[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Sign-in] [Mail] [Setup] [Help]
Status: Not Logged In; Sign In
|
9/11 See other 9/11 Articles Title: More 9/11 Emergency Calls to Be Released Delayed by what the fire commissioner says was “poor management,” the city plans to release a new avalanche of documentary records from Sept. 11, including more than 1,600 phone calls made to emergency services that morning. While most of these are calls made by people outside the buildings or watching television, officials say about 31 were from people who were part of the morning’s narrative of struggle and loss: 21 firefighters who died and 10 civilians who were also in the World Trade Center towers. Often a few seconds long, the calls offer only the barest hints of the dramas that would follow. One caller was Capt. Fred Ill of Ladder Company 2 on 51st Street. As the first alarms of the attacks were being sounded, Captain Ill contacted the fire dispatcher to mention that his company had trained for high-rise firefighting in helicopters flown by pilots from the Police Department. But no firefighters flew on police helicopters that morning — the fire chief who was assigned to organize a rendezvous between the two agencies said he could not reach the Police Department — so Captain Ill and his company were sent into the north tower. Fire commanders on the ground, 1,000 feet below the fire, were hampered by their lack of perspective, investigators concluded. After the south tower collapsed, police pilots in helicopters broadcast urgent warnings that the north tower was also on the verge of collapse. That dire message was not heard by firefighters in the north tower, most of whom did not realize that the other building had come down. In the final minutes, Captain Ill was seen trying to round up his company in the lower floors of the north tower. He and his men died. In late March, the city released 130 phone calls to 911 from people inside the towers. The New York Times and families of Sept. 11 victims had sued the city for those and other records under the Freedom of Information Act, and the New York State Court of Appeals ordered their release with some portions removed. In responding to the court order, the Fire Department relied on a collection of calls that were drawn from more than 300 hours of tape recordings and assembled in 2001, Fire Commissioner Nicholas A. Scoppetta said. These, however, did not include all the calls made to the emergency services that morning, he added, a fact he learned only after the release of the first 130 phone calls in March. “I don’t think there’s anything venal here,” Mr. Scoppetta said. “It was badly managed.” The official who had overseen the initial compilation was taken off the job. Mr. Scoppetta said he then had all 300 hours reviewed two more times by a separate team, which included lawyers and members of the Fire Department. The city’s Law Department conducted a third, separate review, he said. The recordings that will be released today were edited to remove the voices of civilians calling the 911 system, as the court ordered on privacy grounds. As a result, those calls will only contain the operators’ responses. Calls made by government employees — including firefighters — will contain both sides of the conversation. There is one exception: a call made by Melissa Doi, who was trapped in the south tower. It will include four minutes of her voice because it was introduced as evidence during the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. In the call, Ms. Doi tells the operator she believes she is dying, and asks the operator to call her mother. Although the call lasted some 24 minutes, only 4 minutes were put into evidence; the remaining 20 that will be released today contain the 911 operator’s voice as she tries to console Ms. Doi, who apparently died while on the phone.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: robin (#0)
The system is going to fight to the last - to keep the world from learning of this new Nazism.
|
||
|
[Home]
[Headlines]
[Latest Articles]
[Latest Comments]
[Post]
[Sign-in]
[Mail]
[Setup]
[Help]
|
||