The city's official estimate of the number of people killed in the September 11 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center has dropped below 3,900 - far lower than the most conservative projections just after the disaster.
And Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Wednesday the tally would likely drop further, perhaps by hundreds, as police detectives continue to pore over the missing-person list to eliminate errors and duplications.
The tally stood Wednesday at 3,899, which includes people whose deaths have been confirmed and those still missing. The total includes people on the ground and on the two hijacked airliners that crashed into the twin towers.
The figure represents a sharp decline from the city's peak estimate of 6,789 dead and missing, which came on Sept. 24.
The main reasons for the drop, city officials say, are the elimination of people reported missing but later found to be alive and multiple missing-person reports on the same individual, sometimes with different name spellings.
As death certificates are issued, Giuliani said Wednesday, "you find out you're resolving the situation for three different people."
He said reports from foreign consulates, some of which overestimated the number of missing foreign nationals by hundreds, also inflated the city's tally.
As the death toll is adjusted, the figure is entering a realm of comparison with two other events in U.S. history that killed massive numbers in a single day: the Civil War battle of Antietam in 1862 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
According to historians and the National Park Service, the Antietam battle on Sept. 17, 1862, was the bloodiest single day on American soil, with some 3,650 soldiers killed. The Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii - then a U.S. territory - took the lives of 2,388 people.
In New York, in the first days after the twin towers collapsed, unofficial death estimates ranged as high as 7,000 to 10,000.
But it soon became evident that the hijacked jets had struck early enough in the day that the trade center was far from full. The towers had 40,000 employees and 150,000 daily visitors.
Independent casualty counts by news organizations have been lower than the city's official figures. An Associated Press tally of confirmed dead and reported dead or missing stood at 2,772 on Wednesday.
AP's figure is based on data from the medical examiner, courts, funeral homes, places of worship, death notices, employers, public agencies, families and AP's foreign bureaus.
Giuliani said Wednesday that the city has issued nearly 2,300 death certificates. Some were issued by the city medical examiner's office after it reached a positive identification, but more than 1,800 were issued without a body. The city and state set up an expedited procedure to obtain a death certificate without a body so that families could quickly get life insurance and other benefits.
(China Daily November 22, 2001)
