- NEW YORK -- Sharp exchanges
over the failings of New York's emergency services yesterday electrified
hearings on the September 11 attacks held before dozens of relatives of
the dead.
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- Meeting less than two miles from Ground Zero, the national
commission heard that rivalry between the police and fire brigade undermined
efforts to evacuate the Twin Towers before they collapsed.
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- Office workers in the two skyscrapers were given conflicting
advice about what to do after the two hijacked planes slammed into the
buildings, the commission was told.
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- Only half an hour before the first of the towers disappeared
in a cloud of dust and smoke, none of the fire brigade chiefs on the scene
had expressed the fear that the buildings would disintegrate, a commission
report found.
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- Commissioners berated senior officials for being unprepared
for a major emergency. They were particularly scathing about the lack of
a clear chain of command to deal with the events of September 11, and possible
future catastrophes.
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- "I think that command and control in this city is
a scandal. It's not worthy of the boy scouts, let alone this great city,"
raged John Lehman, a former navy secretary.
-
- "It's a scandal that there is no clear line authority
to deal with a crisis of the magnitude we will have to face in the future,"
he said, adding that the overall system was "clearly" dysfunctional.
-
- "It's not rocket science," he went on to applause
from the public at the hearing. "It's just overruling the pride of
existing services."
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- His rhetoric forced Bernard Kerik, who was the city's
police chief at the time of the terrorist attacks, on to the defensive.
There was a chain of command, he said, and anyone who disobeyed his commands
would have been "terminated".
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- Relatives of some of the 2,749 people killed in the suicide
attacks on the World Trade Centre were in the audience and viewed a vivid
blow-by-blow video report of the events that morning.
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- The footage replayed the images of the two planes roaring
into the buildings, film of the fire brigade response and the memories
of survivors who escaped the inferno.
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- "For me, it was reliving what my mother heard, what
she saw, what her last moments were," said one member of the audience,
Terry McGovern, whose mother died in the South Tower.
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- On the film, one survivor, Brian Clark, recalled hearing
an announcement on the public address system telling tenants in one tower
to stay put even though the other tower had already been hit.
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- Another survivor described seeing the letter "U"
- for United Airlines - on the tail of the second plane to collide into
the complex as it hurtled towards his office.
-
- "I dropped the phone and I screamed and dived under
my desk," said Stanley Praimnath. "It was the most ear-shattering
sound ever. The bottom wing sliced right through the office and it stuck
in my office door 20ft from where I am huddled under my desk."
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- The commission had already heard testimony in private
from President George W Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, as well as
in public from the CIA director, George Tenet, and the national security
adviser, Condoleezza Rice. It is expected to publish its recommendations
in July.
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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