NEW YORK (AP) _ Nearly nine hours of emergency calls, some made from inside the doomed World Trade Center, were released by the city Friday, detailing the responses of 911 operators to frantic callers caught in the chaos of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack.
"You saw an explosion at the twin towers?" asks an operator receiving the first call on Fire Department transcripts. The time was 8:47 a.m., one minute after the first plane hit.
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, even with the callers comments edited out, would reveal details of what happened inside the towers and whether 911 operators misdirected the victims. The Sept. 11 commission concluded in 2004 that many operators didn't know enough about the attacks to give the best information to those trapped.
The transcripts reflect the chaos amid the attacks that killed 2,749 people.
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.
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.
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