When the world caved in on me yesterday morning, I was standing 200 feet from 1 World Trade Center, looking at the top of the other Twin Tower resting on the ground.
It was a freakish sight, and as I shot it, another photographer approached me and said he was out of film. I had two rolls left. I handed him one.
The sunny sky had already turned dark with black smoke when, all of a sudden, an unearthly rolling thunder filled the air, forecasting the imminent collapse of the other crippled building.
As I turned to run, a wall of warm air came barrelling toward me. I tried to outrace it, but it swept me up and literally blew me into the wall of a building. By the time I regained my footing, a hailstorm of debris was falling from the sky.
As the rubble piled up around and on top of me, I yanked my bandana around my face.
When the thunder stopped, I found myself standing in a 7-foot heap of rubble, and I couldn’t get my head up. Holding my breath, I frantically picked away at the debris until I opened a space above me and hoisted myself out.
Realizing I was missing one of my cameras – the one with the film of the first collapse – I climbed back in and retrieved it and then came up for air again.
I captured a bubble of air between my cupped hands, inhaled deeply and tried to get my bearings.
Standing on top of the mountain of wreckage and unable to see an inch in front of my face, I started yelling. “Anyone out there?” My question was met with dead silence.
It was 15 or 20 minutes before the smoke started to dissipate and I could see I was standing on a vast ocean of rubble. But it was what I couldn’t see that was the most disturbing of all.
The firefighters who had been darting across the street when the thunder started were all gone. So were the police officers and other emergency personnel.
The photographer who had pleaded with me for a roll of film was nowhere to be seen. He had just vanished.
I never found him.