fter months of rigorous preparation, the New York City medical examiner's office says that a novel genetic testing technique being relied upon to help identify additional victims of the Sept. 11 terror attack has not produced any concrete results because the process has unfolded far more slowly than anticipated.

Dr. Robert Shaler, the office's director of forensic biology, said he had hoped that the experimental technique would begin to analyze a huge cache of badly damaged genetic materials from the World Trade Center site in June or July. But because of the magnitude and delicacy of the task, he said, scientists have proceeded cautiously. As a result, the much-awaited results of a pilot test will not be ready until mid-December.

Even so, Dr. Shaler said he was "certainly optimistic," based on preliminary tests, that the new technology would be successful and lead to aspike in the number of identifications. That number has inched upward in an "agonizingly slow" fashion for months, he said, and now rests at 1,439, or 51 percent of those killed.

For months, many families have been clinging to the hope that the new technology — combined with other advanced genetic tests conducted on the tiniest fragments of bone and tissue — represents the last, best chance of identifying the balance of the 2,795 people who were killed at the trade center.

It is too early to predict whether the final tally approaches the 2,000 figure on which city officials have long focused. Still, with the results from several key tests expected to pour in during the next few weeks, family members say they are feeling tinges of hope, mixed with dread, that the most exhaustive DNA identification effort in history is drawing to a close, and that not everyone will be at peace.

"We're realistic that not all the remains are going to yield DNA," said John Cartier, who lost his brother, James, on Sept. 11. He is a co-founder of Give Your Voice, a victims' relatives group, which has held regular meetings with the medical examiner's office. "There's going to come a point where the medical examiner is going to come to us and say, `Look, we've exhausted all the scientific and medical means.' And we're preparing for that day."

That the medical examiner's office has identified even half of the victims strikes many families and scientists as a remarkable, even heroic, achievement, given that there were only 292 intact bodies recovered from the site, and 19,932 body parts.

Of those 19,932 parts, only 5,404 have been identified. And of the 1,439 victims who have been identified, 709 were identified solely through the use of DNA, according to the medical examiner's office.

Each person's DNA, or genetic code, consists of a string of three billion "base pairs," or large molecules, represented by the letters A, G, C, and T. The sequencing of those four base pairs creates the code for all human characteristics, and variations in those sequences make one person different from another.

Forensic experts can generally work with DNA samples of about 400 base pairs. But as DNA deteriorates, the number of base pairs decreases — which is what happened with countless samples from the World Trade Center that were subjected to intense heat and high pressure.

The pace of identification has slowed drastically in recent months as the limits of genetic research have been stretched. Only nine people have been identified this month. Since the one-year anniversary on Sept. 11, only 40 people have been identified.

"Now we're down to the worst of the worst of each sample," said Dr. Kevin C. McElfresh, senior vice president of operations for the Bode Technology Group, which is one of several companies still involved in the 11th-hour effort to identify more remains.

In mid-December, the city expects to see the first results of some new and more refined tests being conducted by Bode. The city also expects results from another company, Celera Genomics, that will focus on tiny rings of DNA in cell structures called mitochondria.

But according to Dr. Shaler, the most promising chance of a breakthrough lies in a genetic test, developed by a company called Orchid Cellmark, involving single nucleotide polymorphisms, known as SNPS.

The SNPS, in brief, are telltale variations in single base pairs scattered throughout the genome, as when an A is found instead of a T. The SNPS can be found even when a victim's DNA has been truncated into fragments as short as 60 to 80 base pairs, said Mark Stolorow, executive director of Orchid Cellmark. The hope, according to Dr. Shaler, is that the shorter strands can be definitively matched to a reference sample from the thousands of toothbrushes, razors, pieces of clothing and other items that were collected from victims' relatives.

So far, Orchid Cellmark has conducted extensive preliminary work, as well as a trial run of DNA samples. Early results have been promising. But there has been a delay, Dr. Shaler said, in making sure that the technology is ready for use.

"I had thought it would have been faster," he said. "But it takes time to start from scratch and build an entirely new test and make it work. And we know this is going to work."

Scientists involved with the identification endeavor expect the bulk of the final tests to be finished within a few months. But even then, an asterisk is in order, for the medical examiner's office has begun to preserve all the body parts in the event that one day, further advances in technology will enable the identification of even more people.

or more than a year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has had no end of problems with its stewardship of the Sept. 11 aid programs. Congressional leaders have blasted the agency as slow, disorganized and needlessly restrictive. Victims have complained that FEMA evaluators have been rude, ill-informed and condescending. Even agency officials have admitted to management blunders.

But now comes a bureaucratic bungle of a new magnitude. Last week, a FEMA post office box in Albany was closed after the agency failed to pay the rent for almost three months.

The agency had set up the box to handle applications for a major reimbursement program. After the box was closed by the Albany post office, about 300 people who had mailed in applications potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars received their packets stamped "Return to Sender." One Manhattan couple even discovered that their application had ended up in a dead-letter office in Atlanta.

Only yesterday, after a reporter inquired about the delinquent payment, did FEMA pay the $425 annual fee to keep P.O. Box 1279, Albany, N.Y., 12201-1279, in good standing. In fact, someone from FEMA delivered the check by hand, said Mary Madonna, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service in Albany.

The payment was late because of the large quantity of mail being handled, said James McIntyre, a FEMA spokesman. Mr. McIntyre said the agency has been overwhelmed recently by applications for the Individual and Family Grant program. The agency said that the 300 applicants need only put their packets back in the mail.

The episode provided fresh fodder for the agency's critics, who said it had once again outdone itself in confusing a confused process.

Ray Brescia, a lawyer with the Urban Justice Center, offered a typical reaction: shock, followed by resignation. "Just when you think you've seen just about all that could go wrong in a government program, they go out and do something like this," Mr. Brescia said. The center is an advocacy group for poor and homeless New Yorkers.

The timing could not have been worse: the deadline for applying to the program is Saturday.

Interest in the program remains high, with nearly 800 people showing up on Monday outside FEMA's disaster assistance center at 141 Worth Street in Lower Manhattan hoping to apply, or get information. As a result, the Urban Justice Center and other community organizations plan to hold a news conference today asking that the deadline be extended again and that FEMA do a better job in explaining the details of all of its Sept. 11 programs.

The Individual and Family Grant program has been touted as the ultimate safety net for people who had lost their jobs, suffered property damage or needed to be reimbursed for air-quality equipment. FEMA provides 75 percent of the financing, and the state Department of Labor administers it. But a year after the attack, state officials acknowledged that they had not reviewed more than half of the applications, and that the size of the awards was dwarfed by those offered in other emergencies by other states in recent years.

To speed the process, FEMA lent 150 employees to the Department of Labor to help process claims. As a result, of the 116,000 people who had applied as of yesterday, 45,000 had been approved for assistance totaling $34.9 million, Mr. McIntyre said.

Despite the improvements, though, problems have persisted.

