Scores Of 9/11 - 911 Tapes Were Held Back By City Despite Court Orders

Scores of 911 Tapes Were Held Back by City Despite Court Orders

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/ny...HNHGVq0ly1Y+eA

By JIM DWYER
Published: April 14, 2006

Despite subpoenas and unequivocal court orders, the city did not turn over scores of 911 tapes to federal investigators looking into the Sept. 11 attacks, and also did not make them public under the state's Freedom of Information Law, officials revealed yesterday.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said the recordings were mistakenly not included among the 130 made public on March 31, even though their release had been the subject of four years of litigation. Mr. Scoppetta said lower-level officials might not have recognized their obligations in deciding which tapes to release.

A new review of the 911 tapes has found many additional calls from off-duty firefighters to fire dispatchers asking where they should report, but Mr. Scoppetta said some of the undisclosed calls might also be from civilians and firefighters at the World Trade Center.

He said it was too early to say precisely how many people had called, but he acknowledged the emotional power of such tapes to family members who may not have had a chance to speak with a loved one, or indeed, any remains to bury.

"In some cases, there's sufficient information so you can know where the person was and what they were doing, and I think that's still of enormous interest to the families," Mr. Scoppetta said.

Another city official who has been briefed on the process said "scores and scores" of new recordings had been located. The official asked not to be identified because the review has not been finished.

The hunt for additional recordings began two weeks ago, after the city, under court order, released partial recordings of calls to 911 from inside the twin towers. One call was from a chief who was transferred between two dispatchers. Only the first part of his call was released, and Mr. Scoppetta said that when he asked aides to locate the chief's conversation with the second dispatcher, they found eight other calls.

Mr. Scoppetta said he then ordered lawyers and firefighters to begin listening to about 250 hours of 911 tapes to locate any other undisclosed recordings, a process that will take at least 10 more days. Any undisclosed recordings will then be turned over to the Law Department, which will erase portions of them before publicly releasing them, as provided under court order.

Asked why not all the recordings had been identified when the tapes were initially prepared for release, Mr. Scoppetta said the people in the communications division at the Fire Department had apparently made mistaken judgments about which calls would be relevant.

Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the city has resisted disclosing vast quantities of records regarding Sept. 11 to the public or even to federal investigators, citing privacy concerns. In approving a rare subpoena, the 9/11 Commission said Mr. Bloomberg's refusal to cooperate "significantly impeded" its inquiry. Later, the city reached an agreement to make available a limited number of the calls.

The city had similar conflicts with investigators from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which also sought access to the 911 calls for a technical investigation of the collapse of the towers and the emergency response. The investigators were provided with only 107 calls, according to Michael E. Newman, a spokesman for the agency.

"This is the first we heard of them," Mr. Newman said of the missing recordings. "We'll be very interested in learning more about these tapes."

The tapes were among records sought in January 2002 under the state's public records laws by The New York Times, which later sued after the city refused to release them. A group of families who had lost loved ones at the trade center joined the suit, and the New York State Court of Appeals ordered the release of a vast majority of the records last year.

Norman Siegel, a lawyer who represented the families, said yesterday: "My instinct was we hadn't been given all the tapes. The more we learn, the better. It's momentarily painful to the families, but in the long run, it's empowering."

Mr. Scoppetta said the new review would be fully compliant with the Court of Appeals order.

The contents of one undisclosed recording was reported this week by Michael Daly, the columnist for The Daily News, and confirmed yesterday by fire officials. In it, Capt. Patrick Brown of Engine Company 3 called the 911 operator from the 35th floor of the north tower at 9:21 a.m.

"Just relay to the command post, we're trying to get up, you know," he said. "There's numerous civilians in all stairwells. Numerous burn injuries are coming down. I'm trying to send them down first. Apparently, it's above the 75th floor. I don't know if they got there yet, O.K.?"

Few firefighters other than Captain Brown's company got so high into the tower so quickly. The captain and his entire company perished.