25 years on from 9/11: Shock, grief, and resilience as New York is attacked from a clear blue skyReporting from New York on the 25th anniversary, Paul Hosford hears stories of people who lived through the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center on this day in 2001 Fri, 11 Sep, 2026 – 10:25Paul Hosford
Everybody remembers the clear blue skies. Talk to New Yorkers about September 11, and they will start there.
The skies above the five boroughs were what aviators call a “severe clear”, meaning there were no clouds in the sky and visibility was effectively limited only to the eye’s ability.
The previous night, a thunderstorm had broken the stifling humidity and haze that punctuates the late summer in one of the world’s most densely packed cities.
Sunrise and blue skies
But by the time the sun had risen in New York at 6.30am, a deadly plot thought up thousands of kilometres away and executed by 19 terrorists had already taken its first steps as hijackers Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al-Omari passed through security at Portland International Jetport in Maine, some 500km from Manhattan at 5.45am.
The pair — Atta is the leader of the plot — board a commuter flight to Boston Logan International Airport, where they are to connect to American Airlines Flight 11.
Around 15 minutes later, polls open in the city’s mayoral primary. After eight years of Rudy Giuliani’s focus on civic order and debates about the ‘Disneyfication’ of the city after decades of neglect, New Yorkers were set to elect a successor, and debate raged about what the next version of a city constantly reinventing itself would be.
This article is part of Paul Hosford’s special report on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 published by the ‘Irish Examiner’ in print and online on Friday and Saturday, September 11 & 12, 2026
Manhattan borough historian and director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, Harold Holzer, was at the time the vice president for external affairs at the Metropolitan Museum and says that New York on the morning of 9/11 was a “restive” city.
“We had gone through eight years of Giuliani as mayor, and he was a law-and-order conservative… and the campaign had engaged a lot of people.”
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While billionaire businessman Michael Bloomberg is on course to take the Republican nomination, the Democratic ticket is far from decided, and is the focus of the city’s news media.
“Everything was geared toward the evening, because that’s when the results come in, and so that’s where we had put most of our resources,” Kristen Shaughnessy, who at the time was a reporter for NY1, tells the Irish Examiner. “So we were just doing primary coverage in Brooklyn at the time.”
Flights take off
Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Brenda Morrissey was working as an EMT with Hunter Ambulance. As she clocks on to start her 8am shift with a hospital transfer, American Airlines flight 11 takes off from Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Los Angeles, carrying 11 crew, 76 passengers, five hijackers and 76,000 pounds of fuel.
Some 15 minutes after that transport had begun, Flight 11 had been hijacked by five Al-Qaeda terrorists who, in the words of flight attendant Betty Ong, had stabbed the captain and purser.
At the same time, United Airlines Flight 175 is taking off from Boston, also bound for Los Angeles, also carrying five hijackers along with nine crew members, 51 passengers and a similar fuel payload.
At 8.20am, American Airlines Flight 77, en route to Los Angeles, takes off from Washington Dulles carrying six crew members, 53 passengers, and five hijackers.
In midtown, Dubliner Martin Nutty and his wife set off for work in the Times Square area.
“If anything, it was a beautiful day. My wife and I both worked in the Times Square area, which probably about a mile and a half walk, and if we had the time, we used to like to walk into work together.”
Meanwhile, just blocks from the site, Lila Nordstrom is a high school senior at Stuyvesant, hoping to get a class picture retaken, dissatisfied with her previous day’s effort.
An FDNY firefighter’s day off
Across the East River from the towers, firefighter Brian Davan is on a day off, having worked a 24-hour shift from Sunday into Monday.
“My two older kids were in grammar school. I got them off to school.
“My wife went to work as a teacher in a Catholic school, and I had my youngest, a three-year-old, at home. And later on that day, she had like a two-hour nursery programme or something.”
At 8.42am, Flight 93 leaves Newark Airport after a delay carrying seven crew members, 33 passengers, and four hijackers on a San Francisco–bound flight. At around the same time, David Ushery, now a familiar face on the city’s local NBC news, was working for another station and preparing to call in sick.
“I was in South Africa at a UN conference and I returned from that trip a little under the weather, a little laryngitis. So fully prepared to call in sick at about 8.30am. But before I could, our communication devices at the time, beepers, went off saying ‘All available crews report to the World Trade Center’.”
8.46am: Flight 11 hits the WTC
Near the tip of Manhattan, as the World Trade Center is coming to life and New York awakens, at 8.46am, Flight 11 slams into floors 93 through 99 of 1 World Trade Center, the North Tower.
The impact severs all three emergency stairwells and traps hundreds of people above the 91st floor. Nobody above the 92nd floor would survive.