In August, the Albany post office began asking FEMA to renew its post office box, which it has had for six years. The deadline was Sept. 1. No one paid. So the post office asked at least several more times for payment, Ms. Madonna of the Postal Service said, giving FEMA an unusually long grace period. Still, nothing.

Ms. Madonna could not recall another instance in which a government agency, of which there are more than a few in Albany, had been so delinquent.

"This is not common," she said.

FEMA's postal woes have caused great stress for Howard Weintraub and Deborah Day, a married couple who live in Midtown Manhattan and have been plagued by respiratory ailments since Sept. 11. They are seeking reimbursement for air-purifying equipment.

After being rejected at first by the program, they were encouraged to reapply last month. But when they called to trace their package last week, they were told that it had made its way to the Mail Recovery Center in Atlanta — the dead-letter office — and that their chances of recovering it were slim to none.

ASHINGTON, Nov. 25 — Donald W. Goodrich never considered himself particularly cynical about the ways of Washington, but as President Bush signed the domestic security bill, Mr. Goodrich found himself deeply disillusioned today about the intersection he has observed between politics and the protection of the nation.

"To think that they're invoking the name of my son and all the other victims for a bill this bad, it's really offensive," said Mr. Goodrich, a lawyer from Bennington, Vt., whose son, Peter, died in the plane that hit the south tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"People in Washington are attaching their personal agendas and their corporate agendas to a bill that's supposed to protect this country, to make sure that this kind of attack never happens again," Mr. Goodrich said. "That's very troubling to me and many others like me."

Many families of Sept. 11 victims had expected to give their support to the creation of a Department of Homeland Security as a strong indication of the country's determination to prevent another attack. But in interviews today many relatives, including leaders of the largest family organizations, said they were surprised at how bitter they felt about the partisan politics surrounding the measure. Several expressed fury that Congress had inserted special-interest provisions into the bill that might affect them personally.

Most prominent, the measure includes a section inserted by House Republican leaders that will limit the liability of airport screening companies for any negligence they may have committed in allowing box cutters aboard the planes that day. Relatives of victims who were planning to sue the screening companies for damages found a possible avenue of compensation and information closed.

"Why would the House Republicans give the screening companies a get-out-of-jail-free card at the last minute?" asked Kristen Breitweiser of Middletown, N.J., whose husband, Ronald, died in the trade center and who has been considering a lawsuit against the screeners.

"The families are outraged by this," Ms. Breitweiser said. "We were down there lobbying last week and trying to make the case that this will hurt us, but they did it anyway. It's just a slap in the face to the victims."

The creation of a Homeland Security Department was never the lead agenda item for the family groups, which have become a powerful lobbying force in Washington. After the groups began to coalesce in the months after the attack, their most insistent quest was for information rather than bureaucratic restructuring. They demanded to know whether the government might have known something or done something that could have prevented the attacks, and they persuaded Senate leaders to include their top priority — an independent commission to investigate the attacks — in the domestic security bill.

But the commission was removed from the bill after the White House balked in a round of partisan finger-pointing. The commission was reinstated at the last minute in a separate intelligence-spending bill after heavy lobbying and news conferences by family leaders. The Homeland Security Department was held up for months while Democrats and Republicans battled over the issue of job protection for workers, and family members said they looked on with disgust as the prevention of another attack seemed to take a backseat to political gamesmanship.

"This whole thing has been hugely disillusioning to me," said MaryEllen Salamone of North Caldwell, N.J., whose husband, John, died in the towers.

"You assume after an event like this that the politicians will do what's right, and then you see that so much of it is political favors and Republican-Democrat stuff," Ms. Salamone said. "I feel like I could write a book about everything I learned about politics that I never wanted to know."

Many family members became critical of the domestic security bill and the process for assembling it, particularly when it became clear that the new department would not substantially reshape the nation's intelligence-gathering apparatus.

"There was a real disappointment when the administration decided not to include the intelligence agencies — the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. — in the department," said Stephen Push, a leader of Families of Sept. 11, the largest of the organizations. "We knew that the major foul-ups that contributed to 9/11 had to do with the failure of the intelligence agencies to communicate with each other, and it was hard to see how this department would help with that. So we didn't make this one of our legislative priorities."

The indifference turned to anger when House leaders inserted special-interest provisions in the bill that seemed to have little to do with domestic security. One provision would protect the makers of some vaccine ingredients from lawsuits. Another would direct money for security research largely to Texas A&M University. A third would allow the department to contract with companies that leave the country to avoid taxes.

Congressional leaders have vowed to change those provisions next year, but there are no plans to alter the section that provides immunity to airline screening companies.

"Some people say that we should accept the bill as a whole because of the good it does, despite the new amendments," Mr. Goodrich said. "Well, I just don't accept that. I just don't think that politicians should use the tragedy of Sept. 11 as a wedge to gain some kind of unrelated advantage. It's totally upside down."

s the deadline approaches for aid requests to the biggest grant program helping small businesses recover in Lower Manhattan, a state agency said yesterday that any leftover money would probably be added to the grants already given to the businesses "most severely impacted" by last year's terror attack.

About $80 million has yet to be distributed, and some critics of the program welcomed what they said was the firmest indication yet of how any leftover money would be used. Those critics had contended that the program had not given enough to the hardest-hit small businesses — mostly those that were in the World Trade Center. They expressed satisfaction, however, that the agency's statement indicated that the businesses that were obliterated when the towers fell would get more help than those nearby, which suffered more from street closings, lost revenue and other factors.

But other critics said the statement by the agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, was too vague. Over all, complaints about deficiencies in the program have been made by elected officials, owners of companies that were in the trade center and businesses that are elsewhere in Lower Manhattan. But many grant recipients have praised it as extremely helpful.

The program, the World Trade Center Business Recovery Grant Program, provides compensation for lost revenue to companies from 14th Street to the Battery with up to 500 employees.

Yesterday's statement came in response to a letter that Senator Charles E. Schumer sent on Thursday to Charles A. Gargano, the state agency's chairman.

The letter said as many as 200 small businesses that had been in the trade center, and were "still struggling to stay afloat" in new or temporary quarters, and needed aid beyond that offered under the program.

In responding to the letter, a spokesman for Mr. Gargano said that if any of the program's $481 million remained after the last grants were awarded to businesses that had applied by the Dec. 31 deadline, "we are predisposed to providing additional assistance to those businesses that were most severely impacted by the events of Sept. 11."

The spokesman, Michael Marr, said he could not estimate the amount of any additional aid that a company might receive. "We don't know how much we'll have left over, if anything," he said.

Senator Schumer said in his letter that any remaining money should also go to small businesses immediately around the trade center site that were so severely damaged that they have not reopened.

Yesterday, the senator said that he was grateful for the agency's position and that he looked forward to working with Mr. Gargano "to ensure that the people most hurt by this tragedy get the help they need."

Meyer Feig, president of the World Trade Center Tenants Association, which says it represents 100 small businesses that were in the center, also welcomed the agency's statement. But he said he wanted to know how the agency would decide which businesses were the hardest hit.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat representing portions of Manhattan and Queens, said the statement was not specific enough. "The World Trade Center tenants, whose businesses lost everything, need more than vague murmurings that those who lost the most might — might — get extra help," she said.

