http://www.hollandsentinel.com/stories/060402/new_060402066.shtmlNEW YORK — A man on the 92nd floor called the police with what was - though he did not know it - the question of his life.
"We need to know if we need to get out of here, because we know there's an explosion," said the caller, who was in the south tower of the World Trade Center. It was Sept. 11, 2001. A jet had just crashed into the Trade Center's north tower. "Should we stay or should we not?"
The officer on the line asked whether there was smoke on the floor. Told no, he replied: "I would wait 'til further notice."
"All right," the caller said. "Don't evacuate." He then hung up.
Almost all the roughly 600 people in the top floors of the south tower died after a second hijacked airliner crashed into the 80th floor shortly after 9 a.m. The failure to evacuate the building was one of the day's great tragedies.
The exchange between the office worker and the policeman was one of many revealed Thursday when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned and patrolled the office complex, released transcripts of 260 hours of radio transmissions and telephone calls on 9/11.
The transcript of nearly 2,000 pages includes the words of dozens of victims. Some identified themselves by name. The release comes two weeks before the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Almost 2,800 people died at the Trade Center. The Port Authority lost 47 civilian workers and 37 police officers. Its loss of uniformed personnel was second only to the 343 New York City firefighters.
In addition to explaining why people might not have immediately fled the upper floors of the south tower, the transcript helps explain the largest pocket of death below the floors where the hijacked jets crashed: 14 Port Authority workers who had plenty of time to leave, but did not.
Sixteen co-workers waited 80 minutes before leaving their 64th-floor office in the north tower. During that time, about 7,000 people safely fled the first 91 floors of the building. The tower collapsed 102 minutes after impact.
'Wait for the police'
The transcript shows that Patrick Hoey, 53, a Port Authority executive from Middletown, N.J., called police and was told not to leave.
Hoey: "I'm on the 64th floor. ... I've got about 20 people here with me."
Sergeant: "OK."
Hoey: "What do you suggest? (Loud commotion.) Staying tight?"
Sergeant: "Stand tight. Is there a fire right there where you are?"
Hoey: "No, there's a little bit of smoke on the floor."
Sergeant: "So be careful. Stay near the stairwells and wait for the police to come up."
Hoey: "They will come up, huh? OK. They will check each floor? If you would just report that we're up here."
Sergeant: "I got you."
The 16 workers waited, making phone calls to loved ones. Later, the same sergeant got a call from another officer who said people on the 64th floor were trying to find out what to do. "I think they should hit the stairwells and get the heck out of there," the sergeant said.
It's not clear how far apart the two calls were, or whether the instruction to leave ever made it to the 64th floor.
The 16 workers left at 10:08 a.m. on their own initiative, one of them, Pasquale Buzzelli, later told USA TODAY. They did not know the other tower had collapsed. They were in a stairwell between the 13th and 22nd floors when their building collapsed at 10:28 a.m.
Two of the 16 were pulled from the rubble alive. The other 14 died, including Hoey. He left a wife and four children.
Police received four increasingly desperate requests for help from Christine Olender, a manager at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the north tower.
"We're getting no direction up here," she told the desk officer in her first call. Smoke on the 107th floor had driven everyone to the floor below. And all three escape stairwells were smoky, she said.
During her second call, told that the building was being evacuated and that help was on its way, she said, "But we need to find a safe haven, where the smoke condition isn't bad." By her fourth call, Olender was reporting that the smoke was "rapidly getting worse. ... The fresh air is going down fast! I'm not exaggerating!"
"We are sending the fire department up as soon as possible," Port Authority officer Ray Murray told her. In fact, the jet crash had cut the upper floors off from the rest of the building.
"What are we going to do for air?" she asked. "Can we break a window?"
"You can do whatever you have to to get to the air," Murray replied.
As maintenance and electrical workers talked to each other on their dedicated radio channel, one man trapped in a stairwell on the 103rd floor of the north tower called repeatedly for help.
"Open the stairway door," he called. The radio picked up his labored breathing, and he reported smoke rising. "People stuck in the stairway, open up the goddamn doors." Later he burst out, "WHERE'S THE F------ SPRINKLER SYSTEM?"
Then, his last transmission: "Heat increasing ... need immediate purge" - a reference to the smoke that had filled the stairwell.
On the street below, disbelieving callers reported people plunging to their deaths.