For many, there was confusion at first about just how serious the incident is.
“I got a phone call from my brother, a little frantic,” says Brian Davan.
“He says, ‘Put on the TV’. I said, ‘I have the TV on’. He goes, ‘So you know?’ I said, ‘What’s going on?’ I had on public broadcasting. It was a little children’s show.
He said, ‘Turn on any other channel’, so I do and I see it.
“He didn’t know it was a plane.
“It was a big hole in Tower One. He goes, ‘Looks like a bomb went off or something’.”
In Brooklyn, as her crew is preparing to get live shots of voting, Kristen Shaughnessy is called away.
“The news came that the first plane hit, and that’s when [my editors] said you’ve got to go. But at that point, we thought it was just like a small commuter plane or something. We didn’t realise it was a big plane.”
In the North Tower, Dianne DeFontes feels a “bang” on the 89th floor and is thrown from her chair. She would later tell an oral history project that the doorframes had been warped by the blast, trapping herself and others before a man in a yellow hardhat and flashlight burst through a jammed door with a crowbar and told the group, “We have to go, now!”
“It was Pablo Ortiz,” she recalls.
Former Navy Seal Pablo Ortiz and his Port Authority colleagues Frank De Martini, Pete Negron, and Carlos da Costa helped at least 50 trapped people, according to a book by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 minutes.
‘There is no need to evacuate Building 2’
At some point in the next five minutes, the South Tower’s PA system announces that the incident occurred in the other building and says Building 2 is secure. A recording of the announcement is playing in the background of a phone message by an office worker to a family member.
The 9/11 Commission report quotes a survivor as recalling it went: “Building 2 is secure. There is no need to evacuate Building 2.”
The commission could not establish exactly why the announcement was made. Both the deputy fire safety director believed to have made it and the WTC complex’s fire safety director died when the South Tower collapsed.
A few moments later, Brenda Morrissey is told that two ambulances from her company have begun to head to the World Trade Center, with her Friday EMS partner Mark Schwartz in one.
Mark, a vice-president with the company, was part of the Metro New York Disaster Medical Assistance Team and was part of the co-ordination for any mass casualty incident involving private ambulance use. At just 50, he would not come home.
“The two ambulances again,” Ms Morrissey says, “We heard them on the radio driving the wrong way down a parkway, escorted by the police department”.
“They had closed the parkway, and these guys were just going. And I’m like, ‘did they just say they’re driving the roadway on the belt?’”
‘I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked’
While an evacuation of the North Tower had been called for, by 8.57am, FDNY chiefs had instructed the Port Authority Police Department and building personnel to evacuate the South Tower as well, because of the magnitude of the damage caused by the first plane’s impact.
However, contradictory messages continue for at least five minutes, by which time Flight 175 is hurtling towards the South Tower.
At 9am, a member of the flight’s crew makes contact with United Airlines, and at least three passengers contact family, including Brian David Sweeney, who leaves a voicemail for his wife Julie in which he says:
“I’m on an airplane that’s been hijacked. If things don’t go well, and it’s not looking good, I just want you to know I absolutely love you, I want you to do good, go have good times — same to my parents and everybody — and I just totally love you, and I’ll see you when you get there. Bye, babe. I hope I call you.”
9.03am: Flight 175 hits WTC
At 9.03am, Flight 175 hits 2 World Trade Center at floors 77 through 85, killing all onboard and more in the building. It is clear to everyone watching that this is not a freak accident.
“The second plane hit, and I knew it was terrorism. I knew we had to go in,” says firefighter Brian Davan.
As Mr Davan realised the scale of what was happening, Kristen Shaughnessy and her crew were already being escorted across the Manhattan Bridge by an FDNY fire truck towards lower Manhattan.
“We took the Manhattan Bridge because the Brooklyn Bridge was full of people who were leaving the World Trade Center.
“There was a fire truck, and us.
“We were the lone vehicles on the bridge… we followed them, but they went to the Trade Center. We got separated from them down by City Hall, because you just couldn’t get through the crowds of people. I just got out of the truck, and I ran, and they said somebody [a cameraman] would meet me.”
Uptown at the Met, Harold Holzer’s mind also turned to the 1945 incident in which a US Army Air Forces B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building, killing 14.
“I did have a television in my office, and I turned it on, and I don’t know if they were focusing when the second plane hit, but they repeated it over and over again. So then we realised that only when the second plane hit did people realise it wasn’t an accident.”
In a news studio in midtown Manhattan, David Ushery and his colleagues watch the second plane hit and know this is no freak event.
“When a second one hits, the whole tenor changes. The whole mindset changes,” he says.
