Remembering 9/11 horror two decades later
Former Citizen reporter Ian MacLeod recalls his first look at the pulverized steel and concrete at Ground Zero.
Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington. Former Citizen reporter Ian MacLeod, dispatched to Manhattan to cover the disaster, recalls days of shock, disbelief and sorrow.
When the second plane hit the South Tower, a newsroom editor hoofed over to where I was watching Manhattan being decimated on live TV. There was no mistake now about was happening, and I was instructed to be on the next flight out of Ottawa to New York City.
Hours later, on a side street a block from Ground Zero, I stared up at a landscape like no other. Time slowed down.
The immense heap of pulverized steel and concrete was silhouetted by searchlights, and disgorging smoke, asbestos, ash and hate. The enormity of it, and all it embodied, was intensely physical — something inconceivably big, menacing, incomprehensible.
Gary Dimmock, the Ottawa Citizen's ace police reporter, and I had arrived in Lower Manhattan at sunset. Plans to fly commercial or charter that morning had ended when civilian airspace closed. We dashed across the U.S. land border at Ogdensburg, New York before the border slammed shut, and shot 600 kilometres south in a cargo van.
In late afternoon, as we crossed a bridge to the east bank of the Hudson River, a towering column of white smoke against an azure sky came into view 50 km downriver at the tip of Manhattan and what felt like the end of the world. It took two more hours to crawl the length of Broadway through fleeing traffic and past road signs flashing “NYC CLOSED.”
We abandoned the van at a police roadblock on Canal Street and walked the remaining 15 blocks, coming to a sprawling medical triage station on Greenwich Street, about halfway to Ground Zero. Dozens of doctors, nurses and emergency workers were milling around in hushed groups. “It's going to basically be body bags,” one said. I touched my fingers to the dust and ash on a car windshield.
We pushed south through what felt like a warp in the universe and into a toxic haze strewn with office paper and exhausted firefighters and first responders caked in grime.
A hulking New York Fire Department heavy rescue truck, whose driver was clearly overcome by grief and anguish over the brutal deaths of 343 firefighters, purposely barrelled into parked cars on an otherwise deserted off-street. As I watched, it rammed one after another after another to mark the deadliest day in history for U.S. firefighters.
I interviewed emergency workers and eyewitnesses for an hour, then Dimmock and I each dictated about 500 rushed words by phone back to the Ottawa newsroom, where they were rolled into the main page one story under a heavy black headline that said it all: “TERROR.”
Sept. 12 was another warm, cloudless day. I hiked early from a midtown hotel to Tribeca, the posh enclave in the shadow of the towers and closed to all but emergency workers and the few residents who chose to remain. Street corners were piled high with bottled water, diapers and emergency food, sirens echoed from all directions and Ground Zero smouldered, as it would for another 99 days.
The mood was beyond grim — the same heavy, stunned stillness that lingers at major human disasters where random lots of ordinary people meet sudden, horrible ends.
By now, anger was rising from the ashes too. The owner of an Afghan kebab house, who'd fled Kabul when Soviet troops murdered his family years earlier, said he'd already received a handful of telephone death threats. At a church service for the dead, one worshipper told me he was praying for “swift and immediate” retribution, a refrain heard in Washington as the U.S. started marshalling the forces of war.
That evening, an editor faxed an Associated Press photograph to my hotel room showing a young, unidentified firefighter staring confidently into the camera as he ascends a crowded stairwell on the 28th floor of the North Tower. What happened to that guy? I was asked to find out.
Out the door and a half-dozen blocks later, I found the empty Engine 16/Ladder 7 firehall, which had lost six men in the South Tower. I stepped into a small office where two firemen were seated and handed one the AP photo, just as the evening national newscast started booming from the TV. The three of us watched the images of firefighters picking through the rubble for lost friends and colleagues.
I'd intruded on many grieving families over the years, but this moment felt particularly raw and unnerving. I offered condolences and turned to leave when a big man named Washington handed back the photo. “His name is Mike Kehoe, Engine 28” in the East Village. “He got out.” The picture appeared on front pages around the world, turning Kehoe, 33, into a reluctant hero.
For days, pieces of the Twin Towers rumbled by me in dump trucks, exposing flattened cars, crushed fire trucks, but little else. I watched workers in haz-mat suits at the chief medical examiner's office swing open the rear doors of a 16-metre, refrigerated tractor-trailer. A few green body bags lay on the floor, surrounded by profound emptiness.
Only the faces of the dead remained, on hundreds of “Have You Seen … ?” flyers posted on walls and street poles — smiling snapshots from weddings, birthdays and family barbecues of 2,753 people who had been settling into another workday at the time the planes hit.
I returned home a week later and hugged my wife and kids.
FRIDAY: MONIA MAZIGH ON THE VICTIMS OF THE `WAR ON TERROR.'