My report grew longer by the minute. It ran, updated in real time, as MSNBC.com’s cover story. I drew together eye-witness accounts — my own and those of others — writing and rewriting as the catastrophe mounted. The lede kept changing throughout the day. This is what it finally morphed into by the time I quit writing.
NEW YORK, Sept. 11 -- It was the scene of a nightmare: people on fire jumping in terror from the two World Trade Center towers just before the buildings collapsed, splinters of debris falling from the sky like surreal confetti, deadly smoke blackening the air and, in the aftermath of the devastation, an exodus of thousands of New Yorkers coated in white ash streaming on foot for hours across the city's bridges.
The report ran at great length under the headline, “Nightmare scene in New York City,” with a photo of people in flight. (Both have disappeared from the site.) Too long to reproduce in full, here’s an excerpt. Besides, I’d rather not reprise all the horrors.
For some downtown workers, this was a day of work that never began. "I just saw the building I work in come down," said businessman Gabriel Ioan, in shock outside City Hall, a cloud of smoke and ash from the World Trade Center behind him.
MSNBC.com producer Steve Johnson told me he was standing about six blocks from the towers in lower Manhattan. "About five minutes before the tower fell, you could see people jumping from the upper floors," he said. "I watched six either fall or jump. ... The police rolled up in vans. Suddenly the top of the tower just shattered into tens of thousands of pieces. You could see the walls peel away. The whole thing just disappeared. Then the smoke came up. The cops started yelling, 'Get back! Run! Get away!' I ran inside a hotel, and it went black outside because of the dust."
And here’s an excerpt toward the end of the story:
In Brooklyn, across the East River from Manhattan, "the situation is chaos," MSNBC.com producer Michelle Preli reported to me. "The Manhattan Bridge and Brooklyn Bridge are just full of people covered in white ash. There's a huge smell of char in the air. People are walking with masks, with their shirts off. People are trying to get away any way they can. People are crying, watching in disbelief. It's total shock. It seems all the medical units, ambulances, fire services from Brooklyn have been called in."
The shock reached uptown Manhattan with a peculiar delay. On the Upper West Side, where I could see police helicopters standing in the sky like sentinels along the Hudson River, it was all eerily calm. "There are people eating in the restaurants," Andras Szanto, a staff member at Columbia University, observed. "It is a glorious sunny day — after a rainstorm of biblical proportions last night — and this perfect fall day makes it even more surreal. At first sight everything seems normal," Szanto continued. "Then you notice strangers huddled around radios, students gazing at TVs in the cafes, lines at the bank for cash." A sign on a Starbucks coffee shop said, "Due to the terrorist attack we are closed today."
Finally:
Five hours after the towers collapsed, people were still streaming on foot across all levels of the Manhattan Bridge as they left the disaster area.
The day after 9/11 I reported from midtown Manhattan.
NEW YORK, Sept. 12, 2001 -- Times Square, the fabled crossroads of the world, was nearly deserted Wednesday. Normally packed with pedestrians and jammed with traffic, this symbol of the city's hustle was a sleepy plaza at noon time a day after the catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center. If you listened closely, you could hear the stop lights blink: The hush was that quiet. Giant-sized video screens in Times Square usually play to streets filled with shutterbug tourists gawking at the neon wilderness. Not today. "They say this city never sleeps," said Victor Tahiri, 31, standing in his Mr. Softee ice cream van. "It sleeps. Look at this. Nobody."
And the stench of char stung the air for many months afterward.
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