A fire official describes near chaos inside the World Trade Center as firefighters try to reach people trapped by the raging blaze.

"We're in a state of confusion," says Chief Dennis Devlin of Battalion 9, in freshly released recordings of emergency phone calls from the September 11 attacks.

"We have no cell phone service anywhere because of the disaster... Bring all the additional handy talkies."

The same mix of concern and confusion is evident in all the 1,613 previously undisclosed emergency calls, released in New York on Wednesday (local time).

"One of the towers just collapsed," says a fire lieutenant in another call. "Everybody's got to be inside of it... There's got to be thousands of the people inside it. One of the towers just came down on everybody."

Frantic callers trapped on the upper floors of the burning towers plead for help from emergency operators, who are unable to offer much more than words of encouragement.

"Listen to me, ma'am," one operator tells a panicky Melissa Doi during a 20-minute call. "You're not dying. You're in a bad situation, ma'am."

A portion of Doi's end of the conversation was played for jurors in April at the trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

"I'm going to die, aren't I?" Doi asks the dispatcher.

"Ma'am, just stay calm for me, OK?" the dispatcher replies.

The newly released calls include the voices of 19 firefighters and two emergency medical technicians killed in the collapses.

One tape contains fire captain Patrick Brown calling from the 35th floor, reporting a chaotic scene of civilians some with burn injuries heading down the stairwell as firefighters head up.

"Apparently it's above the 75th floor," the firefighter says. "I don't know if they got there yet. We're still heading up."

About a dozen family members of 9/11 victims arrived in a midtown Manhattan conference room on Wednesday to hear the tapes, which again raised questions about a lack of communication on the scene.

"We're still looking for information for how we can fix what went wrong that day," said Aggie McCaffrey, whose brother Orio Palmer was among the 343 firefighters killed.

The New York Times and family members had sued for access to the emergency calls and firefighters' oral histories.

Their attorneys said they wanted to find out what happened inside the towers after two hijacked jetliners crashed into them and what dispatchers told workers and rescuers.

In March New York authorities released transcripts of 130 calls, edited to include only the voices of operators and other public employees.

The callers' voices were cut out after city attorneys argued that their pleas for help were too emotional to be publicized without their families' consent.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta ordered his department to search for additional recordings when another tape turned up shortly after the March release of the emergency calls. City officials have now listened to all calls to emergency and fire dispatchers between 8:45 am and 10:45 am on September 11.

Source: China Daily