Anxiously awaiting 9/11 tapes' release

BY SAMUEL BRUCHEY | Newsday Staff Writer

March 30, 2006

Her three-year fight against the New York City Fire Department is nearly over, but Sally Regenhard is more anxious than excited about her improbable victory.

Tomorrow, the city is scheduled to release 911 calls recorded on the morning the World Trade Center was attacked. Regenhard of the Bronx, a member of a group of nine families who lost a loved one on Sept. 11, 2001, joined The New York Times in a 2002 lawsuit and successfully forced the city to release tapes of the calls.

"I'm going to have to face the emotional devastation all over again," she said. Regenhard's son Christian, 28, a probationary firefighter in Brooklyn, died that day.

Not everything on the tapes will be made public. The voices of 28 people who called 911 from the Twin Towers have been redacted. Only the voices of 911 dispatchers will be heard.

However, in another victory for Regenhard and the other eight families in the suit, New York State Supreme Court Justice Richard F. Braun yesterday ruled that names of victims spoken or spelled by the emergency operators cannot be redacted.

The relatives of the 28 people will be permitted to hear those calls should they choose. In total, about 130 calls that came from the towers can be heard on the tapes.

Tomorrow, the families involved in the suit also will call on the loved ones of those 28 people, urging them to make the calls public. Making the tapes public is critical to piece together what happened during and after the attacks, Regenhard said.

"This is a record. This is information," she said.

A representative from the fire department could not be reached for comment yesterday evening.

Norman Siegel, a Manhattan civil rights attorney who represented the nine families, said he believes the tapes will likely show disarray among emergency operators and a failure to implement a coordinated response.

"I'm hoping that I'm wrong," he said. "But I think that's what's going to happen."

Regenhard said she expects the conversations will confirm her belief that lives, possibly even her son's, could have been saved had there been better preparation.

"People should have been able to get out," Regenhard said. "That's why we went to court. We want people to know this so it doesn't happen again."