September 11: The day that changed our world forever
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, was a defining day for the world. For me, it’s 15 years since I was standing five blocks from the north tower when it came down, writes Herald Sun Editor Damon Johnston.
News
Don't miss out on the headlines from News . Followed categories will be added to My News.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, was a defining day for the world. For me, it was a day that lasted an entire year.
It’s 15 years since I was standing five blocks from the north tower.
This story recalls what I saw and some of the people I met that morning and during the never-ending year that came next.
GROUND ZERO, NEW YORK - September 11, 2002
NINETY minutes. That’s how long it takes to read close to 3000 names.
In alphabetical order they ring out around the hole in the ground. Sometimes it’s just the name. Other times the name comes with a personal preamble: “and my husband ...” or “and my daughter ...”.
Others are followed by simple messages: “… when I look back at these days I realise how much I truly miss you and how much I truly love you. You were the best father I could ever ask for. I’ll always love you.”
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani started the roll call. He was replaced by a series of family members who read out a batch, including the name of their relative, then walk into the giant six-storey deep cement tub in which the twin towers stood and throw flowers into a pond. And on it went for an hour and a half. Excruciating, suffocating mass grief.
I had a ringside seat to the saddest show on Earth.
At 10.37am — the exact time the north tower of the World Trade Centre collapsed a year earlier — it finished. It was early, but it was time for a drink. Five blocks north sits the Reade Street Pub.
In those first few weeks after the attack, it was the closest working pub to Ground Zero. A year on, barman Mike Hickey is still serving. Jack Daniels thanks. Straight’s fine.
GROUND ZERO, NEW YORK - A few days earlier
RICHARD DENNIS flew from the Gold Coast to New York in search of something tangible of Kevin. He knew, of course, that his only son had died in the north tower.
A currency analyst for Cantor Fitzgerald, Kevin worked on the 105th floor.
Richard wanted something to touch.
In a few days, he would be among the relatives allowed to enter Ground Zero.
“I have nothing,’’ he tells me.
“Kevin’s remains have not been found. He just went to work one day and vanished into dust. I’m going to scoop up some dust, put it in an urn, and take him back to Australia.
For me, the dust represents Kevin. That’s all I have.
“Then I’m going to leave New York and never come back.”
YARDLEY, PENNSYLVANIA - August 2002
ABOUT 100km southwest of lower Manhattan, I’m sitting with three women as they rise and crash on an invisible rollercoaster.
We’re in a double-storey house on a leafy street in the Pennsylvanian hamlet of Yardley.
Tara Bane, Fiona Havlish and Ellen Saracini lived with their husbands in this idyllic well-to-do community on the banks of the Delaware River.
“I live in the quietest house now,” Tara reflects, looking around the lounge.
The women didn’t know each other before September 11 but were brought together by their loss.
“We make one whole person, that is the running joke,’’ Ellen says. “Together we can do anything, but alone we can’t do anything.’’
Fiona chips in: “We’re one hell of a woman.’’
Each of the women calmly recounts their 9/11.
Victor Saracini was the captain on United Airlines Flight 175, which hijackers flew into the south tower at 9.03am.
The evening before, Victor was his typically upbeat, positive self. He made his wife laugh and told her he loved her.
Tara’s husband, Michael Bane, worked on the 100th floor of the north tower as an assistant vice-president of the casualty claims division of Marsh & McLennan.
Michael rose at 5.30am on September 11, fed the dogs, kissed his wife goodbye, smiled and said, “I love you’’, before walking out the door.
Tara says she has been haunted for months about whether her husband jumped, was burnt alive, died of smoke inhalation or was crushed in the collapse.
Fiona Havlish’s husband, Donald — a senior vice-president for AON Corporation — was working on the 101st floor of the south tower.
Donald called home at 8.51am to say there had been an accident in the other tower, but Fiona wasn’t there.
He left a message saying he would call back. He never got the chance.
Fiona matter-of-factly recalls how Donald’s left femur was finally found under a ramp built for trucks to have access to the disaster site.
