September 11 families want more 911 tapes released

Ellen Freilich / Reuters | April 1 2006

Nine relatives of people killed in the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center called on New York on Friday to release the full recordings of about 130 telephone calls made to emergency operators from the twin towers that day.

The city released partial recordings of those calls on Friday, but included only the voices of the 911 operators and fire department dispatchers responding to the pleas for help from those trapped inside the towers.

Recordings of the voices of the callers themselves were not released, although some family members allowed reporters to listen to, and record, some of the calls.

At a news conference on Friday, the family members said the 911 recordings comprised an invaluable historical record of what transpired on September 11 and what went wrong.

They said the recordings revealed a broken link in emergency communications, saying callers were passed from one agency to another -- police, fire and ambulance -- and only two of the 130 callers were instructed to leave the buildings.

They repeatedly expressed compassion for the 911 operators whose voices are heard on the tapes.

"The operators desperately tried to manage a situation that they were not trained to manage," said Sally Regenhard, founder of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, whose son Christian was a New York City firefighter who died on September 11.

Fire chiefs and police commanders had ordered that the towers be evacuated minutes after the first plane struck but almost all of the callers were given the standard advice for high-rise fires: to stay put.

The recordings released on Friday differed from the New York City Fire Department tapes released last year, which included 514 oral histories from fire department employees and logs and audio from firefighters and emergency workers, said Norman Siegel, attorney for the family members.

The 911 calls were made public on Friday after a lawsuit filed by The New York Times demanding the release of public records related to the events of September 11. Nine family members of people killed in the attacks joined the case.

In early 2003, the state Supreme Court in Manhattan ruled that the vast majority of the records were public, but that the city could remove the words of the 911 callers to protect their privacy. That ruling was subsequently affirmed by the appellate division and the New York State Court of Appeals.

But a state judge ruled on Wednesday the city must provide the names of people who identified themselves in their calls, along with excerpts that could identify more callers. The city won a stay of that order on Thursday but Siegel said he would return to the appellate court next week to ask the court to lift that stay.

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