Released After a Three-and-a-Half-Year Court Fight
Complete Contents of All 23 CDs
Internet Archive page containing all these audio files in various formats
>>> 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 August 12, 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 New York Freedom of Information Law request, and we posted all of them.
Twenty-one of the CDs are audio. The Memory Hole ripped the audio to MP3 files and posted them at the Internet Archive. Each one lasts 44 to 47 minutes. You can go to the main Internet Archive page for the recordings here, where you'll find each audio file available as a high-quality MP3 (128Kbps) and in the open-source format Ogg Vorbis. You can also download all the files at once as a Torrent or listen to all of them as a continuous stream.
Disc 21 contains the following two PDF files (click to download):
Port Authority Radio Repeater Transcript
Disc 23 contains PDF files of 503 oral histories. The NYT has posted all of them here.
[Originally posted to The Memory Hole on Sept 22, 2005]
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