The other side of the fence
On September 11 2001 I arrived at work at 5.30am to begin the breakfast news shift of what I presumed would be an ordinary working day. I was 23 years old and was still a relative newcomer to the world of broadcast journalism, having worked at a local radio station for just over two months. Expecting a typical news day of court cases, road traffic accidents and local community news stories, I began listening to police voice banks and pulling news together for the morning headlines - little realising that this would be the one day in my journalism career that would have the biggest impact on me from both a working and a personal perspective.
At 1.45pm I was reading the latest updates on the international newswire and thinking about what I was going to do with my afternoon off; I was due to finish my shift at two o’clock. With one eye on my news editor who was compiling the hourly news bulletin and one on the newswire, I saw a brief newsflash came through on the system, simply saying “plane hits WTC”. “Is that the World Trade Centre in New York?” I asked, with a vague recollection that a friend had visited it on a sightseeing holiday earlier in the year. “Loads of people must have been hurt” my news editor replied as we both stared at the newswire screen, processing the information and wondering exactly what scale of disaster we were looking at. Waiting another few minutes to see if any further updates came through, my editor eventually had to run to the studio to read the news and I stayed by the newswire to check for updates so I could run to the studio if necessary. One further update arrived just after 2pm, reporting that the incident involved a small glider plane which had hit the North Tower – at this point I instinctively turned on the small television above the newsroom desk to immediately see images of the Twin Towers and flames and smoke pouring from a large hole, three quarters of the way up Tower 1. At the time, the news and sales team shared an office and two of the sales team came over to see what was happening. There were still no further updates from the newswire and we stood in front of the screen speculating about what had caused the damage – could a glider have caused it? A bomb? – before watching in horror as a second plane suddenly emerged from the right hand side of the television screen and ploughed straight into Tower 2, sending huge bursts of flames and clouds of black smoke into the sky. It must have taken under a second for the plane to arrive onscreen and hit the building, but that was enough time to see that this was clearly a passenger plane and all I could think was that I'd just witnessed the last two or three seconds of the lives of those aboard the plane and what must have been going on inside it. As soon as the second plane hit, it seemed obvious that it was a deliberate attack and the phones began ringing constantly with listeners asking what was happening, so we immediately started running frequent news updates on air.
Unfortunately we then discovered that the newswire service, which we relied on for national and international updates, had gone down and no new updates were coming through. The phone continued ringing; journalists from other local radio stations and newsrooms asking if anyone had any updates coming through on the newswire. One update came through reporting that Canary Wharf had been evacuated. Then nothing again, at which point we were left with no choice but to take updates from Sky News and the BBC’s continuous television coverage which had live footage of the towers and eyewitness updates – including the collapse of the first tower in real time. I eventually left the newsdesk and my news editor around 8pm, supposedly to go home to bed to be in again early the next morning, but instead I stayed up until midnight, compelled to watch every news update that came in.
At four o’clock the next morning I was back on shift in the newsroom and trawling through hundreds of updates from the newswire which had started running again overnight. Continuous audio clips were being sent through for the news bulletins, including voicemail messages from people trapped in the towers who had left messages for loved ones to say goodbye. As a journalist you learn to harden yourself against the most awful of stories in order to provide objective, up to date news and, as traumatic as they were, I chose to run these clips in my live bulletins with pre-warnings as they helped illustrate the sheer horror of the events of the day before and to me, helped to answer the question which must have been going through most peoples’ minds - what was happening in the towers? What highlighted the horror of the events most for me was the photographs of unrecognisable figures jumping from the towers, begging the question how awful must it have been in there to make jumping from a great height seem like the better option. News goes on, the international updates carried on coming through and we also managed to track down someone from the North East who was living in New York to get a more local angle to the story.
I’ve kept all the front pages of the national papers from September 11, which are filled with images of the towers on impact, because what might be a macabre souvenir of an awful day to some is still a piece of history for me. Broadcast journalism, like online and social media now, has its advantages as it moves incredibly quickly and allows you to report breaking news as soon as it comes in, but to me nothing had as much impact as the shocking images which came across on television screens and in photography for the news that day. It remains the single biggest news event of my lifetime so far and, no matter how often I’ve seen them, eight years on the images have never got any less shocking over time.