US: Details have been released of phone calls to police from the World Trade Centre as events unfolded on September 11th, 2001, report JoelAchenbach and Brooke Masters
"World Trade Centre ... repeat, we have something ... going into the top of the World Trade Centre!"
"The World Trade Centre, it just blew up."
"Get outside! Get the hell outside!"
"They're jumping out of Building One on the south side."
These are the voices, raw, unfiltered, of police officers and civilians at the World Trade Centre on the final morning of its existence.
Under a court order, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on Thursday released roughly 1,800 pages of transcripts, covering about 260 hours of recorded telephone calls and radio transmissions made in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
The new transcripts, based on reel-to-reel tapes recovered from the wreckage, provide a vivid, chaotic, real-time narrative of what happened that morning.
Confusion is epidemic. There are repeated rumours of rockets fired from the Woolworth Building. Someone claims terrorists with explosives are fleeing through New Jersey in a Ford van with New York tags. In the initial moments, almost everyone struggles to comprehend the dimensions of the catastrophe.
Male: "Yo, I've got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto ... in front of One World Trade."
Female: "Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?"
Male: "People. Bodies are just coming from out of the sky ... up top of the building."
A young man answering the phone at a police desk near the ground floor is nonchalant about an aircraft hitting the building. "It will affect new paperwork ... Only the paperwork," he says. A woman asks him, "It's a big plane or a little plane?"
"Gotta be small," he says.
Seconds later, the second plane hits and, with the shock wave passing through the structure, he changes his tune: "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa - that didn't feel good." The transcripts reveal countless people rushing into action to save lives and comfort others.
"No individual actions! We've got people in there. We are going to go get them. I want everybody over here. We are going to do this right!" a Port Authority police officer says as he prepares a rescue mission.
Some who died also managed to send e-mails and leave messages on answering machines. Brief transcripts of police and Fire Department transmissions also have been made public. Yet many family members say they still don't know exactly what happened to their loved ones, some of whom vanished after making fleeting farewell phone calls.
The transcripts won't solve most of those remaining mysteries, but they do present a sizable and often harrowing addition to the historical record. The new material is largely from police radio transmissions and civilian phone calls. The calls were not to 911, but to Port Authority police lines at several locations in New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority has its own police force, and lost 37 officers, which the agency says was the worst single-day loss of any police force in US history.
"It shows people performing their duties very professionally and very heroically on a day of unimaginable horror," said Mr Greg Trevor, a Port Authority spokesman and survivor of the attack. The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Not for another 16 minutes would the second plane slam into the South Tower. But in some cases, people in the South Tower were told to remain in place rather than evacuate.
The documents had been sought in a lawsuit filed by the New York Times, and a New Jersey judge ordered the agency to release the transcripts. The Port Authority chose not to appeal the ruling, but pleaded with the media to withhold gruesome and gratuitous details "that do nothing to further this discussion".
The Port Authority contacted family members of some victims so they could review the sensitive material before it was made public.
"As a family member, you can't imagine the horror of finding your loved one's last words," said Mr Carie Lemack, whose mother, Ms Judy Larocque, was on American Airlines Flight 11 and was killed when it hit the North Tower. "What is the reason for releasing these tapes? If it's safety, that's fantastic. But if it's entertainment, then we're very concerned."
Ms Liz Alderman's son, Peter, had been attending a conference at Windows on the World atop the North Tower.She is glad the transcripts are public. "Every time we can put a human face on this it no longer is just a mass murder."