As of Nov. 15, Mr. Marr said, 10,322 businesses had received a total of $402.5 million of the $481 million earmarked for the program, leaving $78.5 million.

He said the agency and the city had begun an advertising campaign to tell Lower Manhattan businesses that still may not be aware of the program that they could be eligible.

The program uses federal funds to pay for varying degrees of losses, depending on an applicant's proximity to the trade center site.

Thus, for the eligible businesses farthest away, between 14th and Houston Streets, the maximum compensation is three days' losses, while the highest reimbursement, 25 days' of losses, goes to businesses that were in the trade center or a nearby zone bounded by Chambers and Rector Streets on the north and south and Broadway and the Hudson River on the east and west.

The fact that businesses that were in the trade center are considered to have been in the same zone as those as far as five blocks away, and eligible for no more money than the others, has been a focus of the criticism.

HICAGO, Nov. 20 — The rate of life-threatening heart rhythms more than doubled among cardiac patients in the New York area in the month after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, according to a new study that sheds light on the role of elevated stress in heart disease.

The higher rate of arrhythmias began three days after the attack, was elevated for a month and then returned to the pre-attack level, said the study's authors, who reported their findings today at the American Heart Association's meeting here.

There were no heart attacks or deaths among the 200 participants in the study, because they had implanted defibrillators, which monitor heart rhythms and deliver electric shocks to restore normal heartbeat when they detect life-threatening abnormalities.

While doctors have reported rashes of heart attacks and sudden deaths in the days after Scud missile attacks in Israel and earthquakes in other countries, this study was the first to track abnormal heart rhythms in connection with a traumatic event, the authors said.

Two of the authors — Dr. Jonathan S. Steinberg, chief of cardiology at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, and Dr. Marcin Kowalski, a resident at St. Luke's — said the findings documented persistence of increased psychological stress after Sept. 11 and showed compelling evidence of its effects on the heart.

Like other New Yorkers, the participants reported watching more television news after the attack, and the researchers said that at such times people with heart problems might do well to cut down on television. They also suggested that doctors consider recommending other measures to reduce or avoid stress.

Dr. Steinberg said he began designing the study immediately after the attack out of a longstanding interest in abnormal heart rhythms. He sought the aid of Dr. George Reed, a statistician at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

They determined that they could conduct a statistically sound study if they included 200 of the about 2,000 defibrillator patients in the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital system.

So on Oct. 11, 2001, Dr. Steinberg's team began asking cooperation from patients with known coronary-artery disease at six centers in Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx, northern New Jersey and Orange County, N.Y. The patients were predominantly white and male, with an average age of 69. About two-thirds were taking beta blocker, ACE inhibitor and anti-arrhythmia drugs.

The researchers scrutinized the electrocardiograms stored in the device for evidence of two life-threatening abnormal rhythms — ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation. The device is programmed to deliver a shock when either of these rhythms develops. (The researchers did not study the rate of arrhythmias that were not life threatening.)

The researchers found that the devices delivered shocks to 7 patients (3.5 percent) who had abnormal heart rhythms in the month before the attack, compared with 16 patients (8 percent) in the 30 days thereafter. The number of shocks rose to 45 in the month after Sept. 11 from 27 in the month before.

Of the three patients who saw the terrorist attack, one had a life-threatening rhythm abnormality. But the researchers said they could not identify any factor that predicted who was most at risk of a life-threatening heart rhythm after the attack.

Dr. Steinberg said his team planned to work with colleagues around the country to determine the frequency of life-threatening rhythms among heart patients elsewhere after Sept. 11.

he chairman of the company that holds the rights to build retail stores at the World Trade Center site said yesterday that officials assured him that his company, which has been quiet in public discussions about the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, will now have a more active role in planning the effort.

Frank Lowy, chairman of the Westfield Group, an Australian operator of shopping malls, said that in a meeting yesterday, senior officials from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation also committed to trying to build more than twice the amount of retail space that existed on Sept. 11, 2001.

"We want to be part of the process to determine where and what size the shopping facilities ought to be," Mr. Lowy said yesterday after a ceremony unveiling the architectural plans for the rebuilding of 7 World Trade Center, just north where the twin towers stood. "Now that there is something to add, we will say a lot."

Mr. Lowy said his company had "stayed in the background" to minimize controversy. But, after meeting with rebuilding officials yesterday, he added, "We will be welcomed into the process."

A Port Authority spokesman, Peter Yerkes, said the agency "is working with a number of parties, including Westfield, although nothing has been finalized."

A spokesman for the development corporation, Matthew Higgins, said that Westfield, as leaseholders, will continue to have a planning role.

The Westfield Group, through an American subsidiary, holds the rights to operate the retail stores at the trade center, a right it secured when it joined with the developer Larry A. Silverstein to lease the trade center properties from the Port Authority in 2001, just before the attacks.

Before Sept. 11, about 430,000 square feet of retail space existed at the trade center, most of it along the concourse that stretched among the seven buildings in the complex beneath the outdoor plaza. In its contract, Westfield had the right to expand its retail space to 650,000 square feet.

But when officials of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation gave instructions to the seven teams of architects working on plans for the site, they told the designers that they could include up to one million square feet of retail space.

"I feel confident that we will be able to fill one million square feet," Mr. Lowy said.

Westfield attracted criticism early in the rebuilding process when it suggested that it wanted its stores to be enclosed in a mall-like structure, rather than be in the base of separate buildings open to the street. The suggestion angered relatives of the dead who view some or all of the site as sacred ground. Struggling downtown merchants have also expressed fears that extensive competition will hurt their businesses.

Yesterday, Mr. Lowy said that he was not opposed to having stores in the ground floors of the site's new buildings, as long as there was no automobile traffic that would hinder pedestrians moving through the retail complex to and from a planned transit hub downtown.

"What we are looking for is to have unimpeded access from one part of the retail complex to another," he said. "It's very important that it's connected to the transportation hub, because people will pass by there."

But, he added, "It doesn't matter if it's below ground or above."

Mr. Lowy said his company has consulted with David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who designed the 7 World Trade Center building unveiled yesterday.

The new building, which Mr. Silverstein said he believed will still be called 7 World Trade Center, is to include 1.7 million square feet of office space. It will be 750 feet tall, the equivalent of 52 stories, although the bottom 10 stories will house equipment for a Con Edison substation like the one that was in the previous building.

IRST, and second, impressions indicate that Trevor Davis, who last week announced a bold plan to erect Manhattan's second-tallest skyscraper just a block from the ghost of the twin towers, really likes his trophies. And they don't necessarily have to be buildings. Unless the lions, leopards and polar bears in that photo montage in his office are playing possum, he evidently moonlights as the last of the great white hunters. No wonder Teddy Roosevelt is a big hero, and we're not talking presidential acumen, we're talking bagging big game and carrying a big gun.

