May 19 (Bloomberg) -- World Trade Center tenants weren't prepared for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and emergency responders failed to coordinate adequately, says a new report that calls for national standards to cope with any future disasters.

The 10-member federal commission studying the attacks says employers at New York City's World Trade Center towers lacked evacuation plans and many employees scoffed at fire drills. On Sept. 11, when the two skyscrapers were hit by hijacked jetliners, the on-scene fire commander had trouble coordinating his workers and 911 emergency operators didn't get the right information to alert callers they should evacuate, the report says.

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani offered a contrary view at a hearing today before the panel in New York City. Giuliani, lauded for his performance after the attacks, said civilians and uniformed emergency responders reacted calmly and heroically to the worst terror attack in the nation's history.

``The blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone: the terrorists that killed our loved ones,'' he told the commission on the second day of a public hearing. ``For each other, there really should be compassion, understanding and support, because we're all suffering.''

Giuliani said city officials, shortly after both towers collapsed, estimated the death toll could be as high as 12,000 to 15,000 people. The final tally was about 2,750 killed at the World Trade Center and almost 3,000 overall in the coordinated Sept. 11 attacks. ``The reason you have that difference is the way in which a combination of the rescue workers and the civilians themselves conducted this evacuation,'' Giuliani said.

Several Flaws

The commission has found several flaws in the emergency response on Sept. 11.

Even the emergency personnel who responded to the burning Pentagon in northern Virginia, by comparison a much less complicated disaster scene, encountered dispatching and communications problems similar to those at the World Trade Center site, the report says. The five-floor Pentagon, like the two 110-story World Trade towers, was hit by a hijacked commercial jetliner.

``It is a fair inference, given the differing situations in New York City and Northern Virginia, that the problems in command, control and communications that occurred at both sites will likely recur in any emergency of similar scale,'' says the report, the 14th staff-written statement released so far by the commission.

Winding Up Hearings

The panel, formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is winding up two days of hearings focusing on the crucial minutes and hours after the hijacked planes struck their targets. Witnesses today include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

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Yesterday, the commission released an interim report describing the confusion and miscommunication that confronted emergency workers at the World Trade Center complex.

It said that heroic efforts by police and fire fighters were undermined by tensions between their departments, problems with radio communications and 911 operators who couldn't give fully informed advice to callers trapped in the towers.

Ridge plans to bolster that view in his testimony later this morning. In written testimony released this morning, Ridge says emergency workers ``were limited by an inability to communicate effectively and by frustrating incompatibilities between equipment, such as trucks, hoses and radios.'' He says integration must be a goal for emergency planning.

Final Report

Today's report offers some conclusions and recommendations that the commission will likely include in its final report to Congress and the White House, due July 26.

The report endorses a voluntary National Preparedness Standard, proposed recently by the American National Standards Institute at the commission's request, that would spell out what steps organizations should take to plan emergency management and business continuity programs. The report also puts in a plug for national standards in the training of emergency response units.

A fundamental problem on Sept. 11, the report says, was ``an inability to communicate key decisions to the people who most needed to hear about them.'' That was the case even though Giuliani, months before the attacks, ordered that one designated commander was to run all operations at an emergency scene.

Lacking of Communication

The commander at the World Trade Center, a fire department official, couldn't establish a unified command because of `` the lack of communication and coordination among responding agencies,'' the report says. It suggests one lesson from Sept. 11 is that an integrated command system, with units working together rather than independently, is a more realistic goal than a single incident commander.

Among the commission staffers who contributed to the report, and read it aloud to start today's hearing, was Kevin Shaeffer, who approached the task from a unique perspective. Of the 30 people on duty in the Pentagon's Navy Command Center when it was struck by the hijacked jetliner on Sept. 11, only Shaeffer, a Navy lieutenant, survived.

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in New York City at larnold4@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 19, 2004 09:26 EDT