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Final victims list expected to be 4,500 to 5,000
©New York Times, NEW YORK -- In the hours after the World Trade Center fell, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani predicted that the number of people dead in the ruins would be "more than any of us can bear ultimately." The weeks since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack have proven the mayor grimly correct. But the process of precisely determining how many people perished in the tragedy, a sad accounting that has deep meaning for families, the public and history, has proven to be complicated and hard to control, city officials now admit. The publicly announced numbers of the missing and presumed dead have swung wildly, leaping by hundreds one day and falling by that many days later. This week, though, the officials in charge of tracking the dead and the missing said they think they are closing in on what they regard as a responsible final total. They now have detailed reports on about 4,000 people who they think died in the attack. And while they may not release a final count for a few weeks, they now expect the final list of fatalities to total between 4,500 and 5,000. "We are monitoring it every day," said Deputy Mayor Joseph J. Lhota. "We are trying to make it as scientific as possible. But at the present time, I think those numbers are relatively close." In interviews over the last several days, officials involved in counting the missing and confirming the dead -- 250 police officers and hundreds from the medical examiner's office and other agencies -- talked about the details of the process, the confusions that resulted and their dedication to getting right a count that will affect everything from death claims to history books. "With the blast, the tremendous heat, the collapse, it means, unfortunately, we are not going to find a lot of people," said Chief Charles V. Campisi, who as head of the Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau is the top official in charge of the missing count. "So it is imperative that we know just who is missing." The intent, from the start, was to collect missing person reports centrally through a city Police Department hotline. But almost immediately, state and local police in the tri-state area, companies with offices in the World Trade Center complex, local relief agencies and diplomats representing countries from across the globe each started to compile their own lists. The city police entered the different lists of names into a single computer. With speculation quickly flaring after it was learned that the city had 30,000 body bags available, Giuliani sought to reassure the public with the city's first estimate, released Sept. 13th. It put the missing count at 4,763. As of Friday afternoon, the city's list of the identified dead stood at 321; its count of the missing stood at 4,976.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