They call it their “9/11 friendship rules’’, the most important of which is a ban on more than one of them getting down at once.
“We don’t allow all of us to crash at the same time,’’ Ellen says. “I know that if Tara is having a hard day, I don’t have a hard day that day.
“And I don’t. It’s not always about you. I think we have learned that.’’
THE CHURCH OF SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISO, WEST 31ST ST - August 2002
SITTING in his simple office, Father Brian Carroll pauses for a long time when I ask him if he knows how Mychal Judge started his last day alive.
“I can tell you exactly how it began because I was there,” he finally responds.
Judge was a larger-than-life Franciscan priest who lived at Saint Francis and was the Fire Department of New York chaplain.
On that Tuesday morning, Father Carroll rounded from West 31st St into Sixth Ave and heard a rumble.
“My God, that’s loud,” he said, looking up to see a passenger jet. Then he saw the jet go in.
Father Carroll burst into his friary and raced up the three flights of steps to Mychal Judge’s room.
The friar was sitting on the edge of his pullout bed, his head cradled in one hand in contemplation.
“Mychal, get up, get up. You have got to go.”
“What?”
“I just saw an airliner hit the World Trade Centre.”
“Oh my God, you’re kidding.”
“No, they’re going to need you. You have got to get going.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Judge threw off his robes and sandals and pulled on the firefighter’s clothes and black boots he kept in the cupboard.
“Mychal, good luck,” Father Carroll said, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder. Judge paused to comb his neat grey hair before dashing across the road to his car at the fire station where Engine 1, Ladder 24 was housed.
Judge would die an hour later. Killed by falling debris.
The photo of his lifeless body being carried by four men in an office chair is memorable.
Judge was classified as the first official victim of the day.
Almost a year later, I am sitting with Father Carroll again.
We are in Bryant Park. It is warm and the first anniversary of the attack is approaching. I ask him how he’s going.
“I was laughing the other day. I was watching some people, strangers, I think, screaming at each other on the street.
“No one has more certitude about everything than a New Yorker. The problem is we have millions of certain people. We are back to normal, I think.’’
Then, a low-flying passenger jet out of La Guardia, the closest airport to Manhattan, screeches overhead, and Father Carroll looks up.
“Look at that. Why do they have to fly so low? Are they doing it just to f--- with our heads?’’ he asks.
Then Father Carroll starts crying.
“As I step back now, I am only realising for myself how the trauma affected me,’’ he says.
“I saw the first plane crash into the building with my own eyes.
“It was only last month, looking out of my apartment window, which is a high-rise, watching jets fly overhead down the Hudson, that I myself for the first time wept.
“For the first time I allowed myself to realise that I watched all those people ...’’ he pauses, openly weeping, “become incinerated.”
“You know, that’s what I am working through myself.
“I have not allowed myself to grieve.
“I lost Mychal and I would not allow myself to grieve.
“Here I am only recently coming to terms with the fact that I watched with my own eyes in real time — not on TV — people die.’’
Father Carroll has quit the church.
“I don’t want to live alone. No, I want to have someone in my life to share it with, and I made the decision to move on,’’ he says.
GUANTANAMO BAY - Saturday, February 23, 2002
IT doesn’t take long to shuffle around the edges of a cage about two metres wide and three metres long. The man in the orange is doing it in about 20 seconds.
Then he starts again. And again. And again. And again. I lose count of how many times he goes around. He never looks up once. Head always bowed.
In another cage to his left, another man in an orange sat rocking.
And just to their right, one orange inmate is out of his cage but still far from free.
A US Marine either side, he is marched to a temporary wooden interrogation hut.
They look broken. There are dozens of them; Afghans, Pakistanis, Saudi Arabians, Uzbeks, Yemenis and even an Aussie called David Hicks.
They have mostly been captured on the battlefield of Afghanistan by US forces. Bundled into a military plane and landed in what then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dubbed “the least worst place on Earth”.
