New York ? The Sept. 11 commission took a hard look at how the city handled the World Trade Center attack and found systemic flaws may have proved fatal that day.

The commission discovered bravery and courage, but they also found communication breakdowns and dysfunctional coordination within and between agencies. Preparing the city’s former commissioners for tough questioning, commission Chairman Thomas Kean said, “We want to understand what happened that morning, to learn, so that we, as a nation, can be better prepared.”

The panel zeroed in on several flaws:

¢ Who was in charge?

The commissioners examined the decades-old friction between New York’s bravest and finest and suggested it may have contributed to the chaos during the catastrophe.

The panel’s staff report cited several instances where one of the agencies did not communicate critical information that could have helped the other. For instance, a police helicopter pilot warned police commanders that the north tower was going to collapse. The alarm was never relayed to Fire Department officials.

¢ Communications

Several times, fire, police and Port Authority officials made decisions without knowing how urgent their situation was. Much of this was due to the inability of the different agencies to talk with each other.

A Port Authority order to evacuate was received only by PA officials. Office workers never heard a public address system announcement to get out. The Police Department knew the south tower collapsed, but the Fire Department remained unaware and never sent a call for its people to evacuate the north tower.

Lenny Crisci, left, and John Napolitano watch images during the staff report on Emergency Preparedness and Response to the Sept. 11 commission hearings in New York. Crisci lost a firefighter brother and Napolitano lost a firefighter son in the World Trade Center attack. The hearings, which began Tuesday, continue today with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani scheduled to testify.

¢ Poor planning

After the 1993 Trade Center attack, the Port Authority devised a “defend in place” system of instructing people to stay put instead of evacuating.

After the first plane hit the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001, fire wardens in the south tower told people to return to their desks.

The panel also noted the Port Authority had no plans to rescue people above a fire in the skyscraper, and they never told people there was no access to the roofs.

¢ 911 disarray

People trapped in the burning towers called the 911 emergency number for answers. They didn’t get any, the commission found.

No protocol existed for police or fire departments to give 911 operators information that could be relayed to the desperate callers. The operators could have told people to evacuate or revealed to callers in the south tower that one stairway was still passable.

¢ Misplaced bunker

The administration of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani placed the city’s emergency command center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. The day of the attacks, that location proved unusable. And when the building collapsed, the city was left without its central command.

¢ Intelligence vacuum

The former director of the World Trade Center told the commission that he knew nothing of Osama bin Laden’s terror network until the summer before the attacks, and was never privy to FBI intelligence that Islamic terrorists might hijack U.S. planes.

Alan Reiss said he first heard about bin Laden’s al-Qaida network when ex-FBI agent John O’Neill was hired in the summer of 2001 as head of security at the trade center. O’Neill, who had hunted bin Laden for years, was one of the 2,749 people killed in the attack.

“I was aware of the plot against some of the other Port Authority tunnels and the U.N.,” Reiss testified. “But we were never briefed” by the FBI.