Posted on 08/30/2003 11:35:32 PM PDT by IsraelBeach
9-11 transcripts illustrate bravery, fatal mistakes By JOEL LEYDEN
Digging crews worked constantly for months after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. (Photo: Joel Leyden)
For some it was reliving a nightmare, for others closure, but for most the release of the September 11 transcripts provided glimpses of bravery and fatal mistakes.
The transcripts were created from tapes of Port Authority emergency calls and radio transmissions that day and released Thursday after The New York Times won a court order for their release. The documents illustrate the utter disorientation, shock, disbelief and human courage produced by the worst terrorist attack in US history.
The Port Authority has its own police and its station was located deep below the World Trade Center adjacent to a large, dark parking lot. The tapes, which survived intense heat and flooding, were recovered a few weeks after the disaster.
One Port Authority officer left the control room and made a telephone call to his mother from a nearby conference room. He presented a grim picture.
"Don't even go out," he told her. "I mean, they got planes on the radar. They think they are going to start crashing all over Manhattan."
Another officer told his wife, "It looks like we're going to be at war. They're attacking all over the country."
That morning, most New Yorkers thought at first that a small aircraft had crashed into one of the towers, which would have been no great surprise as there was always an abundance of commercial and tourist air traffic between the towers and the Statue of Liberty.
But the Port Authority police had a better, clearer picture as to what was happening, or so they thought. Already reeling from the twin attacks, the authorities were soon hit with another threat.
"We have a report over the radio from New York City that there is a third plane on the way," said Port Authority police Officer Tommy Cashin, speaking to the PA police in Newark.
"Yeah, we heard that too," said a sergeant answering the call. "Military is aware of that, they're the ones that told us."
The tapes illustrated that there were many rumors that morning, such as missiles fired from the roof of the nearby Woolworth Building and a bomb set to destroy the George Washington Bridge. But it was the acts of human courage which surfaced above all else from the tapes.
The New York Times reconstructed the actions of architect Frank De Martini and inspector Pablo Ortiz. Shortly after the hijacked airplane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, the two men grabbed crowbars, flashlights and two-way radios for rescue efforts. They quickly found an exit on the 88th and 89th floors for the few dozen people in their office.
But they didn't leave with them. Instead, they walked up into the burning tower and used a crowbar to free two dozen more people trapped behind some steel doors. At least 50 people stuck on the 88th and 89th floors of the north tower were able to walk out of the building because De Martini, Ortiz and others tore away rubble, broke down doors and answered calls for help.
De Martini's wife was one of the people he helped save. She said he couldn't leave anyone behind - and did what he had to do. The men continued to walk upwards to the 91th floor, ignoring the extreme heat and dense smoke. It's not clear what happened to them after that; everyone above the 91st floor died.
The transcripts are forcing victims' families to decide how much they want to know about the horrors of that day. The 2,000 pages show word-for-word emergency phone calls from inside and around the building in the minutes before the World Trade Center collapsed. People called for help, reported bodies falling and asked whether they should evacuate.
On the 78th floor of the World Trade Center, Anthony Savas waited for help in a stranded elevator.
Fifty-six stories below, a woman used wet tissues to keep out the smoke as Gene Raggio climbed to her aid. And outside the doomed twin towers, Ed Strauss waited for two co-workers.
Savas, Raggio and Strauss were three of the 47 civilian Port Authority employees killed.
"Listen, this is Tony Savas," the Port Authority construction inspector said. "I'm on the 78th floor. I'm trapped in the elevator. Water and debris is coming down. ... Please send somebody to open the doors."
It is believed that one of De Martini's last actions was rescuing his friend Savas, whose body was later found in a crushed stairwell.
The transcripts also detailed the frenzy of phone calls that followed the terrorist attack on the trade center: Trapped workers begging for an escape route from its 106th-floor restaurant. Anguished wives desperately seeking lost husbands. Screams and sirens echoing in the background as bodies dropped from the sky.
Many callers were inaudible, yet the horror and hysteria of the September morning jumps off the typed pages.
"Yo, I've got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto ... in front of 1 World Trade," said a male caller. "People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky ... up top of the building."
"Bodies?" replied a female operator.
Raggio, 55, an operations supervisor at the trade center, responded to a call for help from a woman trapped when doors on the 22nd floor would not open.
"How are you doing up there?" he asked.
A woman responded that they had used wet tissues to keep the smoke out, but they couldn't escape.
"OK," said Raggio. "We are working our way up to 22."
Strauss, 44, of Edison, N.J., called for help from co-workers.
"Can you send me a couple people?" he asked. Strauss said he would meet them on "Church Street, kinda, right by the steps here." He was not heard from again.
A spokesman for the Port Authority praised the efforts of its workers under an extraordinary strain compounded by confusion and miscommunication. The transcripts "show people performing their duties very heroically and very professionally on a day of horror," Port Authority spokesman Greg Trevor said.
But disastrous decisions were made, such as as setting up a command center in the doomed north tower.
People were stranded throughout the buildings, with calls for help pouring in from the 78th floor, the 88th, the 103rd, the 107th. One male caller from the 92nd floor of the second tower asked a Port Authority police officer, "Should we stay or should we not?"
"I would wait 'til further notice," the officer replied.
A similar call with the same police response came in shortly after. No one in the top floors of the tower survived after the second plane hit around the 80th floor shortly after 9am.
