The dangers were considerable and the task Herculean. The stench of burnt and burning material was overwhelming. Gone were all the yellow taxis, vendors and brash New Yorkers that had lent the city its vitality. Scraps of litter hung from blasted trees. Volunteers distributed food and water to exhausted rescue workers resting on chairs pulled from once-chic restaurants. The roar of a thousand generators drowned out the helicopters hovering overhead.ĭown the adjacent side streets everything was blanketed in ghostly grey dust, eliminating all colour save for the odd traffic light. Behind them, fleets of emergency vehicles formed a sea of flashing blue lights. Around the edges, cranes and mechanical claws were advancing on the foothills. Over this giant grey sarcophagus crawled thousands of workers in yellow high-vis jackets, searching with dogs for survivors, lowering microphones into cavities, slicing through girders with power saws that spilled showers of orange sparks. It was truly an apocalyptic scene, but equally astounding – and inspiring – was the epic scale of the rescue operation. I have reported from war zones around the world, and from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, but such utter devastation in the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities was as shocking as anything I have seen. Poignant reminders of a shattered normality littered the debris – bits of window blind, financial statements, telephone bills, a half-melted keyboard, the odd shoe, a Standard & Poor canvas bag. All around, forming a vast floodlit amphitheatre, were blackened skyscrapers. The splayed bones of the South Tower’s lower storeys protruded from the summit like so many strips of Meccano. That night I spent five hours walking over the mountain of smoking rubble that was once the Twin Towers. This was long before journalists were allowed anywhere near the disaster zone. They put my car between their two fire engines and we drove – sirens blaring – straight into New York, straight into Manhattan, past crowds of cheering well-wishers, and straight into Ground Zero. Driving to New York, I stopped at a town called Liberty, Pennsylvania, just as its firemen were leaving to join the rescue effort. There were still no flights within North America so I rented the last car available, a big black Lincoln Continental. When transatlantic flights resumed three days later, I caught the second one – to Toronto. As a human being I was appalled at what I had seen on television, but I confess that as a reporter I felt a keen sense of anticipation as this would be by far the biggest and most consequential story I had ever covered. ‘Get to New York,’ my editor in London said. As with President Kennedy’s assassination, or the first moon landing, everyone over a certain age remembers where they were when two hijacked planes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center 20 years ago next month.
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