One big shrug.

For 16 hours yesterday, that was the response from the people who run TWA.

Their 747 had gone down in the Atlantic. With it went 230 lives. The questions from the relatives were both desperate and sad.

"Were my children on that plane?"

"Is there any chance my mother is alive?"

"Has the time come to give up all hope?"

And where were the people who run TWA? They ran off, and they hid.

"We're now 15 hours after the crash, and the parents have not been notified by a TWA representative," fumed Frank Capozzi. He and his wife had put their 11-year exchange student on the Paris flight. Now, they were waiting for some kind of word at the Kennedy Airport Ramada.

Waiting and waiting and waiting.

"They don't have tickets for these people yet," Capozzi said. "They don't have flights confirmed. It's just been chaos. We have been treated very poorly. Backs have been turned on us by the people at TWA. And I think they need to be brought to task . . . If you wanted to get in touch with a TWA representative with some authority, with some knowledge about what's going on, it's very, very difficult."

This will be the end of TWA, a once-great airline built by Howard Hughes.

These grieving families would have had an easier time arranging a dinner date with the late billionaire - than getting a crumb of straight information out of today's TWA.

When it comes to "elusive," Hughes had nothing on these guys.

At noon yesterday, Jeffrey Erickson, the airline's sniff-necked CEO, finally walked across the concrete of Kennedy Airport's Hangar 14. He stopped behind a podium, and he began to speak.

He probably shouldn't have bothered.

"This is a personal tragedy for all of us," the CEO said in a smarmy, melodramatic tone.

And that was pretty much that.

Thirty seconds later, the man was marching off.

He would not answer a single question. He would not release a reliable passenger list. He would not take responsibility for anything.

For all the respect he showed these grieving families, CEO Erickson should be out of the airline business by 6 o'clock tonight.

In the annals of bad corporate relations, there is Union Carbide, the poisoner of Bhopal. There is Exxon, whose tanker soiled Valdez.

And now, there is TWA, an airline that had a terrible accident - and responded with a shrug.

Mayor Giuliani spoke for all New Yorkers when he went berzerk about this yesterday. Here it was, hours and hours after the crash, and still no passenger list.

"There are mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters who are in there waiting and wondering," he complained in the heat of the Ramada parking lot. "The delay is being caused by TWA management at the top, and it is outrageous."

An outrage compounded by what now appears to be a lie.

When confronted about the unconscionable delay, Erickson and his lieutenants claimed the National Transportation Safety Board had insisted the manifest be kept under wraps.

"Not true," NTSB chairman Jim Hall told Giuliani in a telephone call.

"Not true."

After Erickson skunked away from the hangar, he left behind his hapless PR man. Mark Abels, this fellow is named. And he made matters only worse.

"We're sorry the mayor's disappointed," he sniffed. "We agree wholeheartedly with him that we wish would could do it faster. But we are a little more interested in doing it right."

So this is doing it right?

Keeping families in the dark?

Refusing to answer questions?

Lying about what federal safety officials demand?

All of this left the victim's families dangling needlessly. It made things that much harder for the volunteer psychiatrists who turned out to help.

"The absense of closure adds to the emotional toll on the families," said an exhausted-sounding Paul Ofman, mental-health director for the American Red Cross. "The longer people wait for information, the longer there are questions that are unanswered, the emotional toll is all the greater.

"I think what we're doing right now is just trying to provide as much information and clarity as we can," said Dr. Alan Manevitz, a staff psychiatrist at New York Hospital who had also been up all night been counseling family members.

But with TWA's big shrug, that hadn't proved easy to do.

"Each person in here is suffering such a personal tragedy," Manevitz said. "We're dealing with it as best we can."