Watching from his office 300 metres from the World Trade Centre, Conor O'Clery reported his eyewitness accounts of the disaster to Ireland, minute by minute. Looking back, the fateful images are just as clear, and distressing.
When I think of September 11th, I recall the man at the window. He was on the 92nd or 93rd floor of the North Tower, 18 stories below the Windows on the World Restaurant. There was black smoke pouring from a line of narrow, church-like windows beside and above him. He stood on the narrow ledge, his body hanging out above Vesey Street 300 metres below. He waved a white cloth.
It looked like his shirt. He was in his 30s, I would say, and a little overweight. I spotted him first about 8.50 a.m., about four minutes after American Airlines Boeing 767 smashed into the tower just above him at 470 miles an hour laden with 10,000 gallons of fuel. The plane had flown past my apartment just 300 metres north of the World Trade Centre. I don't remember hearing it, though it came low over central Manhattan. When the explosion occurred I thought it was a bomb. I saw a gaping hole in the side of the tower high above with flames and smoke pouring out. I made several quick telephone calls, to my newsdesk, to my colleague Paddy Smyth in Washington, DC and my wife, Zhanna, in her office uptown. I also called RTÉ. It was 2 p.m. in Ireland.
As I was waiting to go on air there was a news flash about an aircraft hitting the World Trade Centre. Only then did I realise what it was. I focused again on the man with the white cloth. As I watched him through binoculars still waving futilely, United Airlines flight 175 came roaring over the Hudson and slammed into the South Tower behind and below him.
I knew immediately then that this was an act of war. It hit between the 78th and 84th floors, creating a huge orange and black fireball. Flaming jet fuel rained down on Broadway.
By now about two dozen fire engines had come wailing down West Side highway and parked outside the World Trade Centre, filling the wide roadway. Hundreds of firemen ran into the buildings laden down with gear. I decided to go to the scene. As I passed through the lobby of my building, a woman there was in hysterics; her husband worked in the stricken trade centre (he survived).
I went to the corner of Vesey Street and West Side Highway. People ran past me in panic towards Battery Park. Others stood in absolute shock, hands over open mouths, craning upwards. I recall a security man pushing me back. Bodies were falling on to Vesey Street and on to the plaza between the towers. They fell with arms extended, taking about 10 seconds to reach the ground.
I thought I had better get back to my office. Apartment buildings were being evacuated all around, and I was afraid that I would not be allowed back. I also had a guest for whom I was responsible: 21-year-old Dublin student Aoife Keane, who was witnessing from the window scenes of unimaginable terror. I just made it back minutes before all tenants were ordered to leave. Somehow we were overlooked.
Jim Dwyer called from the New York Times in a panic about his daughter Maura at Stuyvesant High School next to my building. I was able to establish that all the children were evacuated safely. As I watched from the window, a helicopter buzzed low over the North Tower. I remember thinking in frustration - why doesn't it take people off the roof or lower a rope to the windows? Only later did I learn that the doors to the roof were locked and that the helicopter pilots could not approach because of the heat.
At around 10 a.m., I saw office workers gathered in Battery Park suddenly turn and run as fast as they could. The South Tower had started to fall. The top seemed to tilt over towards the river and then crush the whole building beneath it. It collapsed onto fire-engines and firemen who were just arriving. I was by now completely numb, working on my reflexes.
As the dust cleared, I scanned the windows of the North Tower for the man who had been waving. Incredibly, he was still there, holding desperately on to a pillar between two windows as smoke poured out past him. He most likely worked for Carr Futures, the finance company on the 92nd floor which lost 68 staff there that morning, or perhaps the Marsh & McLennan insurance company which had offices on several floors above.
I will never know. Nobody survived in the North Tower above the 91st floor. As I watched, two bodies fell past him from the higher floors, then two more, and I saw the building was shuddering violently.
Much has been written about people jumping. I believe that many were clinging desperately to life but were simply unable to hold on. Intense smoke and heat gave people little choice. They could not breath and crowded around windows smashed open with computers and chairs. It was later estimated that 200 people fell to their death, most from the North Tower. None were ever classified as "jumpers", i.e. people who deliberately commit suicide.
The North Tower was now in its death throes. The end came seconds later, at 10.28 a.m. The man suddenly went down as if on a fast elevator as the building slipped away beneath him. He disappeared as the 110-storey tower imploded floor by floor, spewing out particles of debris and irradiated flesh. A mass of yellow-brown dust obliterated everything. Rescue workers fled from its advance towards the river. Some jumped in and were pulled on board ferry boats. The cloud approached our apartment. We could almost reach out and touch it. Then it retreated, ever so slowly, pushed back by a breeze from the Hudson.
It left a scene like that from a nuclear winter. A thick layer of grey dust covered the whole area, coating the streets and parks. A line of cars at Vesey and West Side Highway were on fire, ignited by firey debris.
More cars were burning on Greenwich Street. The massive walkway from the Winter Gardens lay crushed on the highway. Beyond it, the Marriott Hotel was on fire. Thousands of scraps of paper floated in the air. Some firemen stood absolutely stunned at a distance, coated from head to foot in dust. The telephone lines were disrupted when the towers collapsed, and I could not call anyone in New York after that. Incredibly, the long-distance service still worked. I was able to call my family, keep up contact with my office in Dublin, send digital photographs and do more radio interviews throughout the afternoon.
The firemen vainly tried to fight a blaze at No 7 World Trade Centre, a 47-storey building housing the Secret Service. At 5.20 p.m., we watched it, too, collapse, falling straight down on to Greenwich Street. On its own, such an event would have made world headlines. Its collapse cut off electricity to our building. It was time to leave. We made our way down 41 flights of concrete emergency stairs.
For days afterwards, my muscles ached. I kept thinking, what must it have been like for those fleeing down the stairwells in the World Trade Centre? Now hardly a day goes by that I don't feel a spasm of guilt at the inadequacy and helplessness we all experienced as onlookers that morning. This week, with its memorial services and replays of the horrific footage, will be an especially distressing time for those touched by the catastrophe. Many find it very difficult, even now, to look at images of the burning towers, as they bring back a flood of personal memories and threaten to release powerful suppressed emotions. I'll be glad when it's over.
