I was asked to write this account as a companion to my photograph when it was acquired by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.
I could not believe my eyes when I arrived at Ground Zero. Psychiatrists later explained that I had apparently snapped into what they call a dissociative state. You don’t exactly lose your grasp of reality; you just feel detached, like you are in a movie or a dream …or a nightmare. It was the terrifying last hour of a long, terrifying day that had started 14 hours earlier back home in Philadelphia.
Like every work day, my clock radio woke me at 9 a.m. with headlines from the local news radio station. But on this morning, the anchor seemed uncharacteristically lost for words. She was describing fire and smoke and then a hole in a building and then she mentioned the World Trade Center. I sprung out of bed and turned on the TV just in time to witness the second strike live.
I got dressed, grabbed my gear, got out the door in no time, and within about 30 minutes I had boarded what turned out to be the last train out of Philadelphia. This is the first step when you cover breaking news: You start moving immediately and think about your next moves on the way.
I went to the club car and stuffed my photo vest pockets with crackers and water bottles and I ate a blueberry muffin. There were rumors on the train about planes crashing into buildings in Pittsburgh and Washington and something about a car bomb at the State Department.
My girlfriend called my cellphone and said she had watched both towers collapse on TV and I told her that wasn’t possible. Another call came in: It was my sister begging me not to go to New York. You have to be very selfish to do this work sometimes.
As the train approached Newark, we caught our first glance at the plume of smoke and could see that the towers were gone. A woman fell to her knees between rows of seats, pounded the windows with the bottoms of her fists and screamed at the top of her lungs: “No! No! No! No! No!”
The conductor announced that we all had to get off and switch to another train, but I think now that it was a ruse to evacuate us. As I was getting off, a man who had been obliviously reading his newspaper asked me what was happening.
I explained what I knew quickly in one long horrible run-on sentence and he just absolutely froze in his seat. Police on the platform said they were evacuating the whole Amtrak system. They told us to “Run! Run! Run!” and we did.
I had met reporters from two other newspapers on the train and we hatched a plan to go to Jersey City, where we had heard that evacuation ferries were dropping off survivors. We thought maybe one might take us back into Lower Manhattan.
We got in a taxi but traffic was gridlocked. We got out and started walking and then hitchhiked, and we got picked up by an older man with an old car, who for some reason made it his mission to get us to the Hudson River.
We passed a work crew raking fresh pavement in a strip mall parking lot and I could see the disaster in the distance, but their view was blocked and it seemed like they didn’t have a clue. It was surreal.
The driver who picked us up explained that he had recently retired from a maintenance job at the State Department but still had his ID. He waved it at every roadblock and barked “State Department!” at police who would then aggressively wave us through.
I felt as if we had found an angel to help us find our way, but when we got to the river, police wouldn’t let us pass through the triage area between us and the pier.
Hundreds of shocked survivors were staggering along the Jersey City waterfront. Others were on stretchers; many seemed to have just fallen to the ground. They were all completely covered in dust. Some were bleeding; too many to manage.
Some had lost their shoes. One man had lost his pants and tied his dress shirt around his waist. He told us he had been near the World Trade Center and somehow was propelled into the Hudson by the force of the collapse; a ferry had then taken him to this side of the river.
I took some pictures and a courier sent by my newspaper found me and picked up my film. I had worn a yellow Hawaiian shirt under my photo vest to help colleagues find me, and so I looked ridiculous. It was a beautiful day but the sun was beating down and I burn easily, and so I was worried about that.
A colleague with a car turned up at the Jersey City waterfront. I jumped in with him and two others and we stopped at a highway hotel to regroup. The lobby was filled with people with suitcases who had checked out but had nowhere to go because of the transportation shutdown.
We watched replays of the impacts and collapses for the first time on cable news in the breakfast area. I was too afraid to look very much at where we were going.
We decided to drive as far up the Hudson as necessary to find an open bridge and drive back down into the city. The New Jersey Turnpike was closed but we found an entrance blocked only by a utility crew and we talked our way through and headed north. There was basically no traffic on the pike.
The sun was setting as we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, and I could see smoke rising high into the sky 30 miles away as I looked south down the river. We drove through Yonkers and down the highway along the Hudson until we hit a hard roadblock and ditched the car at the Javits Center.
