Mar 31, 2006

911 calls from 9/11 released

Partial transcripts of 911 phone calls handled on Sept. 11, 2001, were released today. Partial, because the voices of the callers trapped at the WTC were redacted.
The Times and family members hoped the audiotaped calls would reveal details of what happened inside the towers and whether 911 operators misdirected the victims. The Sept. 11 commission had concluded in 2004 that many operators didn't know enough about the attacks to give the best information to those trapped.
There was also some surprise that the operators weren't able to give enough advice about what to do about inhaling smoke, etc.

The goal of getting these transcripts released was to see if 911 operators possibly misdirected the victims. Misdirected how? From what I can tell, the 911 operators were as dumbstruck by what happened as anyone else was. Maybe I'm missing something, but what could a 911 operator possibly do in that situation other than advise them to stay calm? Was there a "magic word" somewhere that could have averted further disaster?

More importantly, why were the callers' words edited out? Why were the transcripts not complete? That just seems odd to me.

1 comment:

Ang said...

They weren't complete until they had permission from ALL the families that they could use the recordings. Not everyone is giving their go ahead from what I heard.

I could be wrong tho.