Not that long ago, I heard the famous cell phone 911 call Kevin Cosgrove made from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I feel just terrible for him, the other men with him, and that poor operator that took the call.
I have a question about the end of the call. Would the recording of the 911 operator stop when his phone is disconnected? I would have thought you would hear the operator saying, “Sir? … Sir?”
So was the call cut there for dramatic effect or does the recording actually stop when one end disconnects? Has anyone ever heard anything from that operator about what she thought happened or how she felt?
Here is a link if you haven’t heard it. Warning: it’s the last moments of that Kevin Cosgrove’s life so it is obviously quite shocking, sad, and haunting.
Cutting it for dramatic effect? Hardly. Those calls are painful enough to hear without adding or deleting for “effect.” Jesus. I think they cut it so you couldn’t hear him screaming as he died. I’m sure his wife and kids don’t want to hear that.
Well, I think his phone is destroyed, ending the actual call.
I meant the recording of the call being cut off when he was disconnected. I’m wondering what happened with the operator/fireman who were talking to him.
That doesn’t necessarily apply to the OP’s question. Specifically:
On a 9-1-1 call, does the recording of that call at the 9-1-1 answering facility automatically stop when either one of the parties disconnects, or does it end only when the operator disconnects?
I visited several 9-1-1 facilities circa 1997. At that time, the recordings were made continuously 24 hours a day, and were not dependent on either the operator or the caller, for good reason. What the operator said and did after the call terminated was often as important as what happened during the call.
Another forum posited that the accompanying video included with the Cosgrove call wasn’t even the same tower, I’ve no way of determining that, nor would I want to try.
The video says he was calling from “number Two World Trade Center” (24 sec).
Number two would have been the South Tower. It collapsed at 9:59.
Number one (North Tower) collapsed at 10:28.
From the best I can tell the correct tower collapses, seeing as how it would be the first one to collapse. However, there’s no question that it was just added onto the call. If you watch the part before the collapse, you can see it is just looping (watch the smoke and the boat on the right).
The tragedy is that, what Cosgrove and 476 other people above the crash line in the WTC south tower did not know is that Stairway A, one of three, was still unobstructed from top to bottom of that tower; four people from floors above the crash site survived because of it.
I’d be surprised to find out that there’s a PSAP that records all the extraneous chatter in the room 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In all the centers that I’m familiar with, all the phone lines are recorded and all the radio traffic is recorded. There would be no recording of “Hey, cover me, I’m going to the bathroom.”
When I briefly worked as a dispatcher, our recordings only covered phone calls and radio traffic - nothing else - so if a phone call ended (not surprising as lines severed in the catastrophic collapse of the tower). It seemed to me that Mr. Cosgrove was calling from a landline in someone else’s office.
My heart really goes out to those folks manning the 911 lines in NYC that day. It’s a very tough job, especially when they really couldn’t do much to help so many of those people. How chilling it would be to have to keep those memories.
