It was 8:30 on a warm, sunny morning in Philadelphia 25 years ago when I walked off the train from my commute to work and ducked into the coffee shop in historic Old City for a cup of hazelnut with a touch of half and half before heading to work in a TV newsroom a block away.
Waiting for my cup, I glanced at the row of televisions hanging above the counter to watch American Airlines Flight 11 strike the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. I can’t recall if I got my coffee, but I vividly remember sprinting to the station, taking the elevator to the third floor and bursting into the newsroom to find my colleagues staring at the TVs, what are called monitors in broadcast newsrooms, in stunned disbelief.
Quickly, along with my photographer, a veteran of the business with a sharp eye and quick, cutting sense of humor, we were racing to New York in the station’s SUV with WCBS Newsradio 88 blaring the nearly unimaginable details of the second strike on the South Tower at 9:03.
As we hurtled north the traffic seemed to fall away as news of the suspected terrorist strikes quickly spread. We both called our wives to share our sorrow and to let them know we were driving to Manhattan to try to get to what would later be known as ground zero. My wife calmly reassured me she would pick up our son from his first day of kindergarten and our younger boy from childcare.
On we drove, pulling off to take a quick spin around an eerily deserted Trenton-Mercer Airport before jumping back onto 95 and arriving along the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey directly across from the smoking remains of the twin towers. The billowing plumes rising from lower Manhattan stopped us where we stood. Quickly joined by another crew from our Philadelphia station, we spoke to each other of the abject horror at what we were witnessing.
I’m certain more than a few expletives were said before we set up our equipment and interviewed survivors as they were taken across the river by New York Ferries and even private boats. Some were still covered in ash from the collapse while others had survived in nearby buildings. Almost everyone wanted to talk about what they’d seen; how they’d survived; how fortunate they felt to be alive.
As night fell, the PATH trains linking northeastern New Jersey and New York City halted after the attacks, reopened and we climbed on board from Hoboken with a plan to go as far as the train would take us and walk the rest of the way to ground zero. Our ride was short. The trains were going nowhere near the disaster site. So, we trudged, tv gear in our arms, to the lower Manhattan campus of Pace University arriving after 10 p.m. It was there police at a check point told us we would go no further. It was then we noticed a volunteer group preparing to haul supplies to rescue crews at the scene and there were far more supplies than people to carry them. We offered to help by carrying the materials the four blocks to the scene to get them where they were needed while allowing us to report. The police didn’t object.
Sometime around 10:30 on the evening of September 11, we laid eyes on the hellscape that was the twin towers. Standing in front of a battered men’s clothing store, we shot video of a massive pile of smoldering debris with hard-hatted rescue workers pawing at the twisted metal in a desperate search for survivors. An officer on the scene, directing us to stay out of the way, said there was a makeshift emergency room on one side of us and a temporary morgue on the other. We never saw anyone taken to the ER while the morgue was active. Directly in front of us we saw a leaning section of one of the towers with what looked to be the bent, scorched, twisted steel frame of the other a few yards away. The exact same image later emerged as an iconic photo of the early hours after the attack.
The streets were piled high with ash. It was as if it had snowed but there was no white, only gray and black soot, reeking of smoke and swirling in the air, filling your nose and mouth. Spotlights sent streaks of light angling across the pile of smoldering debris at ground zero while the surrounding buildings were dark, vacant with blown out window and a layer ash.
We left and hustled to the Fox network newsroom where we cut our video for multiple reports during the morning news in Philadelphia and other stations across the country. Eventually, we finished our reporting and crossed the Hudson for a few hours of sleep in a New Jersey hotel before returning to lower Manhattan.
The days following September 11 remain the saddest I’ve experienced in a nearly 50- year career reporting news on television.
In the hours after the jets struck the towers, loved ones of missing family members rushed to New York City in a desperate search to find them. Mothers and fathers would approach holding pictures of a daughter or son and ask, often through tears, if we’d seen them. If we knew where they were and could we direct them. They would plead; often beg for any information we had. We had none. And if they told me their sons and daughters, their brothers and sisters had been in the towners at that time of the strike, having stood at the smoldering pile of debris just a few hours earlier, I would not try to tell them what I’d seen. Through their grief, I was convinced they knew the news was dire.
It seems impossible 25 years have passed. I’m retired and we’ve left Philadelphia. My sons, little boys back then, are men living on their own with careers, friends and reckoning with parents asking when they’ll visit. The memory of September 11 remains ever constant: The nighttime scene of abject devastation. The searing agony etched on the faces of loved ones. The firefighters, police and rescue workers atop the pile searching for survivors and finding only death. The nagging sense that the America of September 10, 2001 was gone.
Jeffrey Cole of Madison is a former news anchor for WFSB in Hartford and more recently retired as an investigative reporter at Fox 29 in Philadelphia.