There were several communication failures between federal agencies and between first responders during the 9/11 attacks: - The FAA was unable to join an important interagency phone call due to equipment problems, hindering situational awareness. - Fire chiefs were unaware radio repeaters in the WTC towers functioned and did not use them. Police and fire departments also lacked coordination. - Cell phones and in-flight phones allowed some passengers on hijacked planes to call family and authorities, providing critical information but overwhelming responders.

1. Communication during the September 11 attacks
Federal government
According to 9/11 Commission staff statement No. 17 there were several
communications failures at the federal government level during and after the 9/11
attacks. Perhaps the most serious occurred in an "Air Threat Conference Call" initiated
by the National Military Command Center(NMCC) after two planes had crashed into
the World Trade Center, but shortly before The Pentagon was hit. The participants were
unable to include the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic control command
center, which had the most information about the hijackings, in the call.
According to the staff report:
Operators worked feverishly to include the FAA in this teleconference, but they had
equipment problems and difficulty finding secure phone numbers. NORAD asked
three times before 10:03 to confirm the presence of FAA on the conference, to
provide an update on hijackings. The FAA did not join the call until 10:17. The FAA
representative who joined the call had no familiarity with or responsibility for a
hijack situation, had no access to decision makers, and had none of the information
available to senior FAA officials by that time. We found no evidence that, at this
critical time, during the morning of September 11, NORAD’s top commanders, in
Florida or Cheyenne Mountain, ever coordinated with their counterparts at FAA
headquarters to improve situational awareness and organize a common response.
Lower-level officials improvised—the FAA’s Boston Center bypassing the chain of
command to contact NEADS. But the highest level Defense Department officials
relied on the NMCC’s Air Threat Conference, in which FAA did not meaningfully
participate. ”
First responders
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, radio repeaters for New York City Fire
Department communication were installed in the tower complex. Because they were
unaware that several controls needed to be operated to fully activate the repeater
system, fire chiefs at their command post in the lobby of the North Tower thought the
repeater was not functioning and did not use it, though it did work and was used by
some firefighters. When police officials concluded the twin towers were in danger of
collapsing and ordered police to leave the complex, fire officials were not notified . Fire
officials on the scene were not monitoring broadcast news reports and did not
immediately understand what had happened when the first (South) tower did collapse.
There was little communication between New York City Police Department and fire
department commands even though an Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had
been created in 1996 in part to provide such coordination. A primary reason for OEM's
inability to coordinate communications and information-sharing in the early hours of the
WTC response was the loss of its emergency operations center, located on the twenty
third floor of 7 World Trade Center which had been evacuated after debris from tower's

2. collapse struck the building, igniting several fires Emergency relief efforts in both Lower
Manhattan and at the Pentagon were augmented by volunteer amateur radio operators
in the weeks after the attacks.
Victims
Cell phones and in-plane credit card phones played a major role during and after the
attack, starting with hijacked passengers who called family or notified the authorities
about what was happening. Passengers and crew who made calls include: Sandra
Bradshaw, Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, Mark Bingham, Peter Hanson, Jeremy
Glick, Barbara K. Olson, Renee May, Madeline Amy Sweeney, Betty Ong, Robert
Fangman, Brian David Sweeney, and Ed Felt. Innocent occupants aboard United
Airlines Flight 93 were able to assess their situation based on these conversations and
plan a revolt that resulted in the aircraft crashing. According to the commission staff:
"Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S.
Capitol or the White House from destruction."
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, 13 passengers from Flight 93 made a total of
over 30 calls to both family and emergency personnel (twenty-two confirmed air
phone calls, two confirmed cell phone and eight not specified in the report). Brenda
Raney, Verizon Wireless spokesperson, said that Flight 93 was supported by several
cell sites. There were reportedly three phone calls from Flight 11, five from Flight 175,
and three calls from Flight 77. Two calls from these flights were recorded, placed by
flight attendants: Betty Ong on Flight 11 and CeeCee Lyles on Flight 93.
Alexa Graf, an AT&T spokesperson, said it was almost a fluke that the calls reached
their destinations. Marvin Sirbu, professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie
Mellon University said on September 14, 2001, that "The fact of the matter is that cell
phones can work in almost all phases of a commercial flight." Other industry experts
said that it is possible to use cell phones with varying degrees of success during the
ascent and descent of commercial airline flights.
After each of the hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center, people inside the
towers made calls to family and loved ones; for the victims, this was their last
communication. Other callers directed their pleas for help to 9-1-1. Over nine hours of
the 9-1-1 calls were eventually released after petitioning by The New York Times and
families of the WTC victims. In 2001, many cell phones did not yet have texting or
photography capabilities that came by the mid-2000s.
Background:-
The scale of the incident was described in the National Commission report on the
attacks as unprecedented. In roughly fifteen minutes from 8:46 to 9:03 am, over a
thousand police, fire, and emergency medical services (EMS) staff arrived at the
scene. At some point during a large incident, any agency will reach a point where they
find their resources overrun by needs. For example, the Port Authority Police could not
schedule staff as if a September 11 attack would occur every shift. There is always a
balance struck between readiness and costs. There is conflicting data but some sources
suggest there may have been 2,000 to 3,000 workers involved in the rescue operation.

3. It would be rare for most agencies to see an event where there were that many people
to be rescued.
There is some level of confusion present in any large incident. The National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST) asserts commanders did not have adequate
information and interagency information sharing was inadequate.[7] For example, on
September 11, persons in the New York City Police Department (NYPD) 9-1-1 center
told callers from the World Trade Center to remain in place and wait for instruction from
firefighters and police officers. This was the plan for managing a fire incident in the
building and the 9-1-1 center staff were following the plan. This was partly countered by
public safety workers going floor-by-floor and telling people to evacuate. The
Commission report suggests people in the NYPD 9-1-1 center and New York City Fire
Department (FDNY) dispatch would benefit from better situation awareness. The
Commission described the call centers as not "fully integrated" with line personnel at the
WTC. The report suggests the NYPD 9-1-1 center and FDNY dispatch were overrun by
call volumes that had never been seen before. Adding to the confusion, radio coverage
problems, radio traffic blocking, and building system problems occurred inside the
burning towers. The facts show that much of the equipment worked as designed and
users made the best of what was available to them.
Typical of any large fire, many 9-1-1 calls with conflicting information were received
beginning at 8:46 am. In addition to reports that a plane had hit the World Trade Center,
the EMS computer-aided dispatch (CAD) log shows reports of a helicopter crash,
explosions, and a building fire. Throughout the incident, people at different locations had
very different views of the situation. After the collapse of the first tower, many firefighters
in the remaining tower had no idea the first tower had fallen.
A factor in radio communications problems included the fact that off-duty personnel self-dispatched
to the incident scene. Some off-duty staff went into the towers without
radios. According to the Commission report and news coverage, this was true of NYPD,
Port Authority Police Department (PAPD), and FDNY personnel. Regardless of any
radio coverage problems, these persons could not be commanded or informed by radio.
In any incident of this scale, self-dispatched staff without radios would likely be a
problem. Even if a cache of radios were brought to the scene to hand out, the scale of
this incident would be likely to overrun the number of radios in the cache.
NIST concluded, at the beginning of the incident, there was an approximate factor of
five (peak) increase in radio communications traffic over a normal level. After the initial
peak, radio traffic through the incident followed an approximate factor of three steady
increase. FDNY recordings suggest the dispatch personnel were overloaded: both fire
and EMS dispatch were often delayed in responding to radio calls. Many 9-1-1
telephone calls to dispatch were disconnected or routed to "all circuits are busy now,"
intercept recordings