I walked off alone at first but ran into police barricades all the way across Manhattan to the East River. I had basically given up and was making my way back to the car when I ran into my friend Chris Brennan, who had also been riding in the car with us. He was a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, which had sent both of us to New York.
Chris convinced me to keep digging and we eventually found an unguarded alley and made our way south, evading every roadblock and barricade. I remember counting 65 of them. We found our way along the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and all the way to the Financial District.
We had overshot Ground Zero because the twin towers, which had always served as beacons for lost visitors, were gone. But we knew we were getting closer as the warm beige dust we were kicking up as we walked grew a little deeper in the street. All of the surrounding buildings had lost power and I could see the stars in the sky whenever I looked up.
We turned one corner and were surprised to find a neon sign illuminated outside the Killarney Rose, an Irish pub just off of Wall Street. Chris opened the door and we were amazed to find the place open for business. People in business attire were sitting at the bar, covered in dust and drinking beer.
Inexplicably, I spotted Mets highlights on the TV.
I used the bar’s pay phone to check messages because we had lost cell service. I got some ice water in a pint glass and tried to nap on the dusty floor. I think we may have been there for nearly an hour before we set off again.
Still dodging roadblocks, we had to go all the way down to Battery Park before eventually following a stalled, parade of ambulances winding up toward Ground Zero. The crew from one gave us dust masks.
The last alley we followed into the scene was dark and narrow, and the ground seemed to move as I stepped forward. I froze as I realized I was looking at a carpet of rats in front of me but Chris pressed onward, making a wake, and I followed him through.
Having seen no images of Ground Zero before we arrived, laying my eyes on the scene challenged my grasp of reality. It was approaching 11 p.m. on Sept. 11 and there were already huge construction cranes at work and banks of emergency lighting. The girders on the ground looked like thousands of huge matchsticks covered in dust.
My first thought was that we must have stumbled onto a movie set, that this couldn’t be real, but I followed Chris and did my best to mask my confusion. The things I saw were unspeakably ghastly but I knew enough to try to take the sort of photos that a newspaper might publish.
A firefighter walked up to us and started rattling off a long list of FDNY members who were missing. He seemed lost and ghost-like, covered in dust but with dark streaks of blood running down from his eyes.
Chris thought he recognized an actor from “The Sopranos” — probably the most popular TV show at that time — and we confirmed it was him. He had just come to help dig through the rubble.
I gashed my palm while climbing around and then had my own clean streak of blood cutting a path through the dust on my arm and dripping from my elbow, but I pressed my other thumb into the wound and got it under control.
Two officials who must have just arrived at the scene — because their matching golf jackets were exceptionally not yet caked in dust — yelled at us and made us take a few steps back for a few minutes.
Fire was pouring out from two upper floors of an old bank building on one corner and nobody seemed concerned. Smaller fires were burning everywhere. I found two temporary morgues in plain view. A small emergency medical crew had set up a base but had nothing to do.
I knew that I had stay to photograph the sunrise, but I was already exhausted. Somebody had dragged dozens of office chairs into the street between the buildings of the World Financial Center, on the west edge of the ruins. I imagined that volunteers may have placed them there for emergency workers to rest but few were being used and so we grabbed a couple.
I nodded off sitting upright but kept waking up to the crashing sounds of cranes pulling girders from the pile and the screeching noise of bulldozers clearing paths along the edge of the scene.
I think part of some building must have collapsed around the corner when one huge cloud of heavy dust and debris blew past us. It was getting colder too.
When I spotted the first signs of dawn on September 12, I made my way into one heavily-damaged building and up to the second floor to get a higher perspective and face east toward where I imagined the sun would rise. And it did.
As Chris and I left the scene, we passed a cluster of journalists being held outside the widening security perimeter. We took a wide berth and one yelled a question toward us: “Was it worth it?” I still don’t know what he meant but I have wondered the same thing many times since while managing my own deep and persistent traumatic memories.
We walked north along closed streets for a while before I spotted and caught a taxi back up to Penn Station. I was still completely covered in dust as I boarded Amtrak back to Philadelphia but everyone took it in stride. I borrowed a phone charger from another passenger and let the office know I was coming.
Back in the newsroom, I handed my film to one editor for processing and watched while another picked the sunrise image for the next day’s newspaper. The photo was printed wrapping around the entire front and back pages on September 13.
– Jim MacMillan, June 1, 2025