‘It’s coming faster than I can run’: I was there the day the Twin Towers came down

Twenty years ago, on 11 September, 2001, two hijacked planes were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

A third plane crashed in to the Pentagon in Washington and a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tackled the hijackers.

Steve Evans was in the South Tower of the World Trade Centre when the attacks happened.

The morning was clear and bright, one of those perfect autumnal Manhattan mornings when it was great to be alive in New York. People were streaming in to work from the ferry terminals and the stations, picking up coffee from the street stalls and grabbing a newspaper.

I got to the South Tower – 2 World Trade Centre – at about 8.30am, and was killing time on the ground floor before going up to my meeting.

At 8.46, there was an almighty, metallic crash, as though a huge building skip had been dropped from a great height. Dust filled the lobby and I went outside, more confused than frightened. Above, I could see the gash where the first plane had gone in, flames coming out.

Even then, though, there was an air of unreality. I couldn’t believe the evidence of my own eyes. It was unreal – surreal is the word that fits the day, like watching a movie shoot from off-stage.

A few days before, a microlight aircraft had got snared on the Statue of Liberty and my thought was that it must be some similar sort of accident. Deliberate? How could it be?

A journalist’s instinct to file took over, and I persuaded a newsagent at the base of the tower to let me use his phone – mobiles didn’t work. At 9 o’clock, I was on the air on BBC radio when the second plane hit, and all doubt about an accident vanished. The newsagent at the base of the South Tower pulled down the shutters and deprived me of his phone. I eventually hired a room in the Embassy Suites hotel on the corner of the site, just for the phone.

Again, there was this disbelief. I remember looking at the line of fire trucks on Vesey Street and thinking: “Everything’s OK now. The authorities are in control” as the fire-fighters filed into the towers. Within half an hour of the impacts, people watching on TV around the world knew more than we actually did, at what came to be known as Ground Zero.

Somewhere along the way, I said on air that there had been an explosion – what I meant was a big bang – but that then became evidence for daft conspiracies: “The BBC said there was an explosion”. For years, I got emails from conspiracists to whom I would reply that there was no explosion; men did land on the moon; Tony Blair was not an alien.

The towers collapsed in the reverse order of the impacts – the south was hit second but collapsed first.

When it fell, the lights in the hotel went out and the alarms went off. I got out down the backstairs in the dark, literally and metaphorically.

By this time, bewilderment had been replaced by fear, but I never saw a jumper. A photographer friend who did will never recover from the sound and sight of a human being, forced to jump by the heat of the furnace at the top of the towers, and then hitting concrete.

The only moment when fear turned to terror for me was when the North Tower collapsed and the debris seemed to rush towards. I thought ‘it’s coming faster than I can run’, only for the cloud to stop short of me.

But it was enough to tell me to get away.

I got into the back of a taxi, where there was already another passenger in there; a heavily pregnany woman.

We strangers sat side-by-side, shoulders touching, leaning in, listening to the news in Spanish from a local Hispanic station, trying to grasp the ungraspable.

She was trying to make sense of a huge global event as a huge personal event was happening for her.

She turned to me and said she was going into labour and needed to get to a hospital. She gave me a piece of paper with a phone number to ring her husband and tell him that she was OK and about to give birth. I’m ashamed to say that I lost the paper in the turmoil.

Some days later, I talked to another woman; a widow in her inconsolable grief.

She had kissed her husband good-bye that morning and he had then been trapped above the fire. The two of them spent perhaps an hour on the phone.

On TV at home in suburban Connecticut, she could see the Tower on fire, and kept directing him: “Go to the roof. Maybe you can get out to a helicopter”.

He would return and say there was no way out. No way out. She then saw the tower collapse and the phone went dead.

As she and I talked, she kept smoothing the wooden dining table that her husband had made. She stroked that table as though she was stroking him.

The signs of loss were everywhere: the line of empty hooks in a fire-house where there should have been helmets and the gear of brave, brave firefighters.

It seems odd to say but New York was uplifting in the time that followed.

I used to drink in a classic, long and narrow New York bar on 11th Street. A few evenings after the attacks, I went in to find the bar dark and crowded – but hushed, subdued, thoughtful.

As I entered, the barman caught my eye and when I reached the bar, he clasped both my hands in his and just held them tight. Strangers did that in the days after the attacks.

The flag – the Stars and Stripes – became everybody’s, and not just the property of the right. Middle Eastern shops displayed it. Rickety old cars, in poor neighbourhoods, flew the flag.

I bought a big sweater with the Stars and Stripes filling my chest and puffed it out in defiance and pride.

Twenty years on, I remain angry that a gang of men could try and impose their mediaeval views on us. Despite the simplicies of the hard left for whom “America had it coming”, it felt – and feels – like a matter of good versus evil.

To this day, after all this time, I feel privileged to have been part of the solidarity of a great mongrel, modern city that defied those zealots.