Death on an unfathomable scale

9.50 am - by DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK - We gathered uncomprehending in the park in front of New York City Hall, our eyes fixed on the two towers of the World Trade Center six blocks away.

Etched against a brilliant sky, both were burning. The image was too astonishing to seem real. As we watched, fascination quickly gave way to terrible fear and shock. I had come downtown because I thought there had been an accident involving a small plane. Then a man who had been in an office building across the street from the Trade Center told me how it had not been one plane that had crashed into it but two, one after another. This, clearly, was a something else.

John Slovik, an investment banker, was on the 24th floor of his building, just to the north of the towers, when he heard what sounded like a "rifle crack".

"I thought maybe a plane had just gone past a little too low. Then I saw everyone crowding into my office. I have windows overlooking the Trade Center. I wondered what was going on."

He and his colleagues were standing there gaping at the damage inflicted by the first plane when the second aircraft, an American Airlines jetliner, suddenly came into view and smashed into the second tower.

"I hate to say this, but it was like a bad movie. There was this huge fireball".

At that moment it was time for him and everyone else in the financial district of Manhattan to evacuate and to leave. Peter Yannaci was fleeing the Post Office where he works next to the Twin Towers when the second aircraft hit.

"There was just this huge explosion and ball of fire. I actually saw the plane coming and we had just seconds to react. We all fell to the crowd. Then everyone was just running, stumbling over one another. I was trapped under people for about a minute. That plane just came out of nowhere."

One CBS reporter, Carol Marin, described being hauled out of the Trade Center by firemen just before the first of the towers fell.

"One picked me up and threw me into the wall of the building and covered me with his body. I could feel his heart beating against my back. We were so sure we were going go die. There was a rain of cinders so thick you couldn't see in front of you. You couldn't breathe..."

This was just as the rush hour was ending so thousands of people were running for safety. Most of them headed north, funnelling into City Call Park where I was standing. We seemed to be at a safe distance, so we stopped to look.

It is hard to avert your eyes from a scene like that. At first it is the structures you look at in this sort of catastrophe. You just stare.

And this was not any ordinary building that was burning, of course. The Twin Towers are a symbol of New York and of America. It was hard simply to compute what was happening to them. I was reminded of earthquake scenes I have seen.

The way buildings collapse and pancake is always strangely compelling. But it not losing concrete and glass that matters. It took me, at least, a few minutes to begin to grasp the human horror of what I was witnessing. We could not see the people who were inside the towers, of course. Nor could we see the rescue personnel who doubtless were swarming beneath the complex them trying to find ways to save lives.

Mr Yannaci had told me about seeing people leap from 70 or 80 floors up and I hadn't really wanted to believe him or think about it. Then I saw a person jump. And another. And another. One at a time, they were leaping from the tower that the first plane had hit.

Frankly, it has hard now to describe the terror of watching those people fall. They were kicking. And it's a very long way.

By now, the crowd in the park and in the complicated pattern of streets around City Hall was getting very dense. People were mostly quiet. Nobody's cell phones were working, presumably because the signals once came from transmitters on the roofs of the towers.

People were forming queues at public payphones, desperate to tell family and friends that they were unharmed.

Oddly, only a few of us seemed to notice the occasional falling body. People's eyes were too closely focused on the giant flames gushing from the corners of the towers and the might clouds of smoke and steam billowing into the sky.

Police and emergency personnel were gradually pushing us back, further north, but still within just blocks of the towers. They were afraid of explosions, they said. It was not explosions that we had to worry about. It was already clear that the towers were going to be unsalvagEable once the fires were put out.

But what I saw next, I simply had not been expecting. At first I noticed the corner of the second tower begin to buckle and bulge just where the fire was at its most intense. I look up and saw that the entire top section, about one third of the tower was beginning to topple over. All I could think about was Lego towers coming down when I was a child. Then the entire structure just sank down onto itself with a colossal whoosh.

For a second, the smoke and dust cleared enough to reveal a stump of the core of the building. It was standing still. Perhaps it had been the elevator shaft. But the clouds closed in again and nothing more could be seen. All of us simply stood and gaped, hands to our faces. Men and women alike just began crying. We were all both shocked by what we had witnessed. We knew we had seen loss of human life on an unfathomable scale.

About 50,000 people work in the World Trade complex.