That much is obvious even before the gentlemanly developer, bear-size himself, makes a jaunty entrance — Mr. Davis, 48, retains his South African speech mannerisms and accompanies bone-rattling handshakes with a crisp "Cheers" coming or going — and settles down at a red lacquer conference table at 400 Park Avenue.

Everybody already knows big urban developers like to leave big urban footprints. Mr. Davis, who builds luxury East Side residential towers with a penthouse-for-everyone persona, is no exception. "I don't get egotistical about it, but I've been fortunate enough to be able to say I've left my mark on New York City," he says, riding the fence between modesty and its opposite.

He's not done making his mark. And unlike some developers, he does it without stamping his name on his creations. "It's too vain, putting your name on a building," he demurs. "I don't even like to buy things that have labels on them."

First things first. Did he kill his co-stars in those safari photos or are they just tranquilized?

Mr. Davis pours all 6 feet 4 1/2 inches of himself into a semi-apologetic shrug and rakes a hand through the front of his bristly, graying hairdo, which sticks up skyscraper straight. Or perhaps it got that way from the shock of being charged by a lion while on safari in Zimbabwe last year. It was, he says, an old lion, one ripe for legal culling; he does not kill young animals, "just the lonely old guys whose best years are behind them." Pays for the privilege. Mr. Davis tracked this particular king of beasts three days before it turned the tables and confronted him; so he shot it. Same thing happened with an elephant, a bull so massive Mr. Davis recalls his trusty guide turning tail and running. But not Mr. Davis.

"Survival is the point of business and of life, and I've kind of applied the fundamentals of what I learned from hunting to the way I do business; not so much the kill part," he says, with a conspiratorial chuckle, "but about taking in everything in the environment around you. You develop a sixth sense, sort of."

The odd woven bracelet on his wrist is all that's left of the elephant. Its meat fed scores of hungry villagers. The hair of his bracelet came from its tail. "A trophy," he says and chuckles.

As regards his less furry trophies, these walls are papered with so many mock-ups of skyscrapers — prime among them First New York Place, the $680 million, 90-story retail-office-luxury-living complex he has proposed for downtown, at Broadway and Fulton Streets — that the room has the feel of a single-theme art gallery. Skyscrapers are us. That's the mantra of RFR Davis, the collaboration between Mr. Davis and two German-born entrepreneurs, Aby Rosen and Michael Fuchs. They teamed up in 1995 when he bought his first plot, a white elephant at 64th Street and Second Avenue, for $2.5 million.

After decorating the Upper East Side with a dozen swank residential destinations like the Impala, the Seville and the Empire, and creating 425 Fifth Avenue, a tower he calls a sister to the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings, he has seen the future — and it is downtown.

"We've always been long-term players, and there's no question there's a market developing downtown that's going to be very different in 5, 7, 10 years' time than what's there today, and as long as people can get over what's there today, it's going to be a pretty exciting place," he says.

 He insists tomorrow's New Yorkers won't be superstitious about living in a downtown skyscraper. "People have a great propensity in this city to forget bad things quickly," he says. "Well, not forget, but to recover; I don't see downtown being some somber mausoleum."

Mr. Davis grew up comfy in Johannesburg, where his family owned a construction business and their home included a pool, tennis court and black servants. He recalls an insular upbringing in a white enclave: "You didn't even know you were in Africa." It proved too insular for him. "I felt hemmed in; it was, settle down, work in the family business, stay here, be bored." When he left to study architecture and engineering at M.I.T., his mother refused to go to the airport to see him off. "She knew I wasn't coming back," he says. "I didn't know it, but she did."

He now lives in one of his trophies, the Empire, with his wife and four children. They have a horse farm upstate; his jumper is named Zulu. The Empire displaced the Cottages on East 78th Street over the objection of preservationists and Upper East Side denizens like Woody Allen. Mr. Davis harbors no grudge. He even watched one of Mr. Allen's movies recently: "It was a strange one where he plays a blind producer, which is sort of what I do sometimes."

ens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel are stored in a half-dozen big buildings in Manhattan, posing a potentially lethal hazard in the event of an accident or a terrorist attack.

The city's Buildings and Fire Departments are investigating the fuel tanks at the buildings because of the similarities to the situation at 7 World Trade Center, where thousands of gallons of burning fuel may have contributed to the collapse of that skyscraper after the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001. One building in particular is believed to have twice as much fuel as 7 World Trade Center, in a building half the size.

As the investigation proceeds, city officials are trying to determine whether owners and tenants of the buildings violated the city's fire and building codes when they installed dozens of diesel fuel tanks in the buildings in the 1990's for huge backup generators and air-conditioners.

Last week, building inspectors found at least eight tanks on the upper floors of one tower in TriBeCa — containing a total of 2,200 gallons of diesel fuel — that may be illegal, officials said. But before they issue any citations for violations, the Buildings Department officials are poring over confusing and often conflicting records to determine whether the department had issued a waiver of the building code, as well as exactly how much fuel is stored in the TriBeCa building and where.

The buildings, known as telecom hotels, house telecommunications and Internet tenants that require backup generators and diesel fuel to keep their computers running and cool in a blackout. The buildings serve, as a tenant in the TriBeCa tower once put it, as a "nerve center" for international telecommunications.

But since the attack on the World Trade Center, city officials have been examining whether the current fire and building codes governing construction standards, as well as fuel storage in urban areas, are adequate in light of new realities.

With the spread of telecom hotels in many cities, the National Conference of States on Building Codes and Standards is closely watching what happens in New York, said Mike Unthank, the organization's president and the top state building official in New Mexico. The group is considering adopting a model building code clause for fuel tanks that could be adopted at state and local levels.

The New York Times is withholding the addresses of the buildings at the request of city officials, who cited their importance to international telecommunications and their potential as terrorist targets.

"The building code task force is looking at fuel tank storage issues, including the size and location of tanks and the transfer piping, in all buildings, not just telco buildings," said Patricia J. Lancaster, the buildings commissioner. "We're examining the code for tall buildings with regard to all sorts of threats, including biohazards, chemical and nuclear hazards, and bombs."

The TriBeCa tower where the Buildings and Fire Departments completed their inspection last week has long been the subject of complaints from surrounding residents. Bruce L. Ehrmann, co-founder of Neighbors Against Noise — noxious odors, incessant sounds and emissions — said that the numerous generators and air-conditioners that sprang up on every ledge of the tower sound like a thundering locomotive and spew pollution over the surrounding residential buildings.

But no one gave the tanks that supplied fuel for the generators much thought until the attack on the World Trade Center.

Unlike the twin towers, 7 World Trade Center was not hit by a jet, but investigators did determine that a catastrophic blaze fed by diesel fuel in the 47-story tower may have caused its collapse. It also appears that diesel fuel continued to be pumped from the tanks into the blaze after the building began to burn.

