911 Operator: 'It's Got To Be Hell'
City 911 operators caught up in the chaos of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks offered calm compassion but little help to callers trapped in the doomed World Trade Center, partial transcripts of several calls released Friday show.
"The Fire Department, EMS, is crawling all over the place," a fire department operator assures a caller who is trapped with more than 100 people the 106th floor. "They're trying to help everybody as much as they can, OK?"
The call came in at 9:10 a.m., seven minutes after the second plane hit. The tower collapsed 49 minutes later.
At 9:09 a.m., an operator, first hearing of the second plane hit, asked a fellow operator: "What are the odds...I can't believe this. It's got to be — it's got to be hell."
The words of the operators — but not the callers — were released after The New York Times and a group of victims' relatives sued to get them. An appeals court ruled last year that families should have the option to release the tapes made by 28 callers who could be identified.
The Times and family members hoped the audiotaped calls would reveal details of what happened inside the towers and whether 911 operators misdirected the victims. The Sept. 11 commission had concluded in 2004 that many operators didn't know enough about the attacks to give the best information to those trapped.
The tapes and transcripts released Friday reflect the chaos amid the attacks that killed 2,749 people.
State Supreme Court Justice Richard F. Braun issued the order Wednesday at the request of The New York Times and reporter Jim Dwyer after hearing arguments that releasing the names of 27 people killed at the trade center and one survivor would not violate privacy interests.Excerpts from the tapes highlight the chaos of 9-11.
Check out WCBS-TV's audio files.
Earlier this week, the full taped calls were made available to nearly 30 individuals' families.
It's been an emotional day for families who have listened to recordings of 911 calls as they tried to learn more about what exactly happened to loved ones who died on Sept. 11.
In New York, one group of family members sat quietly at banks of computers, occasionally whispering to each other or taking notes of the details of what they read and heard.
Al Santora, a retired deputy fire chief whose firefighter son died in the attack, says he's amazed at the professionalism and calmness of some of the dispatchers.
But he says he's also surprised at how little constructive advice they had for the people who were trapped.
Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son also died in the attack, says more people would have survived if better information had been available to rescuers.
One fire department operator mentions problems with the computer crashing. Another exchange between police and fire operators indicates frustration in trying to deal with a once-unimaginable situation.
Even with the callers' words redacted from the tapes, their desperation is evident in the heavy breathing audible as operators respond to their frenzied calls.
"I'm still here," an operator tells one caller trapped on the 105th floor. "The Fire Department is trying to get to you. OK, try to calm down."
A caller from a downtown business "states that on the northwest side (of the trade center), there's a woman hanging from — an unidentified person hanging from the top of the building," a police operator says. "This is at One World Trade Center."
"Alright, we have quite a few calls," responds a fire operator.
"I know," says the police operator. "Jesus Christ."
The transcripts have long blank spaces where the callers' words would have appeared. One call came from the 103rd floor of the building, where a large number of people were trapped.
"He says people are getting sick from the smoke that's coming in," the operator says. "There's a lot of people. He's thinking that they are trapped."
The appeals court ruled that families would have the option to release tapes made by the 28 people who were identified. One of those, involving trade center victim Christopher Hanley, was made public Thursday after his parents released it to the Times.
Hanley's call came in at 8:50 a.m. — four minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
"Yeah. Hi. I'm on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. We just had an explosion on the, on the like 105th floor," the 35-year-old tells a dispatcher.
"We have about 100 people here. We can't get down the stairs," he says.
Later, he says, "We have smoke and — it's pretty bad."
A dispatcher tells him: "Just sit tight. Just sit tight. We're on the way."
"All right," Hanley says. "Please hurry."
Sally Regenhard, who lost her firefighter son and is one of the plaintiffs, said the public should be allowed to hear both sides of the conversation, and that family members should be able to listen to all the voices, in case they recognized their loved ones.
"Only a mother could listen to recordings and maybe hear some glimmer of your child's voice," she said, "even though his name may have been garbled."
Kate Ahlers O'Brien, a spokeswoman for the city Law Department, cited the Court of Appeals ruling that said families' privacy interests outweighed the public's right to know.
"We felt that the calls obviously involved very gut-wrenching, emotional conversations by people, many of whom tragically were killed," she said.
The first transcripts released as part of the 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 of its emergency recordings in 2003.