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NEW YORK (AP) — A week after the horrifying fall of the World Trade Center, officials faced a crucial decision: When should they concede that rescue efforts are futile and move full-time into the grimmer task of recovering the dead? 

With only five survivors pulled from the smoking ruins — and none since Wednesday, the day after the disaster — the decision, when it comes, will be more symbolic than real. 

But freed of the responsibility of moving gingerly so that lives might be saved, heavy equipment operators and bucket brigades will be able to step up the pace of clearing a seven-story pyramid of debris. 

It will also mean that thousands of relatives and friends will have to move on, and accept that their loved ones are dead. 

The debris is being hauled by dump trucks to an area near the recently closed Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. There it is spread out and sifted by FBI agents and detectives for airplane pieces and other evidence that could help explain what occurred aboard the jetliners and help build a criminal case. 

While recognizing that the odds on finding people alive are “very slim,” as Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said, city officials declined to say when the change in mission might occur, or even whether it would be announced. 

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Monday he is not yet ready to abandon the search for survivors. 

“I’ve been told by experts that people survive for longer periods than the six days that have gone by since the attack,” Giuliani said. “The simple reality is that we’re not going to be able to recover significant numbers of people, but we will continue to try.” 

On Sunday, workers reached the deepest part of the trade center’s underground complex, the PATH commuter train station 80 feet down. 

Allen Morrison, a spokesman for the Port Authority that operated the Trade Center complex, said it appears no one was in the station when the towers collapsed. 

“After the first plane hit, we ordered all the trains with passengers on board to return to New Jersey, then we swept the entire station for any people still there, and stationed police at the entrances to keep anyone else out,” Morrison said. 

It was not clear whether the same actions were taken at the shopping concourse just above the station. 

There are still some levels to be searched and “we need a better handle on what the conditions are within those levels,” said Peter Bakersky, the on-scene search and rescue coordinator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

The search went on Monday without any good news. Giuliani said 5,422 people were still missing, and just 201 deaths had been confirmed. Much of downtown Manhattan, including the financial markets, reopened just blocks from the smoking ruins of the Trade Center. 

While the move from rescue to recovery is seldom sharply defined, “the political leadership has to make that determination,” Bakersky said. 

“Have we had any live victims that were pulled out? Were there any areas that they could survive in? Just because there have been none, there is still a sense of a possibility,” he said. 

A forensic pathologist who worked on the 1993 Trade Center bombing that killed six people said there was no doubt that everyone aboard the two Boeing 767 jetliners perished. But building collapses often offer hope that people found shelter in protected spaces. 

In the Trade Center’s underground passages, “it would be possible for someone to live for some time, even weeks, if they had water — rainwater or firefighters’ water — and there was no pressure on their bodies,” said the pathologist, who asked not to be identified by name. 

Many victims probably were incinerated in the fireballs of jet fuel that roared through upper floors of the towers. Many others were dismembered in the crashes or the collapses that followed. Firefighters and others at the scene have reported finding few intact bodies. 

The heat of the fire — estimated by FEMA at 1,700 degrees — would make identification difficult because it consumed smaller body parts, said Dr. Steven Symes, a professor of forensic pathology at the University of Tennessee.