A report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency concluded that more analysis was needed to determine the full role of the burning diesel fuel in the collapse. Shyam Sunder, chief investigator for the review of the World Trade Center by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said that the agency was looking at the sources of fuel in the building, where there were seven tanks with a combined capacity of 42,000 gallons, and what led to its ignition. "We know for sure that the collapse of 7 was significantly due to the fires in the building," Mr. Sunder said. "The FEMA report suggests that the fires persisted for a long time."

Consolidated Edison, which had an electrical substation underneath 7 World Trade Center, and its insurance companies have filed a $314 million lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land, charging it with improper use and maintenance of the diesel fuel tanks and citing their role in the fire.

With new diesel generators and fuel tanks being installed periodically at the tower in TriBeCa, Neighbors Against Noise also began to raise questions about all that fuel sloshing around in one building. Councilman Alan J. Gerson, who has worked with the group, then asked the Buildings Department to look into the matter.

"This is a potential tinderbox," Mr. Gerson said. "It's unacceptable to have any significant quantity of fuel stored above ground, literally across the street from where people live. We need to have stepped-up enforcement and new building code regulations. We should also encourage the conversion of diesel engines to fuel cell technology."

John F. Hennessy III, chairman of Syska Hennessy Group, a consulting, engineering and construction firm involved in the construction of 7 World Trade Center, played down the potential hazard of the fuel tanks in a dense urban environment.

"Is it something that should be looked at?" Mr. Hennessy said. "Certainly. But at the same time, I don't think we have a ticking time bomb in these buildings."

"You're not looking at an overly dangerous situation," if fuel tanks are installed properly and according to building and fire codes, he said. "Fuel oil is not like gasoline; it burns slower. It kept burning in 7 because there was nothing to extinguish the fire."

But the volume of fuel and its location concern some experts.

According to a review of Fire Department permits, there are tanks with a capacity of 45,425 gallons in the basement and on the upper floors of the TriBeCa tower. But records at the State Department of Environmental Conservation indicate the number is far higher: 80,560 gallons, about twice the amount at 7 World Trade Center, in a building half the size. The records, which are no longer available on the Internet because of security concerns, did not include two generators and fuel tanks installed in September.

Battalion Chief Bill Van Wart, a spokesman for the Fire Department, would not explain the discrepancy.

Last week, the Buildings Department completed an inspection of the TriBeCa tower that found tanks with a capacity of "upwards of 80,000 gallons," including eight 275-gallon tanks on the upper floors that may have been in violation of the city fire and building codes. Fire Department records indicate that another building housing telecommunications equipment has eight fuel tanks with a total capacity of 156,500 gallons.

The codes do not limit the amount of fuel stored in the basement of a building, as long as the steel tanks have a specific fire rating and are surrounded by a catch basin and a concrete wall. But under the city code, only one 275-gallon tank per floor is permitted on above-ground floors.

Ms. Lancaster said her department was trying to determine whether a waiver was granted to the tenants or landlord who installed the equipment, in which case the multiple tanks would be legal. Otherwise, the owners, who face possible fines and criminal charges, will be required to bring the tanks into compliance with the building code, Ms. Lancaster said.

A spokesman for the landlord of the TriBeCa tower declined to comment.

Many hospitals and educational institutions have backup power stations. But telecommunications centers, known in the trade as telecom hotels, are a more recent phenomenon that grew very rapidly in many major cities, beginning in the mid-1990's with the rapid growth of telecommunications and Internet companies.

Landlords in many cities began converting some older buildings with thick floors capable of supporting heavy equipment, computers and generators. In New York, the companies gobbled up 4.9 million square feet in less than three years.

One of the first buildings to become a telecom hotel was the tower in TriBeCa, where the landlord initially installed generators and air-conditioners on the ground floor, creating a street-level din for the surrounding neighbors. But as the telecommunications companies in the building multiplied, the generators started showing up on ledges on higher floors. The 275-gallon tanks on the upper floors feed the generators and are in turn fed by larger underground tanks. Portable generators are also set up on the streets outside the brick tower.

Local residents complained that noise continued to increase at the tower. One man said he could not hear the television in his living room, while other people had not opened their double-pane windows in five years.

Now there are the fuel tanks. According to the Buildings Department, there are about 60 tanks in the building, including 39 on above-ground floors and outside the structure.

"If this is potentially another 7 World Trade," said Tim Lannan, a co-founder of Neighbors Against Noise, "it's a huge concern."

he tidy apartment in a house in Staten Island rents for just $650 a month, but Salvatore and Lorraine Nardulli can no longer afford it. They cannot pay the phone bill, or the electric bill, or the insurance on their 10-year-old Pontiac Grand Prix. There is an empty space next to the VCR where the cable box once stood; dunning letters are stacked up on the kitchen table.

Mr. Nardulli, 53, who worked for an airline for almost three decades, has been unemployed for 18 months and cannot find a full-time job. Mrs. Nardulli, who is several years younger, worked for years as a legal secretary but more recently has been a homemaker and student; she cannot find any work.

They have run through their $12,000 or so in savings. They have borrowed to the limit on their credit cards, another $12,000. And in June, Mr. Nardulli's extended unemployment insurance ran out.

Turned down twice for public assistance, the Nardullis say they fear that they will end up in a homeless shelter. "If we have to leave this apartment — God forbid," Mrs. Nardulli said. "I feel like we are being punished because my husband lost his job."

No one knows for sure how many people are in the same boat as the Nardullis: people whose comfortable lives have abruptly unraveled because of the recession and the economic aftereffects of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Some economists say there may be hundreds of thousands of them across the country, based on trends in the labor market and in unemployment insurance, which has traditionally been a safety net of the middle class, as public assistance has been for the poor.

The percentage of people who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits is at the highest level in two decades. In New York State, 156,000 people have also used up the additional three months of temporary unemployment benefits that Congress authorized in March; that program expires at the end of December.

While New York has by far the largest number of people who have run out of temporary benefits, nationally there are about 1.5 million, according to the federal Department of Labor. Wendell Primus, director of the income security division of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research institute in Washington, estimates that up to a million of them have not found jobs and are not eligible for more aid.

Of course, even among those who have not found work, not everyone is necessarily experiencing as much hardship as the Nardullis. Many may have had more savings, and about 40 percent are likely to have had working spouses, according to studies done in previous years for the Labor Department by Mathematica Policy Research.

What clearly makes the Nardullis unusual is their willingness to talk about their plight. Some New Yorkers in similar straits have said they were too embarrassed or ashamed (or worried what their landlords would think) to let their names be used publicly.

Mr. and Mrs. Nardulli struggled with the idea of discussing their situation but said they finally decided that their story might help other people by drawing attention to the problems of the unemployed.

Besides, Mr. Nardulli said: "We've got nothing to lose. We're going down anyway. I used to be optimistic, but now that's all gone."

Such gloomy sentiments are new for a couple who describe themselves as "life of the party" types who love to dance. They met in 1977, at a disco in Brooklyn, where they lived until three years ago. "We were `Saturday Night Fever' fans," Mrs. Nardulli said.

