Rough estimate of World Trade Center death toll: 6,000

Associated Press

NEW YORK — With too many people missing for an accurate death count to begin, officials did their best Wednesday to calculate the toll from the World Trade Center attacks.

A frantic search was under way for the names of confirmed survivors so officials could begin to guess the number of dead.

"The best estimate we can make is that there will be a few thousand left in each building," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Wednesday.

Asked about a report that the city had requested 6,000 body bags from federal officials, he replied, "Yes, I believe that’s correct."

Because of the difficulty of digging through the rubble, only 82 fatalities had been confirmed as of Wednesday. Airline officials said another 157 people were on the two planes that smashed into the towers.

The mayor said 202 firefighters and 57 police officers, as well as the World Trade Center’s head of security, were among the missing.

In Tuesday’s other terror attacks, there were 45 people aboard a plane that was hijacked and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania

At the Pentagon, the military services said about 150 people — mostly Army soldiers — were unaccounted for, along with 64 passengers and crew from the plane that crashed into the building.

Operators at the New York mayor’s hotline were compiling the names of the missing and providing relatives with information about patients at city hospitals.

Two Web sites listed thousands of names of people who worked or lived near the disaster.

"If you have survived the World Trade Center attack or know someone who has, please add their name to our list," said a message on www.ny.com. q It asked users to note the survivors’ conditions.

State officials were also counting. Nearly 200 state government workers and an unknown number of private-sector employees couldn’t be located, Gov. George Pataki said Wednesday.

About 300 state workers and more than 3,000 employees of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey worked in the towers.

Also missing Wednesday were some of the 900 people employed by the state Attorney General’s Office in a building near the World Trade Center.

There was some good news from the towers’ largest tenant, the Morgan Stanley firm, which employed 3,500 people on 20 floors in both towers.

"It certainly looks like the vast majority of our people got out, and we are fortunate," said Ira Miller, Morgan Stanley’s branch manager in Rochester, N.Y.