By Lisa Davies
Where were you when the world irrevocably changed?
Those defining moments, when two planes flew into the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, remain among the most shocking in history.
I was already in bed but not asleep when my Dad sent a text message, asking if I was watching the late news. He suggested I put the TV on. Like so many around the world, I spent the next few hours glued to the coverage. As a first-year journalist, barely six months into my reporting career, I tried in vain to fathom what was happening. Text messages between colleagues and friends ricocheted around Sydney into the early hours of that morning. It was the first time the Herald attempted rolling coverage of a big breaking story and the newsroom I know so well would have been in overdrive, remaking multiple editions of the printed Herald to ensure our readers had the most up-to-date news possible.
Front-page of the Herald on September 12, 2001.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald
It’s hard to forget that week for the other major event - airline Ansett collapsed the day after the attacks, leaving 15,000 people out of work and passengers around the country stranded. It would take ten years to finalise the company’s debts, including the payment of entitlements to the thousands of workers who were left unemployed.
As our trawl through the archives discovered, it was also the year 20-year-old Aussie tennis player Lleyton Hewitt won the US Open, beating America’s Pete Sampras just two days before the Twin Towers came down.
Twenty years on, watching this incredible compilation by our video journalist Tom Compagnoni makes that week seem far more recent; at the same time the whole event still seems surreal.
There were an estimated 17,400 people in the 110-storey buildings when the planes struck. It took less than two hours for the twin monoliths to collapse onto their vast footprints, sending piles of twisted rubble hundreds of metres across Manhattan. In total 2977 people were killed, including 412 first responders who entered the buildings to help those trapped on the upper floors. That also included those from the third plane that struck the Pentagon, outside Washington DC, and a fourth that crashed in Pennsylvania because brave passengers overpowered the hijackers.
Thousands more people sustained significant injuries in the attacks or later contracted illnesses connected to it - and the emotional scars for those left behind are all too real. Citizens from 77 countries were among the casualties.
Around the world, everyone has memories of that day. What we know in the newsroom as “anniversary journalism” can be tricky; it’s not always as engaging for readers as we think. So in preparing to mark this one, World Editor Michelle Griffin wanted to focus on how it has impacted us all. “It’s been a whole generation (since the attacks), and it is no longer a story about what happened to New York and Washington, it’s about the changes that affected the whole world.”
Last week, US Correspondent Matthew Knott wrote a piece from the American perspective, how the attacks shattered the myth of American innocence and invulnerability.
Good Weekend’s Tegan Sadlier has written about her heart-stopping experience on the ground in New York that day; while photographer Stephen Dupont also provides a very different perspective, with a photographic tribute to Afghanistan.
Keep an eye out tomorrow for a powerful range of voices reflecting on how their lives changed in an instant, while the Herald’s International Editor Peter Hartcher will write about US complacency, and what it has meant for the global superpower, its allies and the future.
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