“This appears to be a deliberate act. Just too rare, too uncommon to have two jetliners on a clear day target two twin towers, and you know I think not only our tenor changes, but you can feel it with elected officials and the government officials fairly quickly.
“Certainly here in the city, with Mayor Giuliani at the time, and the response that this is a different environment now that we’re operating in.”
Mayor Giuliani reaches the NYPD command post at the World Trade Center at 9.05am as the NYPD asks for airspace to be closed and issues a second level four mobilisation while the FDNY sounds a fifth alarm for the South Tower, effectively cancelling any leave for any firefighter in the city.
Brenda Morrissey, meanwhile, is tasked with getting to the site and finding Mark Schwartz.
“My dispatcher called me and said, ‘We need to send you in to find Mark. He goes to get those crews out of there. This is not going to be good for them. And I’m like, ‘Okay’.
“They asked us to head into Manhattan and figure out where the two crews that they had sent had gone, and we never found them. I mean, you know we got there. We were following a convoy of police vehicles, fire vehicles, buses with fire and EMS people in them, and cops and whatever.
“It’s just a convoy of everything going into the city… and a car broke down inside the Midtown Tunnel, which is where we were all travelling through.
“A fire truck pushed it out of the way. I had no idea where that car came from, and I was afraid of it because I’m like, this thing might be a bomb, like it’s this beat-up car, and I had no idea it got pushed out of the way because we were so far behind that fire truck that just pushed it.”
‘Are you going in?’
At the same time, Brian Davan, part of a proud firefighting family, began his journey into Manhattan.
“I call my two brothers, my older brothers who were firemen too. They were also off, and I said, “Are you going in? Are you going in? Of course, we have to go to our firehouses to get all our gear.”
In the skies over West Virginia, meanwhile, United Airlines flight 77 has been hijacked while in Florida, President George W Bush has been informed that the US is under attack. He will take off in Air Force One with no set destination, while vice president Dick Cheney is evacuated to the Emergency Operations Center under the White House. At the same time, falling debris has damaged 7 World Trade Center, across Vesey St, forcing the evacuation of both that building and the New York City Office of Emergency Management inside.
9.37am: Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon
At 9.37am, Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon in Washington DC, but many of those in New York don’t become aware until later.
“The one thing we didn’t know is what was going on in Pennsylvania and DC. I actually found out about that probably 9pm, maybe even later,” says Brenda Morrissey.
In DC, New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney had been due to bring a bill to the Financial Services Committee when her late husband, Clifton Wells Maloney, himself an amateur pilot, had alerted her to the fact that the first crash was in fact terrorism and not an accident. She was then told that a helicopter had hit the Pentagon.
“I could see the Pentagon out of my office window, and I’ve seen crashes, and it’s a little bit of fire. This was billowing huge amounts of fire, and I said it’s a terrorist attack. I’m leaving. I want my staff to leave. I called the chairman of the committee and said I’m not coming in. I’m leaving. We went down and got into cars and started driving out, and I started driving back to New York.”
9.59am: South tower collapses
In the shadow of the towers, Kristen Shaughnessy reached a phone booth to call into her TV station to report. As she is live on air at 9.59am, the South Tower collapses.
“I figured they would want some kind of report, and so we went live using phoners because all the antennas and the communication were on top of the World Trade Center, so everything was out.
“Nothing was getting through, but the payphones worked, and there was still a payphone.
“And then when I was reporting, that first tower came down, and I just didn’t think that they had any idea. Like I’m like, there’s no way they can understand how bad this is. So I was, I don’t know. You’re kind of you.
“You want to explain how bad it is, but you don’t want to freak people out. You don’t want to exaggerate.
“You just want to say what you see. But at some point, it got to the point where we had to run because you’re getting hit by debris.”
That knocking out of satellite and cellphone infrastructure made reporting the day more difficult, says David Ushery.
“A lot of the station’s transmitting towers were on top of the World Trade Center. So when they went down, we lost the ability to reach a significant part of the audience. Our job is to get information out, and people can’t even, you know, they can’t even get us over the air.”
As Brenda Morrissey sought to reach the EMS staging post at the base of the World Trade Center, a police officer’s plea for help redirected her attention not long before the collapse.
“Mark was actually the co-ordinator for the private ambulance segment if a disaster happened. So that’s why he was there. So he was sent to a staging area right outside World Trade Center, and that’s where the first building that collapsed pretty much fell right on top of those guys. We were sent there. That’s where they were.
“But we got stopped a few blocks away by that federal police officer with his gun, who just wanted help. All of the officers who could run got out, and evacuated to 26 Federal Plaza, which is the main federal building in Manhattan, and that’s where we were.”
