as the callers pleaded for help. Although there were no voices, their desperation was evident in heavy, audible breathing on the other end of the operators' calls.
"If you feel like your life is in danger, do what you must do, OK?" one dispatcher told a caller at 9:02 a.m., just a minute before the second plane hit. "I can't give you any more advice than that."
The comment was typical of the frustration that came through amid the calm professionalism.
"All right, we have quite a few calls," said a fire operator.
"I know," said a police operator. "Jesus Christ."
Many dispatchers complained about computers failing in the chaos.
"Oh goodness. Hold on a second, because we are so backed up here," a fire dispatcher told one caller. "Because we have so much information on here, that our computers are down. OK?"
In the background of another call made from the 105th floor of the north tower at 9:17 a.m., a public address announcement could be heard in the background: "We aware of it down here. The condition seems to have subsided."
Sally Regenhard, one of the plaintiffs whose firefighter son was killed on Sept. 11, said the tapes showed that the operators were untrained to tell people how to save their lives.
"I'm hoping that the public and the system will learn how unprepared the City of New York and the Port Authority were on that day," Regenhard said.
Many of the operators told frantic callers to stay put and wait for help, which fire dispatcher supervisor David Rosenzwieg said is standard procedure in high-rises when fires break out on lower floors.
"Telling people to stay — for some reason people think that's the wrong thing to do," Rosenzwieg said Friday. "But the same instructions saves lives every day."
Rosenzwieg said some dispatchers were so traumatized by their encounters with the trade center victims they never came back to the job. Others retired early. "Unfortunately, they took it very much to heart," he said.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said the police 911 operators "displayed professionalism and compassion under the most trying of circumstances, often staying on the line with anguished callers until the very end."
At 9:47 a.m., one police operator did exactly that, telling another unidentified caller, "Yes, I'm here, I'm not going to go nowhere. ... You know there are people there trying to get you all out right now, all right? You're not by yourself."
The dispatcher then took a telephone number of the caller's family and promised to reach them. Then the call went dead: "And who is this? Hello?"
The first transcripts released as part of the Times lawsuit came last August, when thousands of pages of oral histories of firefighters and emergency workers, as well as radio transmissions, were released. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the trade center and has its own police force, released all its emergency recordings in 2003.
The Sept. 11 commission concluded in 2004 that the operators did not have enough information to allow more people to escape from the twin towers.
"Are they still standing?" one dispatcher asked at 10:15 a.m., 16 minutes after the south tower collapsed. "The World Trade Center is there, right?"
I should've added "editing" and "deleted"
Mods, feel free to pull this one
oops
September 11th is something we should never forget:
The Falling Man (worth the read)
How does a person react when they are forced to face their own mortality? What makes a person do the terrorists' job for them? What makes a person jump?
This should be writing assignment for every high school senior.
Darryl Worley said it well:
Have you forgotten how it felt that day?
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside going thru a living hell
They took all the footage off my T.V.
Said it's too disturbing for you and me
It'll just breed anger that's what the experts say
If it was up to me I'd show it everyday
Never, ever forget.
I really don't understand what purpose the releasing of these tapes serve. Releasing them to the families maybe but to the general public?
Frivilous Lawsuit comes to mind........
What obscene history revisionism.....
Oh aren't we happy that we have a compassionate court. They are only looking out for our well being. So nice of them to think of the people for a change. They must have gone to the school of psychology and learned about peoples' feelings.
Charlie Sheen should be held in solitary confinement and made to listen to these tapes over and over again...
The purpose is so that we will not forget the agony our fellow citizens suffered.
Sweeping this under the rug is playing into the enemy's hands. We must never forget, and we must strike harder at our enemies than we have done so far.
The only thing which fills me will more rage than reading that the tapes have been censored, to the enemy's advantage, is recognizing that our government tried hard not to release the tapes.
I disagree - not ghoulishly so - but I think we should see the towers on a daily basis, I think we should see the beheadings that circulated online that no news on TV would show - that I for one, literally was sick after viewing. We MUST feel the anger of that day - we MUST stay angry and horrified to continue this fight. If it takes the voices of panic and horror to stay true to the fight, then we should hear it.
Those "peaceful believers" who would destroy us all in bloody heartbeat are -counting- on the MSM to suppress -all- the truly horrible, gory details of that day.
Only by doing that can they hope to break this country's resolve and will to exterminate them.
Out of sight; out of mind.
As the days stretch into months and the months into years, agonizing memories fade and lose their power to persuade the will to action.
The will becomes weak; complacency and impatience takes its place.
Then, when the horror of that day is *almost* forgotten, it will be repeated.
The ancient Celts would dip a rag or torn shirt into the blood of their slain kinsmen and when the warriors began to fail under the fatigue of battle, someone would 'raise the bloody flag' before them and remind them of why they were fighting....and it never failed to compel.
That [and all the other photos, videos and tapes] are *our* bloody flag.
It is much easier for us all just to forget that infernal day.
It will be much harder to forget the hell that will surely follow, if we do.
To remind America of the evil we are fighting.
Let me ask you, how many times did the MSM re-broadcast the Rodney King video on the network nightly news?
Now, how many times have you seen the pictures of the people forced to leap to their deaths re-broadcast on NBC, CBS, and ABC?
If Islamic terrorism was something the left cared about, we'd see pictures of those poor bastiches jumping out of the upper windows EVERY DAY of our lives. Play the tapes!
I agree with all the people on here that say we need reminders. If a family member or I died in such a manner, I wouldn't want it to be forgotten. I think it's an insult to the victim. Our (mine included) attention spans are too short. We need the reminders.
I see.
Abu Gharib photos must be released because we all have the right to know according to the ACLU.
But this court
"An appeals court ruled last year that the calls of victims in the burning twin towers were too intense and emotional to be released without their families' consent."
Made up yet another law to keep us ignorant and not remind people of what happaned here. Not a peep from the ACLU.
It almost makes you think that there's been a coup and justice is dead, that the enemy is ruling us but most people are blissfully unaware.
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