spokesperson, said it was almost a fluke that the calls reached their destinations. Marvin Sirbu, professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University said on September 14, 2001, that "The fact of the matter is that cell phones can work in almost all phases of a commercial flight." Other industry experts said that it is possible to use cell phones with varying degrees of success during the ascent and descent of commercial airline flights. After each of the hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center, people inside the towers made calls to family and loved ones; for the victims, this was their last communication. Other callers directed their pleas for help to 9-1-1. Over nine hours of the 9-1-1 calls were eventually released after petitioning by The New York Times and families of the WTC victims. In 2001, U.S. cell phones did not yet have the photography capabilities that became widespread by the mid-2000s. General public After the attack, the cell phone network of New York City was rapidly overloaded (a mass call event) as traffic doubled over normal levels. Cell phone traffic also overloaded across the East Coast, leading to crashes of the cell phone network. Verizon's downtown wire phone service was interrupted for days and weeks because of cut subscriber cables, and to the 140 West Street exchange being shut for days. Capacity between Brooklyn and Manhattan was also diminished by cut trunk cables. Following the attacks, the issues with the cell network weren't resolved until 36 cellular COWs (cell towers on wheels) were deployed by September 14, 2001, in Lower Manhattan to support the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and provide critical phone service to rescue and recovery workers. Since three of the major television broadcast network owned-and-operated stations had their transmission towers atop the North Tower (One World Trade Center), coverage was limited after the collapse of the tower. The FM transmitter of National Public Radio station WNYC was also destroyed in the collapse of the North Tower and its offices evacuated. For an interim period, it continued broadcasting on its AM frequency and used NPR's New York offices to produce its programming. The satellite feed of one television station, WPIX, froze on the last image received from the WTC mast; the image (a remote-camera shot of the burning towers), viewable across North America (as WPIX is available on cable TV in many