"Yo, I've got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building ... in front of 1 World Trade," a male caller said.
"Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?" said the woman who answered the call.
"People," he said. "Bodies are just coming from out of the sky."
At least two wives called to inquire about their husbands. They were unaware that they already were widows. One was Christy Ferer, looking for Neil Levin, executive director of the Port Authority.
Another was Jeannine McIntyre, wife of police officer Donald McIntyre. She saw the first tower fall and immediately called one of his co-workers. "Is my husband in that building that just collapsed?"
Assured that there were no reports of injured Port Authority police, she was unmollified. Her husband had told her what he was doing. "He was going up," she said. "He was going up ... " And she had seen the building collapse.
'Another plane hit!'
The transcripts capture vivid eyewitness accounts, such as a Port Authority officer describing something that "looks like a missile coming out of the wall of the ... second building."
"Just hit the building," another man said over a police channel. "Another plane hit! Another plane just hit the building! Move everyone from Liberty Street!"
The transcripts described an almost biblical array of plagues: flooding in the underground shopping area, smoke on the 22nd floor, people fainting on 44, an elevator stuck near 78, dust and debris everywhere. Indeed, one officer said in his report that God told him to dive between two parked cars to escape debris when the south tower collapsed.
There were wild rumors passed around about missiles fired from the nearby Woolworth Building and a third suicide flight.
One Port Authority policeman identified only as "Tommy" did what many do in a crisis: He called his mother. Their conversation reflected the worry that morning that even worse horrors were about to occur.
After apparently sneaking into a conference room to make the call, Tommy assured his mother he was OK, then warned: "Just stay in. Don't do nothing. This is bad. They got planes all over the radar coming into New York area. They think everything is going to start hitting."
The transcript reveals an argument at the base of the north tower between Port Authority Officer Michael Simons and New York City firefighters over what to do next.
The firefighters wanted to continue upstairs. Civilians, apparently anxious to help, wanted to follow. But Simons said he told them all to leave the building.
"Port Authority, don't argue with me," a firefighter told him. "This is a fire department gig. We're taking over."
Similarly, the Port Authority police had high hopes that the day could be saved. Outside the north tower, an unidentified officer tried to bring order out of chaos. "We are going to move out as one operation!" he said over his radio. "No individual actions! We've got people in there. We are going to get them. I want everybody over here. We are going to do this right."
Different authorities appeared to give different evacuation orders. Shortly after the first jet struck the north tower, the Port Authority's fire command desk in that building got a call from the agency's fire command station in the south tower to discuss evacuation. The caller from the south tower said, "I'm not going to do anything until we get orders from the fire department or somebody."
"OK," replied the north tower fire command.
"OK?" the south tower caller asked. "Because we don't know what it is here."
Although many people described being told to stay put in the south tower after the first crash, one Port Authority sergeant called for evacuating both towers at 8:59 - three minutes before the second airliner hit.
Everywhere, there was the fog of battle. A Port Authority police captain was on the 13th floor of the north tower. After trying to escape and being forced back upstairs by a cloud of smoke, he checked a news Web site on his computer and found a jet had crashed into the building.
"We now believed that the clear liquid that was streaming outside of our windows was not water," he later wrote, "but jet fuel."
Releasing the transcripts
The transcripts were released under an agreement between The New York Times and the Port Authority. The Port Authority is a bi-state public agency that operates bridges, vehicle tunnels and a subway line between New York City and New Jersey, plus the midtown bus terminal and Newark, LaGuardia and Kennedy airports.
Last year, the Times went to court to obtain access to the tapes. The Port Authority agreed to release transcripts on the condition that the newspaper drop its demand for copies of the tapes. The Port Authority later argued that a review of the transcripts indicated their release would violate the privacy of victims' families.
But a New Jersey judge ordered Friday that the transcripts be released. The Port Authority urged the news media to use restraint in reporting details.
Some victims' relatives said they favored releasing the transcripts to shed more light on what went wrong on 9/11. Others said the release opened old wounds.
"People are looking for the horror stories. Not the good things," said Laurie Tietjen, whose brother Ken Tietjen died in the attacks. "A lot of the information there is pretty personal."
Several dozen relatives accepted an offer to read the transcripts before their release, according to the Port Authority. Theresa Riccardelli, whose husband, Francis, died in the attack, declined: "I know the final outcome. My husband didn't get to come home."
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