Twenty years ago today, on Sept. 11, 2001, the deadliest foreign attack on U.S. soil killed 2,996 people and injured more than 6,000 others.
Nineteen men hijacked four commercial airplanes and crashed them into the towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon building in Washington and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Bay Area News Group photojournalist Jane Tyska spent 10 days in New York, flying out on the first commercial flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 15. Here’s her first-person story from 2001.
When I was little, my father Frank took me to the bottom of Manhattan Island and pointed to scores of men working down in the biggest hole I had ever seen.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked. Without waiting for a reply, he answered: “This is going to be the tallest building in the world.” I stared in awe and wonder, knowing I was witnessing something special.
My mind flashed to that memory as I gaped at the TV screen in panic and disbelief on the morning of Sept. 11, falling to my knees on the floor as I watched the Twin Towers collapse. I soon realized I needed to be with my friends and family who were affected by this horrific act. Almost everyone I know back East knew someone who died.
I jumped on the first flight that departed Oakland for New York four days after the attack, and upon arrival could immediately see the billowing black smoke from JFK Airport. But it was not until I actually slogged through mounds of soggy stock portfolios and smelled the stench of death rising from the subway grates that I began to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy.
Even then, I kept looking for the twin towers.
I went to several of my favorite spots to view the Manhattan skyline, secretly hoping the gleaming towers would magically reappear. But they couldn’t be seen. Not from Brooklyn, not from the Staten Island Ferry, not from uptown. There was only an emptiness that seemed to have a physical presence, as if the void itself was an unbearable weight.
The first-hand accounts of the tragedy were endless and compelling. Everyone I spoke with, police, firefighters, rescue workers and civilians, needed to talk about their experience.
“I kept crawling deeper and deeper into the wreckage, but there was nothing. I just wanted to find one person,” said a firefighter as his eyes filled with tears. I asked if there was anything I could do. Could I buy him a drink? “I just need a hug,” he replied. I embraced him and we both cried.
My cousin, Lt. Ray Callinan from Ladder 17 in the Bronx, first worked ground zero two days after the attack. Rescue workers found the bodies of 20 firefighters that day, and he was part of a 100-man line that carried them out of the rubble in firefighter tradition.
“I was on the line which went from the perimeter,” my cousin said. “They put them (the dead firefighters) in body bags and were passing them out. It was very emotional seeing these guys on the line, some who were looking for sons and brothers. One helmet was with a body and it was a brand-new helmet. It wasn’t even damaged. That was very sad.”
Callinan’s station lost two men whose bodies haven’t been recovered; the station next to his lost six. He has been going to memorials and funerals non-stop.
“The toughest was passing these guys down and knowing they were regular firemen like myself,” he said. “If the circumstances were different, I could have been there. You worry about the future of your kids, this unknown fear that we now have to live with every day.”
Staring down on the wreckage of the World Trade Center as I shot pictures from the 40th floor of a nearby building, I thought of that giant mysterious hole in the ground that I saw so many years ago as a child. Once again, it was filled with workers.
