Released After a Three-and-a-Half-Year Court Fight

Complete Contents of All 23 CDs

>>> It took a bitterly fought lawsuit brought by the New York Times to get the Fire Department of New York to release some of its dispatch tapes from 9/11. The NYT requested the tapes in early 2002, got denied, and went to court. When the FDNY lost the fight three and a half years later, on 12 August 2005 it made available 23 CDs, almost all containing audio of radio dispatches, plus transcripts of oral histories and some other text. The NYT posted about one-quarter to one-third of the audio. The Memory Hole also received the discs due to its freedom of information request, and we're posting all of them.

Twenty-one of the CDs are audio CDs. The Memory Hole has ripped the audio into MP3 files and posted them at the Internet Archive. Each one lasts 44 to 47 minutes. The links below will open each MP3 (64 Kbps). Or you can go to the main Internet Archive page for the recordings here, where you'll find each audio file also available as a high-quality MP3 (128Kbps) and in an open-source format called Ogg Vorbis. You can also download all the files at once as a humongous zip file or listen to all the files as a continuous stream.

Disc 23 contains PDF files of 503 oral histories. The NYT has posted all of them here.

Disc 21 contains an audio transcript and an EMS logbook. See Disc 21 below.

Related Info

Vast Archive Yields New View of 9/11 [New York Times]

The Complete Firefighters' WTC Tape from 9/11 [The Memory Hole]

Port Authority Radio Repeater Transcript

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