New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Wednesday that four survivors and 55 dead bodies had been recovered and "a few thousand people" were believed to be trapped in the smoking ruins of the city's World Trade Center.
The city's hospitals were bracing to take in huge numbers of casualties and said they were "absolutely mobbed" by blood donors, but said relatively few people had so far been rescued from the disaster zone and treated for injury.
"We so far we have a body count of 55 people, about a half hour ago," Giuliani told a news conference shortly after 1900 GMT.
"We were able to take out another person two or three hours ago, a woman who was found alive and taken to the hospital, so now there are at least four people we have been able to take out," he said.
"This is a situation we are going to be living with for a while, which is we will only know whether we have saved someone or recovered someone's body when that actually happens," he said.
He said about 300 firefighters and 70 police officers were missing since the World Trade Center's twin towers collapsed after being hit by two hijacked commercial airliners on Tuesday morning.
Earlier, Giuliani said: "The best estimate that we can make, relying on the Port Authority and everyone else that has experience with this, is that there will be a few thousand people left in each building."
Mary Johnson, spokeswoman for the Greater New York Hospital Association, said "around 2,000 people were registered" in hospitals in New York and adjacent New Jersey, but many were not formally admitted.
At the Pentagon in Washington, one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said reports that as many as 800 people had been killed there were "completely inaccurate."
And Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "We've made no estimates on casualties."
A spokesman for New York's Saint Vincent's hospital said shortly after daybreak on Wednesday that "things were pretty slow" since few survivors had yet been dragged from the rubble.
At Bellevue Hospital, a spokesman said the hospital's dining room had been turned into a blood donor center and was "absolutely mobbed" by donors.
"We continue to have hope that more survivors will be brought to the hospitals," Johnson said.
She said she had no information on an overall casualty toll, but hospitals were "ready, willing, and able" to receive victims.
Johnson said there was a flood of blood donors at the city's hospitals and asked people to come back over the next couple of weeks.
Giuliani estimated it would take two to three weeks to clear the debris.
"We took 120 dump trucks out of the city last night, and that will give you some idea of the amount of debris," he said.
Giuliani suggested the casualty toll would be higher in the northern tower, the first of the pair to be hit and the second to fall.
"Building number two had a chance to clear out, a lot of people probably cleared out of building number two," he said, referring to the southern tower, which was hit 18 minutes after its neighbor.
Giuliani said three survivors had been pulled from the rubble "and we are hopeful of getting out a fourth."
Rescuers' first priority remains finding and extracting anyone still alive from the ruins, and following that to restore normal services in Manhattan, which has been all but cut off from the outside world for 24 hours.
"We want to make sure that food comes into the city and that people can go about their lives," he said.
Giuliani also appealed to people who might have private videos of the attacks to give them to the authorities.
"Please contact the police department or the FBI because it could be of enormous help in the investigation of the case," he added -- NEW YORK (AFP)
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