He said the utility stood by the emergency plan and welcomed feedback from federal nuclear and emergency experts.

People who have lost power, water and roofs - as well as emergency experts across the country - will be closely gauging the agency's performance in the days ahead.

The city has sent police divers, boats, emergency experts and equipment to the crash site, and dozens of officers have helped provide security at the hotel where the families are staying and at Kennedy International Airport.

"Emergency experts around the country say that an increasingly formalized relationship among them has apparently paid off in the Hurricane Charley effort, with a system of conference calls and e-mail messages that have been used to share state resources and federal ones.

As Australia prepared to land an international force in East Timor to restore order, a United Nations emergency expert was able to travel out of the capital for the first time today to visit the largest concentration of refugees remaining in the territory.

On the United Nations secretariat side, Secretary General Kofi Annan has appointed Kamel Morjane, a skilled Tunisian relief and emergency expert who studied in Switzerland and the United States, as his special representative.

International Committee of the Red Cross emergency experts assessed the capacity of the city's main medical facilities, the water and sanitation infrastructure of Port-au-Prince's Cité Soleil neighbourhood, and the assistance needs of those living in makeshift camps.

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani defended his plan to build a $15 million emergency control center in the World Trade Center complex yesterday, as emergency experts questioned its viability, City Council members complained that they had not been consulted and radio hosts turned it into a punch line.