A trumpeter plays "Taps" at Ground Zero to signify the...

A trumpeter plays "Taps" at Ground Zero to signify the end of the annual commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2010. Credit: Getty Images File

Some of the sounds recorded on that day almost 10 years ago, when 19 hijackers armed with box cutters commandeered four planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, have been memorialized in an interactive website that chronicles one of the darkest days in American history.

The voices of victims and witnesses - the calm flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 phoning loved ones, the testimony of an employee who climbed down dozens of flights of smoke-filled stairs to safety, the grim recollections of first responders - are among the recordings that capture the sheer horror of Sept. 11, 2001.

The interactive timeline (timeline.national911memorial .org), a project of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan, contains images and audio starting at 5:45 a.m., when hijackers Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari passed through security in Maine to board a flight, and continuing until President George W. Bush's address to the nation at 8:30 p.m.

On Sept. 11 this year, the museum will unveil a memorial at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan to honor the nearly 3,000 victims killed in the attacks that occurred when two planes struck the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overtook their hijackers.

An audio entry at 8:19 a.m. has American Airlines flight attendant Betty Ong's call to ground personnel to report that two employees had been stabbed: "I don't know, but I think we're getting hijacked."

Atta blares in another entry, an exchange with air traffic control: "We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be OK. We are returning to the airport." The plane crashed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.

The exhibit contains images of the mundane and the spectacular: shoes abandoned by World Trade Center evacuees, employee badges, the damaged towers aflame, and firefighters rushing into a disaster.

The voices of news reporters describe events: "We have a lot of smoke at the top of the towers of the World Trade Center," said WCBS Radio 880 traffic reporter Tom Kaminsky.

"This timeline is a real attempt to organize what was an incredibly chaotic day into a format that's accessible for people to learn from," said Joe Daniels, museum president.

One marketing firm employee, Bruce Dellinger, is heard detailing the walk down from his 47th-floor office in the North Tower. "There were three flows of people: The regular people like me going down, the people who were coming down from the other floors, who were very badly burned. No skin. No hair. Just burned."

He added: "The third flow of people was security personnel and fire department people . . . While I was walking down, they were going up to their death, and I was walking down to live."

With Reuters

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