NEW YORK—They had no water, hardly any air and no way out.

In frantic, confused radio dispatches from inside a burning toxic skyscraper near ground zero last August, firefighters made a series of desperate pleas for help as they encountered boarded-up stairwells and a broken water pipe, got lost in the smoke and ran out of air.

They had to saw through wood to get up the stairs and run a hose up the side of the building from a hydrant on the ground; some ended up jumping from windows to escape.

“We’re on 17 but we ain’t going much past the stairway,” one firefighter said from the floor where the Aug. 18, 2007, blaze began. “There’s fire up here, no water, ah, we gotta stay on air the whole time here too. So we ain’t gonna stay up here too long.”

The emergency radio transmissions were released Thursday in a 176-page report on the Fire Department of New York’s response to the disaster at the government-owned building, which was being cleaned of toxic debris and dismantled floor by floor.

Firefighters Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino were found dead of smoke inhalation on the 14th floor of the former Deutsche Bank tower, a building heavily damaged in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Prosecutors are investigating a litany of failures at the government-run project, which was inspected by city and environmental regulators and owned by a state rebuilding agency.

Beddia, 53, and Graffagnino, 33, did not send distress calls, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said. The emergency radio dispatches came from 16 different radios, but the firefighters aren’t identified.

The fire department’s report acknowledged that its inspectors had not been to the building for over a year and if they had, would have been able to point out the maze of hazards that awaited more than 100 firefighters.

“It was very, very important that the building had not been inspected, and we will deal with that,” Scoppetta said. He said his department would begin its own inquiry into actions before the blaze once the criminal investigation is complete.

Among the hazards: The pipe supplying water to fire hoses was broken and the sprinklers didn’t work, stairwells were blocked with plywood paneling meant to keep toxic debris in, no working elevator existed inside the building, and an air pressure system created more smoke.

“It’s starting to get bad up here,” another firefighter reported close to an hour after the blaze was reported. “We gotta breach some of this, ah, plywood to get the hell outta here. It’s getting bad. We’re losing visibility.”

It took 67 minutes for the firefighters to get water to fight the blaze, which was reported 13 minutes after it started, the report said. Construction workers at the scene told firefighters the standpipe was working, and the department wasted 20 minutes trying to activate it before attaching a hose to a nearby hydrant, the report said.

Firefighters sent more than 30 distress signals, including 14 maydays, from inside the burning tower, but some weren’t heard because commanders and others kept the lines open. Scoppetta said the firefighters would receive more training in “radio discipline.”

“Some messages were not being received. Everybody was speaking over them,” Scoppetta said.

The first call came 45 minutes after firefighters went into the building: “It’s starting to get hot.” Twenty minutes later, firefighters were jumping out the 14th floor-windows and onto scaffolding to escape the smoke.

“It just blew through the wall here. We’re going over on the scaffold,” one firefighter said. Eight minutes later, another distress call: “I’m in the stairwell. I need help.”