In Marine Park in South Brooklyn, a large enclave of Irish and Italian-Americans, many of whom served as first responders or commuted into the city, 11-year-old Bridget Gormley sees classmates being taken home as the day goes on. Her father, William ‘Billy’ Gormley responds to the call shortly after the collapse.
“I was one of the six kids who stayed all day. It was Twilight Zone-ish.”
10.03am United Flight 93 crashes
Just after 10am, United Flight 93 crashes into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers and crew storm the cockpit, killing 33 passengers and seven crew. Within half an hour, the Pentagon’s E Ring and the North Tower of the World Trade Center both collapse.
John Lee, the president of the Irish Business Organisation in New York, sees the smoke from over 24km away in Belmont Park, where he works at the time and which is used as a staging area for emergency vehicles.
“From the roof of Belmont Park, you could see the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center. The tallest buildings on the skyline. And then at one point, it wasn’t there anymore. You know, it was hard to kind of see it through the dust and everything, but at one point, it just was gone.”
With the collapse comes the deaths of thousands of people, including senior leadership from first responder organisations, something Brian Davan felt personally and professionally.
“It took a while to regain control; you could even argue there was no control on that on 9/11. It was just too tragic and too big.
“Sometime later in the day, maybe 2pm, I saw the chief medical officer, who’s a friend, and she told me that Bill’s gone.”
As the day wears on, it becomes clear that there will be thousands of families whose loved ones will not return from work that day.
“It’s an aspect of the story that’s not as recalled as much, but it was a painful aspect,” David Ushery says.
“And that was families desperate, and now we can look back and say this with some sensitivity, in denial almost. They came with the pictures that said, “Have you seen? Have you seen?”
“With hope, because hope was all you had to cling to.”
Within hours, though, many first responders know that aside from a handful of cases, this is not going to be a rescue mission.
While Port Authority police officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin will be pulled from the rubble at 10.30pm and Genelle Guzman-McMillan the following morning, there are just 20 survivors pulled from the rubble.
‘New Yorkers have a lot of heart’
Within 24 hours, an operation to clear the debris would come alive, drawing construction workers and first responders from across America to what would become known as ‘The Pile’, in a dust that would claim three times as many lives as the attacks in the years since, resulting in two and a half decades of political and grassroots advocacy and campaigning for access to healthcare and compensation.
In the immediate aftermath, as the city reeled in the following days, New Yorkers would find hope and comfort in one another and in a global outpouring of grief.
“On 9/12 you had fire trucks on the West Side Highway from Chicago that drove all night waiting to help,” says Bridget Gormley.
You had fire trucks from Miami-Dade that drove up all night, parked, waiting to help. You had Texas FEMA Task Force One and Texas FD drove trucks through the country to New York waiting to help.”
“I think I just want to say there’s always this perception of New Yorkers as kind of cold and busy and indifferent,” says Lilly Tuttle, senior curator of the Collection at Museum of the City of New York.
“And I think that 9/11 really disproved that stereotype. I think that New Yorkers have a lot of heart.”
William M Feehan, 71-year-old Irish-American firefighter, died a hero
In the 9/11 Memorial Museum in Lower Manhattan, there is an exhibit called the Portrait Wall.
A still, haunting box room of 2,997 faces killed in New York, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania 25 years ago, one such portrait is William M Feehan.
At 71, William was the oldest and most senior leader of the New York City Fire Department to die in the line of duty during the attacks, a first deputy fire commissioner and former firefighter who rose through the ranks and served as the department’s commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins.
In a cafe just three blocks from the museum 25 years on, his son-in-law Brian Davan — himself a firefighter and 9/11 first responder — remembers a “hero”, a man who died operating a forward command post at the worst mass casualty events in US history.
But in the museum, an audio tribute from William’s granddaughter Kelsey recalls simply a quiet grandfather who would make oatmeal and put on Grease when his granddaughters came to visit, content in their company watching a film he had seen multiple times.
He is just one of nearly 3,000 people who woke up expecting Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to be just another workday and who did not come home.
One of thousands of family members lost, one of thousands of stories to be told in the quarter of a century since.
- Paul Hosford, Deputy Political Editor
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25 years on from 9/11: ‘Man in the red bandana’ symbolises courage and selflessness amid tragedy
25 years on from 9/11: The profound loss suffered by New York’s Irish community
25 years on from 9/11: Firefighters and volunteers took solace from ‘little chapel that stood’ among ruins
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25 years on from 9/11: ‘Man in the red bandana’ symbolises courage and selflessness amid tragedy
25 years on from 9/11: The profound loss suffered by New York’s Irish community
25 years on from 9/11: Firefighters and volunteers took solace from ‘little chapel that stood’ among ruins
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