911 operators told tower workers to stay put

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.

Before 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.

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., 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," a fire operator said.

"I know," a police operator said. "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: "We aware of it down here. The condition seems to have subsided."

No more than two of the 130 callers to 911 were told to leave the towers, the tapes reveal, even though unequivocal orders to evacuate the entire trade center had been given about 10 minutes after the first plane hit by fire and police commanders on the scene. Indeed, most callers were told to wait, the standard advice in ordinary high-rise fires. The city had no procedure for field commanders to share fresh information with the 911 system.

The result, the tapes show, is that as the unseen callers were passed by telephone from one agency to another, moving through a confederacy of municipal fiefdoms -- police, fire, ambulance -- they almost never received instructions to get out of the buildings. Instead, operators continued to press many callers to stay put.

On the upper floors of the north tower, good advice probably would not have saved anyone: All three of the building's stairways had been destroyed at the 92nd floor. But some callers from below the 92nd floor also were told to wait for help, and in the south tower, where one stairway remained passable, the recordings include references to perhaps a few hundred people huddled in offices, unaware of the order to leave.

"Telling people to stay -- for some reason people think that's the wrong thing to do," fire dispatcher supervisor David Rosenzwieg said Friday. "But the same instructions save 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 just 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?"