By LARRY MCSHANE
The Associated Press
New York - As the smoldering ashes of the World Trade Center slowly yielded unimaginable carnage, investigators fanned out across the country Wednesday to track the conspirators who orchestrated an unprecedented day of terror from the air.
In one indication of the potential death toll, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was asked about a report that the city has requested 6,000 body bags from federal officials. “Yes, I believe that’s correct,” he said.
Another, 2,500 people visited a grief counseling center handling questions about missing family members Wednesday.
The last few floors that remained of the trade center’s south tower collapsed Wednesday afternoon in yet another cloud of thick smoke. No injuries were reported, but rescuers were evacuated from part of the area.
Police and fire officials said there were problems with other “mini-collapses” among some badly damaged buildings nearby, and when the towers were destroyed, the Marriott World Trade Center hotel fell with them.
The search and rescue mission continued despite the problems.
The devastation turned the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan into a dust-covered ruin of girders and boulders of broken concrete. A Brooks Brothers clothing store became a morgue, where workers brought any body parts they could find.
The workers’ grim task was interrupted by brief epiphanies of life, when a fortunate victim was pulled alive from the wreckage of the steel-and-glass buildings. Three police officers, and six fire fighters have been pulled from the wreckage alive.
President Bush condemned the onslaught as “acts of war” and NATO gave the United States its backing for a military response if the attacks were directed from abroad.
While investigators and diplomats moved forward in their tasks, progress for rescuers in New York was slow. Cranes and heavy machinery were used, but gingerly, for fear of dislodging wreckage and harming any survivors. Searchers with picks and axes worked slowly, too - sometimes when they opened pockets in the debris, fires flared.
Companies that leased space in the trade center began realizing the awful consequences of the violence. Thirty-eight people from Fred Alger Management Inc. were missing, including the company’s president, David Alger.
“The terrorist attack is a personal tragedy for my family as well as for all of our employees and their families,” said Fred Alger, the company founder and David’s brother.
Giuliani said the best estimate is that a “a few thousand” victims would be left in each building, potentially including 250 missing firefighters and police officers. Among the missing was John O’Neill, head of security for the trade center and a former FBI expert on terrorism.
There were 82 confirmed fatalities - a number that was sure to grow. Another 1,700 injuries were reported.
The four hijacked planes carried 266 people, none of whom survived. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that an estimate of as many as 800 people were killed at the Pentagon may be far too high.
In New York, the rubble at the trade center was taken by boat to a former Staten Island garbage dump, where the FBI and other investigators searched for evidence. One volunteer, Peter Coppola, said he had found four bodies in his 24 hours of searching. “The air down there is totally toxic,” he said.
New Yorkers were told to avoid lower Manhattan.
People still clung desperately to the hope that their missing friends and family members were somehow alive. At St. Vincent’s Hospital, where hundreds of victims were treated, a sobbing Annelise Peterson walked in a daze, clutching pictures of her boyfriend and brother.
Peterson asked if anyone had seen either. No one could tell her yes.
