Grisly accounts of falling bodies, pleas for help and warnings to flee the World Trade Center fill thousands of pages of transcripts of September 11th emergency calls that were released last night.
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
.
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.
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"We are on the 88th floor. We're trapped," one woman caller said. "The whole building is going to coming 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 September 11th, 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.
Other calls described people jumping in terror. "There's body parts all over the place. So much . . . bodies blew out of the building," 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 fell 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."
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."
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.