More 9/11 Emergency Calls Released

The tapes of 19 emergency calls from Sept. 11 including one from an office safety director were released Friday as part of a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and some victims’ families.

The latest calls were to police operators and some later transferred to the Fire Department.

City officials said eight World Trade Center victims made 11 of the calls. The complete recordings were sent to their families, who could later decide to make the caller’s side public.

In recent years, the city has released hours of emergency calls that were made amid the chaos of the terrorist attacks. In March, officials issued transcripts of 130 calls from people trapped in the towers, including only the voices of operators and other public employees.

In August, more than 1,600 previously undisclosed emergency calls were released. And a year earlier, thousands of pages of emergency workers’ oral histories and radio transmissions were made public.

A call made by Larry Boisseau, fire safety director for OCS Security, was the only victim identified on the calls released Friday because he was on the job. The rest only played the operator’s side of the conversation.

“EMS is not picking up,” the operator told Boisseau, 36, of Freehold, N.J.

“OK,” Boisseau said, exasperated. “Maybe you can keep trying. … I kind of got to get going. This is my job. Fire safety.”

The call was less than three minutes long.

The Times and families sued the city for access to the calls and firefighters’ oral histories. Attorneys said they wanted to find out what happened in the towers after two hijacked jetliners crashed into them and what dispatchers told workers and rescuers in and around the buildings.

Copyright © 2007 Midwest Television