NYC Mayor Giuliani asks for 6,000 body bags

NEW YORK -- The grim task of calculating a death toll from the attacks on New York and Washington was being done in reverse. First, officials were trying to find out who survived.

With too many people missing for an accurate count to begin in New York, authorities began a frantic search for the names of confirmed survivors so they could begin to guess the number of dead in the World Trade Center.

"The best estimate we can make is that there will be a few thousand left in each building," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Wednesday.

Asked about a report that the city had requested 6,000 body bags from federal officials, he replied, "Yes, I believe that's correct."

Because of the difficulty of digging through the rubble, only 82 fatalities had been confirmed as of Wednesday. Airline officials said another 157 people were on the two planes that smashed into the towers.

The mayor said 202 firefighters and 57 police officers, as well as the World Trade Center's head of security, were among the missing.

In Tuesday's other terror attacks, there were 45 people aboard a plane that was hijacked and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania

At the Pentagon, the military services said about 150 people -- mostly Army soldiers -- were unaccounted for, along with 64 passengers and crew from the plane that crashed into the building.

Operators at the New York mayor's hot line were compiling the names of the missing and providing relatives with information about patients at city hospitals.

Two Web sites listed thousands of names of people who worked or lived near the disaster.

"If you have survived the World Trade Center attack or know someone who has, please add their name to our list," said a message on http://www.ny.com. It asked users to note the survivors' conditions.

A similar Web site also was established by Battery Park City, a residential complex near the World Trade Center.

State officials, too, were counting. Nearly 200 state government workers and an unknown number of private-sector employees couldn't be located, Gov. George Pataki said Wednesday.

About 300 state workers and more than 3,000 employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worked in the towers.

Also missing were some of the 900 people employed by the state Attorney General's Office in a building near the World Trade Center.

There was some good news from the towers' largest tenant, the Morgan Stanley firm, which employed 3,500 people on 20 floors in both towers.

"It certainly looks like the vast majority of our people got out, and we are fortunate," said Ira Miller, Morgan Stanley's branch manager in Rochester, N.Y.

Hope dwindles, 11,000 body bags arriving

By Larry McShane, Associated Press, 09/13/01

NEW YORK -- They battled crumbling buildings, choking smoke and the most unforgiving enemy of all -- time. As rescuers hunted early Thursday for survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center, city officials ordered 11,000 body bags and braced for the worst.

For a second straight night in lower Manhattan, workers using bulldozers and shovels dug in the glare of spotlights while desperately hunting for anyone still alive in the wake of the nation's worst terrorist attack. Throughout Thursday morning, a convoy of dump trucks carted away loads of rubble.

A day earlier, workers pulled five people from the rubble -- three of them police officers. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, at a news conference, indicated that hopes of additional success were dwindling: The city already had requested 6,000 body bags from the federal government; 5,000 more were expected Thursday, The New York Times reported.

"We're going to be doing this for a very long time," Giuliani said.

Workers had recovered 82 bodies by Wednesday night, despite delays caused by the collapse of the last standing section of the south tower.

The crumbling four-story fragment, combined with a smaller collapse at neighboring 5 World Trade Center, hampered rescue efforts by spewing a thick cloud of acrid, white smoke through lower Manhattan. No injuries were linked to the collapses.

"This is a very dangerous rescue effort," Giuliani said. "The volunteers are literally putting their lives at risk."

As parts of the rubble continued to burn Thursday, the smell of fire wafted more than 75 blocks uptown, causing some panicked Manhattan residents to call police.

More than 3,000 tons of rubble were taken by boat to a former Staten Island garbage dump, where the FBI and other investigators were searching for evidence.

Specifically, the mayor said, they were hunting for the black boxes from the hijacked planes that crashed into the Trade Center for clues about what happened in the terrifying final minutes.

Workers at the crash site, including men in National Transportation Safety Board shirts, began recovering parts of the two planes that were turned into weapons of mass destruction.

Federal authorities have identified more than a dozen hijackers of Middle Eastern descent in Tuesday's blasts and gathered evidence linking them to Osama bin Laden and other terrorist networks, law enforcement officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press. In all, perhaps 50 people were involved in the plot, government officials said.

Wall Street and the rest of the nation's financial center remained closed for a third day Thursday, with hopes they may reopen Friday.

Joe Allbaugh, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, announced after touring ground zero that he was "stunned by the devastation." The Bush administration official arrived with a promise that the president had promised a "blank check" to rebuild the city.

All of Manhattan below 14th Street remained off-limits to everyone but emergency workers.

Volunteers emerged from the search and rescue mission with grisly tales that bode of horrors to come as they cleared away the twisted steel and glass wreckage that was once the twin towers.

Guiseppe Sergi, working near one of the collapsed towers, watched silently as a body wrapped in an American flag was carried from the wreckage Wednesday.

After seeing the visceral reaction of the neighboring firefighters and police officers, "I'm sure it was a colleague," Sergi said.

Parish Kelley, a firefighter from Ashburnham, Mass., spent the whole day working in a crater created by the towers' collapse. As he picked through the rubble, Kelley watched a man's body -- a cell phone still clutched in his hand -- being carried out.

Workers also hung an American flag from a piece of a transmission tower that apparently survived its plunge from the top of the Trade Center.

"Everybody stopped and saluted," Kelley said of the impromptu flag-raising. "It was pretty awesome."

Among those who survived the attack, there was an attitude of defiance. Marlene Cruz sported a neck brace, a leg cast and an unbroken will.

"I wouldn't let a terrorist stop me," she said at Bellevue Hospital. "If the building were still there, I would go back."

Among those still missing family members, there were unanswered questions and disappearing hopes. A family grief center set up in a Manhattan armory drew 2,500 family members on Wednesday, Gov. George Pataki said.

Thousands more were expected as the search and rescue mission continued.

Among the missing: at least 202 firefighters, possibly as many as 350; 154 workers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the Trade Center complex; 57 New York Police Department and Port Authority police officers and 38 members of a Manhattan management company.

Also lost was John O'Neill, head of security for the World Trade Center and a former FBI expert on terrorism.

O'Neill headed the investigations into the bombings of the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

An assortment of New York elected officials, including U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, turned up in the city for a briefing on the terrorist disaster.

"When I flew over the site today, I felt sick to my stomach," Schumer said. "The two beautiful tall symbols have gone up in a big pile of acrid smoke."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.