The evacuation of 2 World Trade Center, the second tower hit, became a source of anguish to the victims' families. Some survivors said they were advised to remain in the building.
At least two wives, unaware that they were to be widows, tried to learn their husbands' whereabouts. Neither Port Authority Officer Donald McIntyre nor his boss, Executive Director Neil Levin, ever made it home.
For some, there was the sweet relief of breathing in the temporarily fresh air.
"I'm alive, Dennis," said one man who was not identified. "I'm outside the building and I'm healthy."
The transcripts illustrate the contradictory information within the Port Authority itself in initial moments, with one conversation reflecting an early discussion of evacuating people from the two buildings after the first plane hit. In all, an estimated 25,000 people successfully evacuated the towers.
Police received four increasingly desperate requests for help from Christine Olender, a manager at Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant at the top of the north tower.
"We're getting no direction up here," she told the desk officer in her first call. Smoke on the 107th floor had driven everyone to the floor below. And all three escape stairwells were smoky, she said.
During her second call, told that the building was being evacuated and that help was on its way, she said, "But we need to find a safe haven, where the smoke condition isn't bad." By her fourth call, Olender was reporting that the smoke was "rapidly getting worse. ... The fresh air is going down fast! I'm not exaggerating!"
"We are sending the fire department up as soon as possible," Port Authority officer Ray Murray told her. In fact, the jet crash had cut off the upper floors from the rest of the building.
"What are we going to do for air?" she asked. "Can we break a window?"
"You can do whatever you have to to get to the air," Murray replied.
A man on the 92nd floor called the police with what a question of life or death.
"We need to know if we need to get out of here, because we know there's an explosion," he said, calling from the south tower. "Should we stay or should we not?"
The officer on the line asked whether there was smoke on the floor. Told no, he replied: "I would wait 'til further notice."
"All right," the caller said. "Don't evacuate." He then hung up.
Almost all the roughly 600 people in the top floors of the south tower died after a second hijacked airliner crashed into the 80th floor shortly after 9am. The failure to evacuate the building was one of the day's great tragedies.
The transcript reveals an argument at the base of the north tower between Port Authority Officer Michael Simons and New York City firefighters over what to do next.
The firefighters wanted to continue upstairs. Civilians, apparently anxious to help, wanted to follow. But Simons said he told them all to leave the building.
"Port Authority, don't argue with me," a firefighter told him. "This is a fire department gig. We're taking over."
The Port Authority police had high hopes that the day could be saved. Outside the north tower, an unidentified officer tried to bring order out of chaos. "We are going to move out as one operation!" he said over his radio. "No individual actions! We've got people in there. We are going to get them. I want everybody over here. We are going to do this right."
Different authorities appeared to give different evacuation orders. Shortly after the first jet struck the north tower, the Port Authority's fire command desk in that building got a call from the agency's fire command station in the south tower to discuss evacuation. The caller from the south tower said, "I'm not going to do anything until we get orders from the fire department or somebody."
"OK," replied the north tower fire command.
"OK?" the south tower caller asked. "Because we don't know what it is here."
Although many people described being told to stay put in the south tower after the first crash, one Port Authority sergeant called for evacuating both towers at 8:59am three minutes before the second airliner hit.
Everywhere, there was the fog of battle. A Port Authority police captain on the 13th floor of the north tower checked a news Web site on his computer after trying to escape and being forced back upstairs by a cloud of smoke, and discovered a jet had crashed into the building.
"We now believed that the clear liquid that was streaming outside of our windows was not water," he later wrote, "but jet fuel."
Victims' families seem divided on the transcripts, with some saying they provide valuable insight and others that they merely add to the grief.
One woman whose husband was killed in the attacks said it's not that she doesn't have an interest in reading the transcripts, it's just that she can't bring herself to do so.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
After September 11: Images from Ground Zero
Israel Memorial and Condolence Site With The Associated Press
She thought she lost her.
She escaped.
In relating the tale to me she told me that her sister was advised to stay and not evacuate. She said "screw that" and took the last crowded elevator out. It was the last elevator to go to the ground floor before the planes hit.
The confused advise (some sources urged evacuation while others urged people to stay) was a tragic for the victims of Tower 2.
Their time was up and God has his own plan !
I decided to leave when I felt my office building tremble. I was trying to reach loved ones who worked near the scene to warn them. So I did not see the towers fall but I felt them. I knew then they fell without seeing.
The smell was not something to forget. The wind redirected it a day later all over the city. Office papers from the towers were everywhere.
One final note. I am not into the supernatural but on the one year anniversary of the 9/11, New York had this strange weather-violent wind the kicked you around (falling debris from buildings killed a couple of people too). It was as if angry spirits flew at you, and office origin papers--tons of flying office origin papers everywhere (piles of paper on the street too), like was seen that day. That paper debris was not there one day before the anniversary date (remember the ceremony?) nor did I observe them after.
I keep telling myself it was the wind that kicked up all that debris from somewhere.
They can talk about people making mistakes, but if you ask me, a lot of people made some pretty good choices that day.
I will never forget them. May the greatest of God's blessings and most profound peace be upon them all.
This is not something I will ever "get over".
We pray that we NEVER forget the continued sacrifices of our men and women in uniform who fight to keep such an evil act from being visited upon anyone, anywhere.
The anger I feel at those who attack this President for trying to save the world from such evil is at times overwhelming.
AQ and other Muslim terrorists have yet to feel the full wrath of the USA. But they will.
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