In those days, Mr. Nardulli's job seemed not just secure, but glamorous, he said. The travel benefits at the big international airline where he was a cargo agent meant that he could go skiing in Switzerland, swimming in Caracas, "travel the world," he said. With overtime, he eventually made as much as $45,000 a year. And what member of the Teamsters union ever got laid off?

"I felt secure with him," Mrs. Nardulli said. They were married in 1981; Mr. Nardulli still carries two copies of their wedding photo in his wallet. And Mrs. Nardulli, the more voluble of the two, constantly sings the praises of her husband as "a good man" and "a good worker."

Neither of them has a college degree. "I couldn't afford it; I was supporting my family," said Mr. Nardulli, whose father died when he was 13. Mrs. Nardulli studied business for a year at Pace University and then worked for about a dozen years as a secretary.

A few years after they were married, Mrs. Nardulli decided to stay home. "I thought I was going to have a baby, but I didn't," she said. It left her depressed.

Eventually, she began going to school. She studied to become a paralegal, got a real estate license and became a notary public. She did temporary work sometimes, but mostly she decorated her apartment and kept it spotless and enjoyed music and parties and friends, she said.

Both of them have regrets. "If I had known this could happen, I would have done things differently," Mrs. Nardulli said. "I would have made sure I got a job immediately."

As for Mr. Nardulli, he wishes that he had heeded the warning signs, in the late 1990's, that there was trouble at the airline (which he does not want identified because he still hopes to get a pension). But his department was shuttered in 1998. "I worked for 28 years straight and I have nothing to show for it," he said.

He did get a severance package, but that was used up quickly as he hunted for a new job, and in the course of their move to Staten Island. (Brooklyn had become too expensive.)

After a short stint running the shipping department of a small factory, Mr. Nardulli got a job at a customs clearing concern, where he worked until April 2001. But as the economy slowed, the owner decided to downsize, and to move what was left of the company to New Jersey. Mr. Nardulli got two weeks' pay.

What kept them afloat after that was the $362 a week Mr. Nardulli got in unemployment benefits. He ran out of benefits before Thanksgiving last year, and used a credit card for living expenses until he became eligible for three more months in the spring under the emergency unemployment program.

He has diligently looked for a job, and has inches of faxed résumés to prove it. "I had a chance before Sept. 11," he said. But since then, the steep decline in travel and shipping has spawned huge cutbacks at New York's airports. Airport-related jobs have plunged by almost 16.5 percent, or about 10,000, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan research group.

Mr. Nardulli has tried looking in other industries but has been told that there are hiring freezes or that he lacks the right job history, he said. "I went to a supermarket and the guy said, `With your qualifications, why?' I said, `I need a job.' But he refused me because I had no experience."

Mrs. Nardulli said she had been rejected for jobs because her experience was not a perfect match for, say, a doctor's office, rather than a lawyer's office. Temporary agencies tell her that nothing is available. Both she and Mr. Nardulli are getting computer training, courtesy of the State Labor Department, but she said their school was not holding out much hope of finding them work.

If they could both find even low-paying jobs, Mrs. Nardulli said, "with steady paychecks, we could pool them and make it."

More than that, Mr. Nardulli said, "I want a job that pays the rent."

In desperation, the Nardullis turned to public assistance, an experience that they said was humiliating and ultimately pointless.

Here, too, they seem to be illustrative of a trend.

Welfare rolls have not increased consistently this year, but there have been sharp increases in applications for public assistance since June, according to the New York City Human Resources Administration. The number of people in the city not on public assistance but getting food stamps, which some analysts say is a better measure of economic hardship, has risen by more than 60,000 in the last year, an increase of almost 17 percent.

The Nardullis, after going through all kinds of examinations and investigations and skills tests, got a two-month supply of food stamps, and Mr. Nardulli was promised a job as a security guard. He said he worked only three days, bringing home just $100. But according to the paperwork, he was making $2,000 a month at that job, so he was refused any further assistance.

Through a friend, Mr. Nardulli then found a part-time job driving a van for disabled people. He enjoys the work, likes the passengers and wants to succeed so much that he has spent hours memorizing city street maps.

But as the employee with the least seniority, he works only three days a week, usually bringing home $150 a week after taxes. He has started spending his days off doing yardwork and anything else he can, but it is not enough to pay the rent and utilities, much less buy food.

Still, it is enough to disqualify him for public assistance. As a letter the Nardullis got from the city put it (complete with misspellings), his "income is suffican to meet the budgetory needof your family unit."

Mr. Nardulli's translation: "You have to lose everything before you get help."

The Nardullis have not yet lost everything, not quite. There's still the green Pontiac, which flies an American flag. Though it broke down recently, a cousin of Mrs. Nardulli's gave them the money to repair it and to pay for the insurance.

And they are still in the apartment, though they are two months behind on the rent. "The landlords are very nice, very nice people," Mrs. Nardulli said. "But, of course, they would like their money."

If worse comes to worst, Mrs. Nardulli said, she will get a lot of bubble wrap and pack up all the treasures she has accumulated during her marriage: all the silk flowers and Precious Moments figurines, all the apple-themed kitchen gear and the framed maxim, "When there is love in the house, there is joy in the heart."

She has already asked friends whether they will store her things if she ends up in a homeless shelter.

"They think we're kidding," Mr. Nardulli said. "But we're just realistic."

ith greater frequency and deepening anger, the relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11 terror attacks are growing disenchanted with the man who oversees the federal Victim Compensation Fund. They say he breaks promises, delays decisions repeatedly and provides conflicting guidance for a program that is intended to pay out billions in awards.

Family members, along with lawyers and company officials whose colleagues were killed or injured in the attacks, have complained that the fund's special master, Kenneth R. Feinberg, often promises decisions within a week or two, only to repeat the same promise for weeks, then months, without delivering. They have also accused Mr. Feinberg and his staff of being inconsistent; one relative said that he once got three different responses to the same question on pension benefits.

Members of one family who received an award that was 25 percent less than what Mr. Feinberg had personally pledged say they now feel betrayed, and are warning other victims to "be careful." And many complain that Mr. Feinberg's staff members can be overly technical in allowing minor problems on applications — like failing to check off the box to one inconsequential question — to derail the process for weeks.

Charles Wolf, who lost his wife, Katherine, an employee at Marsh & McLennan, was so unhappy about the fund that he started a Web site, www.fixthefund.org. He says Mr. Feinberg remains hugely unpopular.

"I believe in his sincerity, and I want this program to succeed for all the families," he said. "But nothing short of a major action on his part to resolve his missteps, coupled with a significant apology, will begin to set things right."

The crescendo of complaints represents a critical shift in the public perception of the fund. Early on, many family members complained that the rules governing the fund were intended to limit payouts and thus the cost to the government. Then, when the fund attracted far fewer applicants than anticipated, Mr. Feinberg attributed the poor response to wholesale grief.

But now, according to interviews with more than three dozen people involved in the fund, the debate about the fund's merits is focusing more and more on Mr. Feinberg's personal management style, as well as speculation that he is being politically shackled by the Bush administration. And the anger at Mr. Feinberg raises yet another set of questions about the eventual success of a novel program that government officials said would provide prompt, generous financial relief to devastated families.

