A view of One World Trade Center from the National September 11 Memorial in New York during the 25th anniversary commemoration of the Sept. 11 attacks.ANGELA WEISS/AFP/Getty Images
In the minutes and hours following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Globe journalists flew into action – some heading immediately for the U.S. border from Toronto, others surveying the landscape in Ottawa and elsewhere. It was a day when their professional responsibilities had to outweigh their personal concerns as the world changed around them.
Twenty-five years later, they can still remember every detail. Here, they recollect those moments.
Dispatches from New York
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was among a team of Globe reporters who drove from Toronto to New York City. We crossed the border in the afternoon and arrived at midnight.
I remember it being the first time I ever saw the Manhattan skyline. As big as it was, it was absolutely dwarfed by an enormous smoke plume that was still growing. Nearly 3,000 people were underneath the rubble of what had been the World Trade Center.
To see this was to feel as if New York had been hit by an inscrutable bolt from the blue. The strike was actually affected by Boeing 767s commandeered by a handful of terrorists armed with box cutters. A quarter century later, my impressions of the aftermath remain.
United Airlines Flight 175 moments before it slammed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.SEAN ADAIR/Reuters
I remember a sun-dappled Sept. 12 spent partly in a midtown playground where a group of moms pointed at a playing four-year-old, saying he was unaware his firefighter dad had likely perished. I remember the people who began posting myriad photocopies of their missing loved ones’ faces around town, holding out all hope against odds. I remember the resigned families starting to queue around the block, bringing hair and toothbrushes to forensic officials for future DNA matches of whatever might eventually be exhumed underneath the burned and collapsed wreckage.
I remember that week’s shock and grief, and also the rage that was starting to brew in America, as a counterpoint to a document I acquired several months later.
In small-town Florida, I obtained a copy of the lead al-Qaeda terrorists’ flight school invoices. These itemized bills showed the enemy agents had methodically embedded in America for months, patiently logging their hours flying Cessnas. This was done in preparation for their eventual terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. – Colin Freeze, reporter
The view from Ottawa
I was still at home on the morning of Sept 11. I turned on the TV to see smoke coming out of the World Trade Center. Then I watched the second plane hit. The phone rang, and my colleague Jeff Sallot asked, “Are you watching this?” I said yes, and he told me to go to the American embassy. At that point there was a palpable fear that there were probably more attacks coming, and maybe in Canada.
Employees were leaving the U.S. embassy on Sussex Drive en masse. Staff at the Revenue Canada building next door left, too, worried they might be close to a target. I walked to the office past the Prime Minister’s Office, where the Mounties were shutting down the street across from Parliament. I remember seeing a Mountie from Prime Minister Chretien’s protective detail furiously directing traffic away. And that he looked scared. – Campbell Clark, political writer
At TIFF in Toronto
It was just before 9 a.m. and I was in the TIFF press office, chatting to other journalists and publicists, getting ready for a day of back-to-back interviews. A rumour started that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Centre. The room, which had been buzzing, started to go quiet. Everyone looked confused. A person beside me asked if it was some kind of joke. A television was turned on to CNN. Smoke was billowing from the side of the first building.
Flight 175 hits the south tower as smoke billows from the north tower.Chao Soi Cheong/The Associated Press
While we all stood there trying to make sense of the impossible, a second plane flew across the screen, smashing into the second tower. The room went deathly still. One woman, a journalist from New York, screamed that her husband worked in that building. Then the first building started to crumble. Over the next few hours, the room filled with journalists, actors, directors, and their handlers – no one knew where to go or what to do. They only knew they did not want to be alone. – Gayle MacDonald, senior feature writer
Remembering Father Judge, the first official casualty of 9/11
Rev. Mychal Judge, left, in a Franciscan robe, presided at the interfaith wedding of Karen Zagor and Eric Reguly, alongside a rabbi.Courtesy of Eric Reguly and Karen Zagor
I first heard about Rev. Mychal Judge’s death about 15 hours after the 9/11 attacks. I was in Toronto packing to drive to Manhattan with Globe and Mail colleague Jan Wong when I heard New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on the radio. He was talking about the firefighters and police officers who had been killed in the Twin Towers. His voice was tight, deliberate and controlled as he tried to hold his emotions.
Father Judge, the chaplain of the Fire Department of New York, was among the dead, he said. I felt that I had been punched in the gut and ran upstairs to tell my wife, Karen Zagor. She bent over double and wept. We knew Father Judge. He and a rabbi – Karen is Jewish – together married us in New York in 1994. I covered his funeral and interviewed his firefighter colleagues, but otherwise spent the whole week in tears. On the 10th anniversary of the attacks, Karen and I wrote a remembrance piece about ‘St. Mychal of Ground Zero’. – Eric Reguly, European bureau chief
From the streets of Toronto
I was at the Toronto Star on Sept. 11, 2001, as a young intern. That morning I was sent out to the Financial District to collect voices and mood. As I reached Bay Street, it was a struggle to move against the tide of thousands of people heading in the opposite direction towards the subway and GO station. Everyone was trying to get home. You could almost hear a pin drop, a silence borne out of fear – no one knew if Toronto was a target too. I wandered in and out of the lobbies of the big banks and American financial institutions, interviewing people. Huddled around one television screen were men and women trying to reach colleagues at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York. The TV was showing on repeat the collapse of the World Trade Center’s North Tower. One woman I spoke to was on her knees and could not stop screaming. The firm was based there, and lost hundreds of staff that day. I had no idea that the horror unfolding in New York was to have extraordinary consequences for the country of my birth, Afghanistan. – Hamida Ghafour, deputy foreign editor
In the air and on the ground
One of the images Globe photographer Fred Lum took on Sept. 12, 2001, in New York City. A person holds a large American flag and cheers on rescue personnel as they head to the World Trade Center.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
I was on a media charity flight with kids headed to Walt Disney World in Orlando. We were in the air when the world changed forever. Most of the media stayed, but I was told to get to New York City by however means. I thought about driving, but ended up finding a train heading north. The handful of other passengers and I had no idea if the train was going to bypass NYC. We did arrive, a day and a half after Sept. 11. By then the city was zipped up drum tight. I met my Globe colleagues and tried to plan our coverage. It was very surreal, as life seemed to go on in other areas of Manhattan, like the Upper East and West sides. New Yorker stoicism in the face of terror. – Fred Lum, photojournalist