The city’s Law Department yesterday made public more than 1,600 additional recordings of calls to emergency operators on September 11, 2001, but lawyer Norman Siegel and the victims’ families he represents questioned the delay of the release.

The Fire Department released the recordings after discovering a cache of tapes of calls made to dispatchers by firefighters, and to 911 operators by civilians, that had not been released.

A judge in the New York State Court of Appeals ordered all the city’s tapes related to September 11 released after the New YorkTimes and families of victims filed a Freedom of Information Act request. In March,130 of those calls were released. The voices of the callers were redacted from the recordings because the judge ruled that the callers had a right to privacy.

The fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, said the city’s failure to release all the tapes at once was a product of bad management and not intentional deception.

“How and why did this happen?” Mr. Siegel asked, and added that bad management might be a sign of wider problems in the Fire Department. He called on Mayor Bloomberg to guarantee New Yorkers that the city had no more tapes to release.

The families Mr. Siegel and his cocounsel represent said they felt the delayed release of the recordings was another example of the city’s attempts to cover up a gross emergency management failure on September 11. They rejected Mr. Bloomberg’s statements that the tapes should not be released in their uncensored form because it would be too emotional for families and New Yorkers.

“I think the real issue here is to protect the families,” the mayor said. “Sadly, those who are on the tapes are no longer with us, and reliving that and reminding people of that may very well be painful to a lot of families.”

“I buried my son,” the mother of a fallen firefighter, Rosemary Cain, said. “What is more powerful than that? There is nothing in the world that can put a knife in my heart like 9/11. …There is nothing that could happen to me in my life that can be more powerful than that day.”

A retired Fire Department captain who was buried in the rubble on September 11, Al Fuentes, said the tapes should be released in full because it is the only way the emergency response to the attacks can be reconstructed. With that knowledge, the city can prepare better for a future disaster, which is a near certainty, he said.

“We’re making some headways,” he said. “But we haven’t addressed the emergency operators as first responders,” and the harbor is still vulnerable, he said.

The recordings released yesterday contain one four-minute section where the voice of the caller was not redacted. Melissa Doi, 32, calls a 911 operator from the 83rd floor of the south tower at 9:17 a.m. and asks for help. The first four minutes of the call are not redacted because the recording was played during the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.

“I don’t see any air anymore,” she says. “All I see is smoke. I’m going to die, aren’t I? I’m going to die. I don’t want to die. It’s so hot. I’m burning up.”

The operator keeps Doi on the line, telling her to keep low and say her prayers, but the line goes dead after 24 minutes.