In an interview, Mr. Feinberg acknowledged that some of his decisions had taken "too long," and that he was "sympathetic to the frustration of the families." But he also strongly defended the performance of the fund and its staff, saying that it was vital to corroborate claims and "be careful with the taxpayers' money."

He also suggested that most complaints were coming from a vocal minority that has not yet filed. By contrast, he said, most families who have received awards have told him that the payouts were fair, even generous. So if widespread disillusionment exists among the families, Mr. Feinberg hasn't noticed.

"I don't see it," Mr. Feinberg said. "I've heard more the other way, that `'we've been treated fairly, he's a man of his word, he's delivered on what he said he would.' "

But in interview after interview, victims and lawyers expressed endless exasperation with what they said was Mr. Feinberg's tendency to overpromise and underdeliver. Many of them were people who had in fact already filed with the fund, contrary to Mr. Feinberg's claim.

"His constant hesitation to make a final decision or put in writing what is said orally is just prolonging the anguish of the families," said Kenneth P. Nolan, a partner at Speiser, Krause, Nolan & Granito in Manhattan, which represents more than 60 families. "This is New York. Be an upfront guy. Tell the people the truth. If you can't do something in 10 days, then you say you can't."

Sally Regenhard, who lost her son, Christian, a firefighter, founded the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, and is in regular contact with dozens of families. She has not yet filed with the fund. "A lot of people do feel that at times this man talks out of both sides of his mouth," she said.

Few people thought that Mr. Feinberg would have an easy time with a fund that was hastily passed by Congress as part of an airline bailout package. If anything, many family members and lawyers expressed admiration that Mr. Feinberg had taken on a thankless, maybe impossible, job of attaching a sliding scale of monetary values to the dead.

But as of yesterday, only 783 people had filed even partial claims, of which less than 200 had been deemed "substantially complete" by Mr. Feinberg's office. Indeed, the pace of less than two new filings a day has not changed since the government announced its first awards in August.

Now, with only 13 months to go before the application deadline of Dec. 21, 2003, the total number of award offers stands at a modest 85, with an average payment of $1.49 million. Sixty applicants have said yes to the award. Ten have said no, and want to appeal. The rest have not yet responded.

Many family members say they have been turned off by what they characterize as Mr. Feinberg's hard-sell style, as well as with the paucity of information. In June, for instance, Mr. Feinberg agreed to evaluate, on a preliminary basis, several claims involving victims who made more than $231,000 a year — the maximum salary on the standard actuarial tables used to calculate a person's lost income and worth. He said he would have answers in a couple of weeks.

He is still saying the same thing four months later, families and lawyers say. "I've gone weeks where I've been afraid to call my clients, because they think I have an answer when I call," said Justin T. Green, a lawyer at Kreindler & Kreindler, which represents 350 families. (Yesterday, though, Mr. Feinberg called to apologize for the delays.)

And some families say that the process does not improve once an award is made. One family that filed early in order to bury the trauma of Sept. 11 remains bogged down in details over taxes and the distribution of the award, even though it has been more than two months since Mr. Feinberg promised that the process would be over within days.

"It's just been a lot of nights not sleeping, a lot of days crying," said the family member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Feinberg does have his defenders. On Sept. 30, Trial Lawyers Care, a national consortium of lawyers offering free legal services, announced that despite a lengthy delay, he had made offers on a group of test cases that were, on average, more than 60 percent higher than projected.

And one family that originally accused Mr. Feinberg of breaking a verbal promise met with him recently and came away satisfied with the amended figure.

Still, when Michel F. Baumeister, an aviation lawyer in Manhattan whose firm represents 70 families, met with Mr. Feinberg to discuss six cases involving high-income families in early June, he believed Mr. Feinberg's pledge of a concrete response in two weeks.

But only yesterday did Mr. Baumeister receive such numbers from Mr. Feinberg on four of six cases. Mr. Baumeister, who has known Mr. Feinberg for years, said he wondered if the Bush administration was encouraging the special master to go slow to limit payments and bolster tort reform efforts.

Mr. Feinberg flatly rejected the thought. "The buck stops with me, and me alone," he said yesterday.

Even so, some families say that any responses, however statistically just, may amount to Pyrrhic victories because of the emotional price exacted by Mr. Feinberg's conduct.

One person who barely survived the World Trade Center's collapse applied to the fund five months ago because he suffered debilitating injuries and desperately needed financial help. But despite receiving almost weekly promises that his case would be resolved, nothing has happened — other than the fact that he has lost his house and exhausted his savings.

He said he had to quit his job as a business consultant because of his injuries. "I can honestly say this has been most frustrating and nerve-wracking experience in my entire life," said the victim, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And that includes surviving the 9/11 collapse."

or much of the last year, New York City has said the devastating breakdown in fire communications at the World Trade Center was largely caused by the failure of an electronic device in the complex called a repeater, which was designed to boost radio transmissions in high rise buildings.

Now, however, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's analysis of its 78-minute tape of firefighter communications from Sept. 11 flatly contradicts the city's version of what went wrong. It also raises questions about the thoroughness of the city's investigations into the worst loss of life any fire department has ever experienced — 343 men.

If the Port Authority's position is correct, it raises the possibility that different factors — failure of other equipment, design of communications consoles in the tower lobbies, or a simple mistake made at a moment of high stress — might have accounted for the communications breakdowns. Many firefighters believe those breakdowns contributed to the department's staggering losses.

On the tape, which recorded transmissions as they were passed through the repeater, firefighters in the south tower can be heard speaking over their radios until the building collapses. Practically no communications are recorded from firefighters in the north tower, even though the same repeater served both of the towers.

Before the voices from the south tower are heard, a series of coded tones are captured on the tape, marking the moment that the radio repeater was turned on, a spokesman for the Port Authority said.

In the view of Port Authority officials, those transmissions show beyond any doubt that the repeater worked, contrary to the accounts given in an official study of the emergency response that has been endorsed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta.

Asked, then, what would account for the communications failures, a spokesman for the Port Authority, Greg Trevor, said, "You will have to put those questions to the Fire Department."

The tape is likely to be remembered as far more than a record of what went wrong. It contains the only permanently preserved voices of firefighters from the tower stairwells, including transmissions from the fire chief who climbed highest into the building. As the firefighters raced up the stairs of the south tower, and right until the final seconds, they can be heard calmly organizing help for injured civilians as high as the 78th floor.

"All right, Tommy," a firefighter from Ladder 15 is heard saying minutes before the collapse, "it's imperative that you try to get down to the lobby command post and get some people up to 40. We got injured people up here on 70. If you make it to the lobby command post, see if they can somehow get elevators past the 40th floor. We got injured people all the way up here."

A spokesman for the Fire Department, Francis X. Gribbon, said yesterday that the department still believed the machinery had failed in some way. "The system was tested in the lobby by two experienced chiefs who came to the conclusion that it was not functioning," he said, referring to the north tower.

