Terror, disbelief and lost loved ones
The day the world changed forever
IT is 8.45am on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
Lizzie Dart is at the kitchen table in her apartment in New York City feeding six-monthold baby William as the TV plays in the background.
She is getting ready to take a shirt to a shop to be exchanged and looking forward to a dinner that night with executives from Citibank. Her investmentbanker husband Justin Voller works there.
As Ms Dart turns to get baby William’s bottle, her eyes stop at the TV. The pictures show black smoke billowing from one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
American Airlines flight 11 has just flown into the north tower. Her husband is supposed to be there for a work meeting.
THE DAY THE WORLD CHANGED
Saturday marks 20 years since that morning in New York changed the course of history.
The 9/11 attack was shocking in its scope and audacity as members of the Osama bin Laden-led terrorist group alQa’ida hijacked four commercial jets mid-flight and crashed them into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon.
The fourth plane, United 93, was intended for a target in Washington, likely the Capitol or the White House, but crashed into a field in the state of Pennsylvania.
The images of the twin towers burning and collapsing were broadcast to an audience of billions. By the end of that day, nearly 3000 people were dead, Manhattan’s financial district was in ruins and the US and its allies were again at war.
A month later, the War on Terror began in earnest with the invasion of Afghanistan to hunt bin Laden and the Taliban regime which had sheltered him.
Now, US and Australian forces have left Afghanistan to a resurgent Taliban.
Two decades have past but the events of September 11 cast a long shadow for the Gold Coasters who witnessed it and the families of those lost.
A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER
The first plane hit the World Trade Center at 10.46pm Australian time.
The Gold Coast Bulletin had already gone to print with a front-page story on the MV Tampa refugee crisis when the first newsflash came that there was a fire in one of the twin towers. Once the magnitude of the events became clear, the presses were stopped, the first editions pulped and staff called in to cover what would become one of the biggest news stories of our lifetimes.
The images of that day struck terror in the hearts of Gold Coasters who had friends and relatives who worked at the World Trade Center.
Among those was Kevin Dennis, the son of Gold Coast real estate agent Richard Dennis.
Kevin was a currency analyst with Cantor Fitzgerald and was in his office on the 105th floor of the north tower when the first plane struck.
Flight 11 collided with the north tower between the 93rd and 99th floors, exploding and raining debris down on the street below and destroying the building’s stairwells.
Nobody above the 99th floor of the tower escaped before its collapse.
On the Gold Coast, Kevin’s father and stepmother Janine watched on as the towers burned.
Also watching the horror unfold was 84-year-old Surfers Paradise resident Arnold Fiala, whose nephew Peter, then 54, worked as a mechanical engineer on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center.
Gathered in his unit with his son George and other family, Mr Fiala watched and prayed.
“I am hoping but I don’t think we have a big hope,” he said at the time.
CHAOS
Justin Voller was in the concourse which ran between the twin towers of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit.
The 26-year-old had arrived a handful of minutes earlier in a taxi, running late.
He had been due for an early meeting with colleagues from Citibank but had postponed because he and wife Lizzie Dart had been kept up the previous night by their infant son William.
Mr Voller was exhausted but thankful for the little sleep he had been able to claw back by putting off the start of his day.
Back on the upper east side of Manhattan, Ms Dart, 27, sat with William watching the carnage unfold on television.
Two days earlier, the family of three had visited the towers and posed for photos before Mr Voller bought a shirt at Century 21, a popular shop next to the World Trade Center.
It was the same shop Ms Hart has planned to visit the same day to return the shirt.
“I called my parents back on the Gold Coast and they sat on the phone with me as I tried to call Justin on the other line,” Ms Dart told the Bulletin this week from her NSW home.
“We all saw the second plane go into the other tower. We couldn’t reach Justin. He was missing.
“Even today, I still get a funny feeling and sweaty palms when I see the footage of people jumping to their deaths from the towers.
“On the day it made me think about what Justin was wearing. Was it him that was falling out of the building?
“Being on the phone with his family and not being able to tell them whether we knew he was alive or not was hard to get through, especially while looking at your happy baby who has no idea what is going on.”
It was just after 9am New York time that Flight 175 crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center at 950km/h.
Both towers were evacuated as emergency services rushed to the scene and Manhattan Island was locked down.
At 9.37am Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
By 9.59am the world watched as the south tower collapsed.
The northern tower, the first to be struck, fell 29 minutes later, filling lower Manhattan with a shockwave of deadly dust that blew along the streets.