Thousands of us, at the moment, said our private prayers. But we did not have much time, because very quickly the bedlam broke out. It was as the top part of the building began suddenly go over, that I had at first began to ask myself the question. Are we near enough that it could actually fall on us if the entire thing is coming down? It was a frightening question to ask, and I never had time to consider it properly before the answer was clear. It wasn't coming anywhere near us. But as it went down, the tower sent out an immense cloud of dust and debris and smoke. It was a dirty white.

Suddenly we understood that it was traveling towards us very quickly. It looked, quite simply, like a huge tidal wave, barreling down the canyons of the financial district to the park we were standing in. The police went beserk, we went beserk, just running, running for our lives, or so we thought. It was impossible not to think that were in the scene of Schwarzenegger film, especially at that moment. We were thousands of Hollywood extras, mostly in suits for the office, with handbags and briefcases, just tearing through the streets of the city.

Every few seconds, we would snatch a look behind us to see who where the wall of smoke was. Was it going to catch us? I ran a few blocks before stopping. I had got beyond the smoke. Probably, if we had been engulfed, we would have been fine. But my tears continued to roll for many minutes as I wondered about all those who had been in the tower or closer to it at that moment. It was as I was fleeing that the second of the 110-storey towers collapsed. Soon the ash was so thick on the streets it was like snow.

What was happening to us? Most of understood by now that this had to be a terrorist attack. Without cell phones, it was hard to get news beyond what we were witnessing. A few people, doubtless sports fans, had small radios and they were passing on snippets of intelligence from news bulletins.

We heard about other planes heading towards Washington DC. Everyone was recalling the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. That, in a sense, was a failure for the perpetrators, who had wanted one tower to fall and to collapse into the second one.

Well now, it seemed to all of us on the street, they had tried again and succeeded. Fear was everyone's face. The streets were filled. It appeared that even tens of blocks north of the towers, everyone had either left their offices voluntarily or been told to get out. It was a terror movie set, but also a war move set. Manhattan felt, quite simply, like a war zone. It was a war zone, in fact. Those who didn't know what had happened were desperate to find out. I found it hard to describe. I was rushing and I was in shock.

"The World Trade Center has fallen down," I told one woman lamely. How do you explain something like this? All of downtown Manhattan had come to a standstill by midmorning. Those trying to get anywhere could not. The underground system in the city had been closed entirely. The streets, meanwhile, had been invaded by office workers. Only the sounds of sirens were enough to clear the crowds.

Death, however, was back in the financial district itself and in the entrances of the few hospitals that are in the downtown part of Manhattan. Caardinal Egan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, could be found performing last rites in street outside St Vincent's hospital in Greenwich Village, says repeatedly: "May God help us."

The hospitals in New York were overwhelmed. "Hundreds of people are burned from head to toe," said Dr. Steven Stern at St. Vincent's Hospital in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of lower Manhattan. "The whole of lower Manhattan is coated in half an inch of dust," Reuters reporter Daniel Sternoff said.

At St. Vincents, hospital staff appealed for blood donors in the street, Reuters reporter Ian Driscoll said. The line to give blood was over 100 people long.

"We expect smoke inhalation, trauma, and burns," Dr. Bernd Reisbeck said. "I expect we will be working non-stop for at least the next 24 hours."

New York Mayor Rudolf Guiliani, meanwhile, predicted "tremendous number of lives lost" in the attacks.

Yesterday was meant to be a day for city politics in New York, with polling stations open for primary votes in the city's mayoral contest. Among those who witnessed the first tower collapse with me was Ron Insana, a nationally-known reproter for CNBC "It was like a scene out of Independence Day," he said.

The UN evacuated its headquarters in the city and Grand Central Station was also emptied by police. Everyone on the street shared the same concern - where might they strike next.

"This is one good reason why people shouldn't live in New York," one man said to me. The stock markets, located near the Twin Towers also ceased trading.

"The two explosions were incredible and at the point of explosions all you could see outside were personal belongings and office supplies raining outside," said Bob Rendine, an American Stock Exchange spokesman, whose office is down the block from the NYSE. Running away with me when the first tower collapsed was Sidney McKinney, a city worker whose office is opposite the World Trade Center. He saw the impact of both planes and was still struggling to understand. He had helped to evacuate several buildings before fleeing the area, just in time. "Right now," he said, "my legs just want to buckle up". Most of us, even if we had not been at the site itself, felt the same.

- INDEPENDENT

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