That leaves unanswered one of the most stinging of all the questions about fire operations that day. Even though the north tower stood 29 minutes longer than the south tower, at least 121 firefighters did not escape from it. While chiefs in the north tower lobby issued orders to come down, they received no response.

The accounts of witnesses and firefighters who survived suggests that most of the men in the building simply did not know how much trouble they were in. Witnesses said that scores of firefighters, unaware of the peril, were resting on the 19th floor of the north tower during its final minutes. Some firefighters who managed to get out said they had no idea the other building had already fallen, and said that they thought that few of those who perished knew.

In February, even as the department was beginning a study of its Sept. 11 response, fire officials declined invitations to listen to the Port Authority's tape, which was recovered by Port Authority police officers from the rubble.

Not until the tape's existence was reported by The New York Times in July did fire officials decide to listen to it. Mr. Scoppetta has said that his aides did not tell him about the tape.

By then, the department's study of the Sept. 11 response was all but complete. The consulting firm that was conducting the study, McKinsey & Company, sent one of its associates to listen to the tape and to hear the analysis by the Port Authority, according to Carlos Kirjner, the McKinsey official who led the study.

In the end, Mr. Kirjner said that, even with the tape, it was not clear that the repeater had worked flawlessly throughout the buildings. No one could prudently ignore the perspective of senior fire chiefs, who had tested the system and believed it was not operating, he said.

"We came to the conclusion that arguing about the different versions was not a fruitful exercise," Mr. Kirjner said. So the report from McKinsey addressed the communications failure from the perspective of the fire chiefs, who believed the repeater did not work. Mr. Kirjner, who has a doctorate in electrical engineering and specializes in wireless communication, said his firm did not take a position on the repeater.

At the Port Authority, officials have long felt that the complaint about the failure of the repeater simply shifted the blame. While blame for the catastrophe is the subject of many lawsuits, Port Authority officials have resented the suggestion that their equipment failed.

The repeater was installed on the top floor of 5 World Trade Center after the first terrorist bombing in 1993. "During our radio coverage tests, we concluded that the system worked exceptionally well," Deputy Fire Commissioner Steven Gregory wrote in a 1994 letter to Allen Reiss, the Port Authority official who oversaw the installation.

On Sept. 11, it did not seem to be working well to Battalion Chiefs Joseph Pfeifer and Orio Palmer, two of the first chiefs to respond. They tested their radios but could not hear each other, an effort that was recorded by the repeater tape.

One possible explanation, according to a Port Authority radio expert who reviewed the tape, is that the problems originated with a radio console that had been set up in the lobby by the Port Authority at the request of the Fire Department. The console resembled a telephone and served as a fire radio. The official suggested that a broken earpiece could have made it impossible for Chief Pfeifer to hear Chief Palmer. Another possible explanation is that the volume had been turned all the way down before they arrived.

In any event, Chief Pfeifer needed to establish communications quickly, so he turned to a backup repeater in his car, the tape makes clear. That repeater also did not appear to work. When the second plane hit, Chief Palmer was dispatched into the south tower with a senior chief, Donald Burns. There, both were able to speak over the trade center's repeater channel that had stymied Chief Palmer a few minutes earlier.

Chief Palmer took an elevator to the 40th or 41st floor, and then climbed on foot to the 78th floor within 30 minutes. As he ascended, he radioed reports on the conditions to the chief in the lobby and to other firefighters in the stairwells.

To Port Authority officials, those reports from the core of the building showed the repeater worked in the most difficult of environments.

Despite a public position that the repeater did not work, the city's top officials now want to replicate the trade center's system in high rises all over the city. Indeed, two weeks ago, Mr. Scoppetta sent a letter to the Port Authority saying that the mayor wanted the technical plans for the trade center's repeater system.

"The City of New York contemplates using the WTC Radio Repeater system as a model for future system development throughout the City," Mr. Scoppetta wrote.

ew York's Congressional delegation and the leaders of several Lower Manhattan organizations have accused federal and state officials of distorting the statistics of a major Sept. 11 aid program to make it appear that it had done a better job of distributing cash grants.

The accusations involve the Individual and Family Grant program, which had been promoted by Gov. George E. Pataki and other officials as the ultimate safety net for people who had lost their jobs, had property damaged or needed to be reimbursed for air-quality equipment.

One month ago, the state's Department of Labor, which administers the program, admitted that it had not even reviewed more than half the roughly 70,000 applications. And department officials said the awards they had made totaled only $10.5 million, a figure well below the size of awards offered in other emergencies by other states in recent years.

But last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides 75 percent of the program's financing, issued a news release heralding a striking improvement. Of the 95,000 people who had applied through Oct. 24, the release said, almost 85,000 had been approved for nearly $24 million in assistance.

In just one month, the approval rate jumped to 89 percent from 13 percent.

Legislators and others, though, say the improvement has been nothing more than semantics and manipulation of numbers. The agencies have created a category called "approved pending," which the program's critics say actually means no decision made, and no money granted. As a result, six members of Congress wrote to Mr. Pataki this week demanding clarification.

"It seems that the New York State Department of Labor is using Enron accounting to report on how they are taking care of New Yorkers who need help after 9/11," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat.

State and FEMA officials conceded that the new category did not represent real awards made, but rather the possibility that awards would be forthcoming, provided that applicants furnished sufficient proof. But they defended their overall performance. "It's more of a positive way of looking at where those people stand," said Robert M. Lillpopp, a spokesman for the Department of Labor.

If nothing else, the demand for assistance is still strong. In the last two months, the number of applicants to the program has doubled. On most days, people line up as early as 6 a.m. in front of FEMA's assistance center at 141 Worth Street to apply.

But with that demand has come discontent. Last week, several community groups protested in front of the Department of Labor's New York City office, demanding reforms. And today, dozens of residents of Lower Manhattan are expected to voice their complaints at a City Council hearing, and urge an extension of the Nov. 30 application deadline for grants.

To ease the crush, FEMA has lent the state 150 employees to process claims. As a result, of the 104,000 people who had applied as of yesterday, 29,000 had been finally approved for aid totaling $28.3 million, while the backlog had dropped to only 3,000 — numbers that also represent a marked improvement from the previous month, Mr. Lillpopp said.

In its news release, however, FEMA chose to count as approved the 60,000 or so cases that had previously been labeled as pending, or suspended, because of a lack of documentation.

It was a designation, officials said, that reflected more accurately the possibility that those who had not yet received assistance could still reapply, since a recent FEMA study found that 85 percent of those rejected under the old rules mainly lacked documentation like receipts.

"The numbers are changed to reflect accurate accounting data," said James McIntyre, a spokesman for FEMA. "The state shouldn't be held responsible for 64,000 people who have elected not to return the receipts."

Program officials said that they had mailed out letters encouraging people to submit receipts. But Ray Brescia, of the Urban Justice Center, an advocacy group for poor and homeless New Yorkers, said that the few people who had received such letters say that the language is confusing, with no clear indication that an applicant has been approved.