The World Trade Center was gone.
THE SMELL OF DEATH
Lizzie Dart was in flight and fight mode.
She had not heard from her husband Justin since he left for a meeting at the World Trade Center.
She had watched both towers fall but was too far away to hear the noise of the structures crumbling more than 10km south.
Instead, she sat in her apartment watching the never-ending news coverage and haunted by the roaring engines of the US Air Force F-15 Eagle fighter jets that circled the skies above Manhattan.
“It feels like a lifetime ago but I still don’t like hearing the sound of fighter jets,” she recalled this week.
“It was scary. We didn’t know what was going to happen.”
Then, just before 5pm, her husband walked through the door, dusty, but alive.
Mr Voller and a handful of colleagues had walked for more than four hours all the way from the burning financial district to reach his home and family.
Their emotional reunion gave way to numbness as they ate dinner from a restaurant on the ground floor of their building and regrouped.
As they sat in their apartment, the wind changed, blowing the smoke from ground zero towards the north.
“Those few days afterwards were traumatic for everyone on the island as the smoke blew,” she said.
“The smell was traumatic. It was very distinct. It was the smell of death.
“We didn’t get to bed that night but the next morning the smell was so strong we thought our building was on fire.”
LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF TWO TOWERS
It took less than two hours for the World Trade Center to fall but the wounds wrought by the events of September 11 cut deep, leaving mental scars and destroying families.
For Surfers Paradise’s Fiala family, there was joy as their relative Peter was found to have survived.
George Fiala received an email the night after the towers fell confirming he was alive.
“He was in the second tower and saw the plane hit the first tower,’’ he said at the time.
“Someone in the building said get out quickly so they crammed into the lifts and got out.
“About a minute after he got out the second plane hit … he
said had he been a few minutes slower getting out he would have died.’’
But for the Dennis family, the scars of 9/11 never healed.
The remains of Kevin Dennis were never found in the wreckage of the twin towers and his Gold Coast family were left with nothing to bury.
A year after the attacks, Richard Dennis, his wife Janine and young daughter Amy made an emotional pilgrimage to ground zero to see where the long-time expat died.
“For weeks afterwards I thought he might have got hit on the head and be wandering around or lying in hospital with amnesia,’’ Mr Dennis said at the time.
“Looking at this confirms for me that he really is gone.
“I’m going to walk into the site, scoop up some dust and walk out. I’ll leave New York and never come back.” He didn’t.
The elder Mr Dennis struggled with the loss of his son, suffered two strokes, was forced to give up work and lost the family home.
Following the death of his wife in the mid-2000s, the once-successful real estate agent left his daughter Amy behind and moved to Thailand.
“Really, our whole family has just disintegrated. It’s just awful,’’ Amy told News Corp in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the attack.
“Basically, Dad fell apart after losing Kevin to September 11. He just couldn’t cope.
“September 11 destroyed him … and he had to leave me – so he feels like he’s lost both his kids.
“I had to do it on my own.’’ Amy, who was just 10 yearsold in 2001, admitted she did not know her half-brother well but the pain of his loss was still great.
“I remember all of it … there were so many people, so many tributes,’’ she said.
“I was really young but I can remember the day my dad found out that Kevin was actually in the (World Trade Center) buildings.
“It was the first time I saw my dad cry, ever. It damaged my family from there, because grief takes over.’’
For Lizzie Dart and Justin Voller, the events of September 11 put pressure on their relationship, with the Gold Coast woman desperate to leave New York for the safe pastures of home.
“Like many people, (September 11) changed things for me but Justin wanted to get on with things and stay working in New York, whereas I didn’t,” she said.
“Looking back, I panicked and put a lot of pressure on him to come home because I felt so unsafe and he supported me in my decision.
“I regret not going down to ground zero but we didn’t know what would happen next and I didn’t want to leave William.
“Justin was unsettled and wanted to go back to a big city but I moved back to the Gold Coast and our marriage fell apart.”
Ms Dart said she remained “extremely good friends” with her former husband and “are very much part of each other’s families”.
She had planned in March 2020 to make a pilgrimage back to New York to finally see where the World Trade Center had stood before the Covid-19 pandemic forced its cancellation.
But even today, her thoughts still turn to the events of 20 years ago.
“You realise how much time has passed and how many people couldn’t move on,” she said.
“I think of what those people who were in those planes thought in their last moments when they were flying into those towers. They must have known what was about to happen.
“That hate for humanity was very hard to digest but you just hope that it all stops at some point.”