Camp X-Ray opened several weeks earlier to handle the influx of about 300 captured Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda fighters. Six hundred US Marines armed with everything from 50-calibre cannon to shotguns watching on.
There’s no denying it is a dog pound. Human beings being held in open-air cages.
This is brutal. I know they are being interrogated, probably with violence in the temporary wooden huts.
But I don’t care. Serves you all right, I think to myself. You’re where you belong. In orange. In a cage. In the middle of nowhere. To me, they may as well be Mohamed Atta the terror leader who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and flew it into the north tower.
WEST BROADWAY, NEW YORK - September 11, 2001
“That’s me, I’m not going any further.”
My yellow cab ride from our Upper West Side home is over at the streets where Canal St and Avenue of the America’s crisscross. I pay him $50. As I get out, the radio commentator says the south tower has fallen.
It’s too big to fall down. Can’t be right. But I look south and I can only see one tower, the north. Smoke is pouring from the top 15 storeys but it is standing.
I reach West Broadway and head south. Not running, but walking with a sense of urgency, Crossing Lispenard, Walker, White, Franklin and Leonard streets, I’m on the mobile dictating copy back to the Herald Sun newsroom.
I reach the intersection of West Broadway and Chambers. I’m standing in the middle of the road. Black smoke is belching from the top and chunks of the skyscraper are breaking off.
Below the smoke, an orange rim glows. I slow down, but keep walking towards Warren St. Four more streets — Murray, Park, Barclay and Vesey — and I’ll reach the tower.
But then I stop. The top 15 or so floors shudder, twist and dislocate. A fireball squirts from the glow. I can hear a noise like a growl.
Most of the damage appears to be hundreds of metres high. Yet the sound rumbles from deep down. It takes about 10 seconds for 110 storeys to collapse in a grey fountain in front me. I’m five blocks away.
The ash starts barrelling towards me. It’s moving real quick, wrapping around buildings, swallowing everything. I turn and run, mobile to my ear, laptop bag thumping my side. I turn around, the storm cloud has closed to within 20 metres. I realise I cannot outrun it. I’m about to be swallowed.
There’s a parked car — can I squeeze underneath it? I begin to slide under. Then I see a man under a restaurant awning. Maybe he beckons me. Maybe in my panic I decide the restaurant offers me my best chance. Doesn’t matter which. I make a run for it.
As I reach him, the cloud reaches me. The brilliant blue sky turns grey, then brown, then black. My throat chokes. My eyes sting in their contact lenses. I taste scorched metal and burned plastic. We bang on the door of what I later discover is the Delphi Greek restaurant.
A woman inside fumbles with the deadlock, then gives up.
I’m having trouble breathing. I am trapped outside. The woman signals to a side door. We crawl towards it, my mind fleetingly recalls the childhood message to stay low to avoid smoke — right now, given the plumes at pavement level, I think somewhat indignantly the advice is utterly wrong.
At the side door, the woman again cannot unlock the door. My survival instinct kicks in. I start kicking the glass door. The glass shatters but does not break. I hear a voice screaming, “Open the f---ing door” and register a moment later that it is mine.
A man appears beside the woman with fresh instructions — go back to the original door. We crawl back on our hands and knees. He opens it and we fall inside.
I spit and gag and splutter before guzzling a bottle of water. I am coated in dust: even the narrow niches between the numbers of my phone are filmed in grime.
Being engulfed in smoke seemed to last forever. It was probably no more than 20 seconds.
Outside, the false night continues. Ash now sits ankle deep in a moonscape where showers of office documents — many of them ripped legal and accounting papers — float through the haze.
I venture out. Closer to what would soon be known as Ground Zero, cars have burst into flames. They boom one after the other. Ambulance and fire sirens wail.
Out of the gloom materialises a ghost, a fireman whose face has frozen with shock, his mouth sagging open, his forehead gashed. He can’t speak. We give him some water. We point him to a first aid station setting up on the street. I start interviewing survivors and witnesses.
Few injured people wander away from Ground Zero. A doctor at a streetside medical clinic comments on this.
