Recovery Continues; No New Survivors

Sept. 19 -- Though hopes are dimming, search and rescue workers continue their grim, round-the-clock search for survivors in the still smoldering wreckage of New York's World Trade Center.

"We don't have a substantial amount of hope to offer to people that there is anyone alive there," New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Tuesday. "We have to prepare people for the overwhelming possibility that finding anyone alive is very very small."

Still, the efforts at the World Trade Center site are being called a rescue mission, Giuliani said. More than 1,200 firefighters worked through the darkness of night with other rescue workers and continued to remove tons of debris under a shock of floodlights.

One sign that officials have not given up all hope: firefighters are not pouring water on the smoldering debris out of concern about drowning any possible survivors.

Searchers also are looking to recover the black boxes of the two aircraft, which struck the center's two towers, to learn more about the circumstances of the attack. Signs have been posted around the site, showing workers what the boxes look like.

And in addition to the firefighters, police officers, medical personnel, and other searchers, are telephone technicians by the hundreds, trying to restore communication in the area. One technician on the scene says that could take months.

Refuse to Give Up Rescue

One firefighter who spent an entire day, almost 12 hours in the rubble, said that rescuers around him found "12, maybe 13 bodies total" and many more body parts.

"There are people down there," he said. "I just don't know where they are."

No survivors have been pulled out alive since last Wednesday, a day after two hijacked planes slammed into the towers at New York's World Trade Center. According to officials, 5,422 people are missing and 218 are confirmed dead in New York. So far, officials have identified 152 of those confirmed dead. The list of those identified include 37 police officers, 32 firefighters, two emergency technician workers, two Port Authority employees and one New Jersey firefighter.