Sat, Aug 30, 2003 page6

• Sept. 11 transcripts detail the horror

  TERROR ATTACKS Transcripts of calls made by people trapped in the World Trade Center's twin towers after they were hit by hijacked planes have been released

  • REUTERS
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  Grisly accounts of falling bodies, pleas for help and warnings to flee the World Trade Center fill thousands of heart-wrenching pages of transcripts of Sept. 11 emergency calls that were released on Thursday.

  Many calls are from frantic people trapped in the upper floors of the heavily damaged twin towers, including a woman making repeated calls from the Windows on the World restaurant, reporting fires in the building and elevator shafts and pleading for guidance on what to do.

  

  Reporters pour over transcripts released by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on Thursday. The 2,000-page transcript contains taped emergency calls and radio transmissions made on Sept. 11, 2001, from inside the doomed World Trade Center.

  PHOTO: AP

  "We are on the 88th floor. We're trapped," one woman caller said. "The whole building is going to come down on me. The building is starting ... coming down [inaudible] ..."

  A caller identified as "Rocko" said he was on the 105th floor of the north tower.

  "Don't let no people up here," he urged police. "There's big smoke!"

  Most of the 2,792 people who died on Sept. 11, 2001, were trapped in the 110-story towers above the level where the two hijacked planes struck. The first jet slammed into the north tower at the 94th and higher floors; the second jet hit the 78th and higher floors of the south tower.

  Myriad calls described people jumping in terror.

  "There's body parts all over the place. So much ... bodies blew out of the building. There's got to be hundreds of people killed here. There's body parts like five blocks away," said one caller.

  Another caller said, "I've got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building ... bodies are just coming from out of the sky."

  One body got caught in a wind current and sailed one or two blocks away, a police detective wrote in a report, while another said he could see some people jumping in pairs holding hands.

  "We had to time our run into the tower in order to avoid being hit by human bodies that were coming down and exploding on impact with the ground," he wrote. "Within seconds, I approximated some 13 suicides."

  The sounds of bodies hitting the ground were so loud that one police officer said he thought they were exploding bombs.

  A judge ordered the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site, to release the roughly 2,000 pages of transcripts and reports after a lawsuit was filed by The New York Times.

  Law enforcement officers from all around the New York area called in, including many off-duty or out sick, volunteering to come and work at the trade center. Others voiced frustration that radios and phones were not working.

  One officer recalled in a memo how he could not see the Trade Center and was told by a colleague it was surrounded by smoke.

  "No," he said. "You don't understand. It's gone. It's not there at all."

  As well as the harrowing and desperate calls from terrified people within the buildings, the transcripts also detailed the emotions felt by thwarted rescue workers.

  "We noticed that people had begun jumping from the towers. Several of these people were on fire ... a wave of shame came over us because we couldn't help them," Detective R.P. Mendenhall wrote.

  Another Port Authority officer, Timothy Norris, wrote that he was outside Tower Two when he "felt extreme vibration and an incredible noise like a thousand freight trains."

  "I knew instantly that the Tower was falling down," he wrote. "I said prayers that I would be spared."

  The scene "resembled the biblical description of hell," one police sergeant said.

  The transcripts recorded calls to nearly 100 Port Authority police and civilian radio channels made by authority staff at the scene, and calls made to Port Authority police stations.

  The Port Authority, which oversaw the trade center's operations, had its headquarters there and lost 37 of its officers in the attacks.
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