Vision of fear returns to haunt New York

7.30 am - By ROGER FRANKLIN in New York

Again, the fear.

Almost two months to the day since the attacks that reduced the World Trade Center to rubble, gouged a hole out of the Pentagon, and brought down a fourth jet in rural Pennsylvania, America again began its day confronted by a vision of fear filtered through the smoky lens of burning jet fuel.

Airports in New York, where the doomed plane had just left on its way to the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, were immediately shut.

And, just as on September 11, the sound of sirens - that dreadful cacophony of hooting, bellowing, and ear-splitting shrieks - dominated the urban soundtrack of all the Big Apple's five boroughs.

Once again, it came from emergency vehicles fighting to navigate streets still clogged by the last heavy traffic of the morning rush hour.

It was a bedlam none of us who live here ever wanted to hear again.

Yet it was also a sound that we knew - deep down and despite the blandishments of America's leaders - would come again.

The early word from officials - delivered with perhaps too much certainty and within minutes of today's crash, which appears to have claimed the lives of the 257 people said to be aboard and an unknown number on the ground - was that this was but a simple accident, a rare but entirely explicable case of an Airbus shedding one of its two engines shortly after takeoff.

The pronouncements were intended to calm a nervous populace.

"Relax, folks," said a message delivered in the voices of the score of different officials who raced to get themselves in front of the cameras.

"Accidents happen. This one isn't bin Laden's handiwork."

But today - after September 11, anthrax anxiety, and the wave of arrests in which more than 1500 foreign-born Muslims have been taken into custody across the country - a rattled city's first reaction was the most obvious.

It was terrorism.

"I don't care what they say," said a radio talkback caller, who claimed to live just near the crash site.

"My neighbour said he saw a missile hit the jet."

Said another caller, this one to a TV anchorman: "There was an explosion on board. We all know there was an explosion on board."

As the reports trickled in, reports of an explosion became more frequent.

Truth or paranoia. At this stage, it's still too early to tell.

What we do know is that, if it was another terrorist outrage, this city was relatively lucky.

Rockaway, where the plane went down, is a working class neighbourhood of low-rise homes, not skyscrapers filled with thousands of people as was the case in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Once, in the days before air conditioning, it was the summer retreat of New York's working class.

The people who live there are mostly poor. People who are prepared to endure the roar of low-flying planes in return for a cheap roof over their heads.

And we also know that, if this was terrorism, the transformation of the American mind that began on September 11 is now complete.

The thing about life right now on this side of the Pacific is that it had become, at least superficially, so disconcertingly normal as the searing memory of September 11 faded.

In New York, say, you might be making your way down a Chinatown street, the sidewalk as crowded and alive as the buckets of bite-size turtles on sale outside the fish shops, when a capricious gust carries just a whiff, the merest fading scent, of scorched tar and melted plastics from the rubble where the Twin Towers once stood.

It's a complex stink, sharp on the nose but with so many strange, unknowable taints that you must force the imagination to whistle past the graveyard images of those 4000-odd bodies yet to be recovered.

This is the smell of a charnel house, you think.

And then, because there is no choice, you exorcise the spectres, force a passage through the throng and continue on your way to dinner.

Today's crash, even if it wasn't the result of terrorism, will make that resolve to continue as before - to get back to normal, as President Bush keeps saying - an academic prospect.

* The New Zealand Herald will publish a special edition today with updated coverage of the New York city plane crash. This special edition will be on sale in Auckland and main provincial cities at midday.

Map of crash area

American Airlines information (from within NZ):
0168 1 800 245 0999