Controversy surrounds World Trade Center death toll

26 Oct, 2001 02:33 AM4 mins to read

11.45 am - By DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK - Confusion over what will be recorded in history as the final death toll for the World Trade Center disaster of 11 September has deepened as American news organisations revealed that their estimated numbers remained far below those still being put out by the authorities in New York.

The leading media outlets have all arrived at figures ranging between 2,600 and 2,950 for people dead or missing from the attacks on the twin towers, including the 157 passengers who perished on the two hijacked aircraft.

They are all far adrift from the city's estimated total which stands at more than 4,700.

Criticism of the city's methods of counting the victims has been simmering for weeks, partly because the figures have fluctuated on an almost daily basis, sometimes wildly. At one stage just a few days after the catastrophe, the city's official number for the dead and missing stood at 6,700 people.

The latest challenge to the city comes from the New York Times, which yesterday said its own enquiries had thrown up a total of 2,950. Even that, the paper said, was arrived at by using the most generous margins of error possible. It was still 1,800 lower than the city's official estimate, however.

Similar claims have been made by USA Today and by the Associated Press.

All three outlets conducted their surveys by contacting all the companies that had offices in the twin towers and asking for their final numbers on employees they lost. The Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage stands out with a toll of 657.

In addition, researchers took account of those who were in the Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower. They also estimated how many may have been passing through the complex. Most casual visitors would have been on the lower floors, however, which were successfully evacuated.

The topic remains extremely delicate. No media organisation wants to appear to be seeking to minimise the horror of that day by suggesting it was not quite as bad as first thought. On the other hand, the news community always thirsts for sure numbers in disasters. And so too, at some stage, does history.

In the hours after the twin towers crumbled, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani naturally could not even offer an estimate of the casualties. He commented only that the final tally was likely to be "more than most of us can bear". That will remain true, whether the final number is 3,000 or 5,000.

In the early days, the city was led to issue inflated numbers because large numbers of missing persons reports were duplicated, with one person often being reported missing by more than one source. Different spellings often meant the city researchers did not spot for sometime that there had been overlaps.

City officials complained also that foreign consulates contributed to the miscalculations by at first grossly inflating the numbers of their own nationals they thought had perished. The United Kingdom reportedly fell into that category. "The highest we ever used were 200 to 300," a spokesman for the British Consulate in New York said yesterday. The revised Foreign Office figure now stands at 58, however.

"The work that's being done is the best and most capable that is available on the planet today," insisted Mike Byrne, a coordinating officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.

The police department admits, however, that they are still trying to eliminate duplications.

"You get different spellings, different dates of births. You don't want to definitely say that this person is not missing or that these two are the same people," without completing an exhaustive investigation, said Police Chief Charles Campisi.

Chief Campisi admitted that, "the list is in a state of flux and it will continue to be". But when asked about the city figure of about 4,700, he suggested that it would not change by very much. "I think we're in the ballpark," he said.

"Where are these people?" Luis Garcia, the American Red Cross administrator in charge of distributing aid to the victims' families, asked the New York Times. He is responsible to giving large cheques to those families, but so far he has only processed 2,563 claims from the World Trade Center.

- INDEPENDENT

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