“We assume everyone is dead,” he says.
A man was in the building’s foyer when the planes struck. He saw a badly burned man stumble from the lifts, “his skin hanging”.
The police have begun to regain control of the area. We slowly edge closer to the ruins of the World Trade Centre.
Police begin to throw up roadblocks. A man asking for medical volunteers draws our attention. Maybe he’s heading into the middle of it. We hop in his small car, and soon discover he is driving the “wrong” way, away from Ground Zero, and towards Chelsea Piers on the Hudson River, a few kilometres north.
We pass many people on this trip. Under their ash coats, they are dressed for the office. They look like columns of World War II refugees fleeing a bombed city.
At Chelsea Piers a frantic operation is underway. The warehouse is being turned into an emergency hospital.
We, the volunteers, are set to clearing a warehouse for the expected onslaught of injured. For an hour, as part of a military-style operation, we move boxes and furniture.
The warehouse will be divided into four colour zonings.
Green for the “walking wounded”, yellow for seriously injured, red for the critically injured and black for the dead.
Doctors turn up, as do medical supplies such as surgical gowns, bandages and instruments.
I am assigned to help in the “red” zone — the area reserved for the critically injured. I ask the doctor what he wants. He reels off a list of supplies, and predicts we’ll see plenty of “combat-style” injuries and “blunt trauma”.
Dr David Kasserman is a trauma surgeon from Ohio. He’s in Manhattan for a medical conference. I’m assigned to his makeshift surgical bed which was just a folding table.
“Do you know how to fit a drip?” “No.” What do you know about medicine?”
“Nothing”.
“Do not touch a patient unless I say so.”
“OK.”
“This is important. Your face will give away a patient’s condition to them. Whatever you see, no matter how bad a patient is, it’s important when you look them in the eye your face doesn’t give this away.”
“OK.”
“I’ve worked for more than a decade as a surgeon, but I’ve never done combat surgery, and this is what I reckon it’ll be like. I just don’t know whether we have the stuff we need to do much, but we’ll have to make do. We’re gonna get lots of blunt trauma.”
“If you feel sick, walk over there, do what you have to do, and come back.”
“OK.”
So here I am as a surgeon’s assistant in Chelsea Piers, listening to rumours about more terrorist attacks. Regular alerts are issued — the injured are on their way.
Once, they announced 500 injured were minutes away. I feel like throwing up.
All the while, I’m working with the doctor getting the makeshift surgical bench ready for our first patient. How badly hurt would they be?
Word spreads that four 747s have been shot down over the Atlantic Ocean because they have been hijacked. It isn’t true. But at the time, in the context of the morning’s events, there is no reason to doubt this. Where is this going to end?
But aside from a couple of firemen having gashes stitched no injured turn up. They are all dead.
It’s about 7pm, and there’s no point staying. There’s no one to help. I leave Chelsea Piers and walk back to the office.
Street after street is deserted. Other than the distant sirens, there is nothing. Just me and these empty streets.
I pass a cantina, buy a sixpack of Miller, and crack open a beer, and keep walking uptown. I still don’t pass anyone. The beer tastes good.
Times Square is empty. The neon signs dazzle and spark, and perhaps for the first time in decades, no one bar me is staring at the flashing lights. I have wended my way through Manhattan.
Back at the office on 1211 Avenue of the Americas, I put the beers by my keyboard and start writing. I write and keep drinking. I wander out for a cab at 2.30am. Usually, even at this time, Sixth Avenue is busy. But there is no one here.
The cab takes me home. I haul myself into the shower, the ash has made my hair feel like steel wool. I stink of burning plastic. I crawl into bed.
The day is over. The year has just begun.
Brewery puts name on global sporting stage
It’s the little brewery that could. A South Gippsland craft brewer is putting its name on a motorsport event with a global audience of more than 100 million people.
West Gate Tunnel build set to close key Docklands route
Brace for more traffic pain linked to the West Gate Tunnel project with a key route in the Docklands set to close.