Few events in history have the power to evoke one’s memory of exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news, but the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was one such event.
For Australian journalist Michael Usher, that memory has been seared into his mind for the past 25 years as someone who saw the terror and devastation at Ground Zero unfold in real time.
Even all these years later, he finds it difficult to wrap his head around.
“I think I’ve blocked it out for quite a few years. Something about 9/11 has a greater impact on me now than even 10 years ago and maybe that’s because what happened then really did tilt the world in a different direction,” Michael tells Woman’s Day of the Al-Qaeda attacks, which saw jihadists hijack two commercial planes and steer them into the Twin Towers.
The unthinkable act claimed 2, 977 innocent lives, including 10 Australians, and injured thousands more, and triggered years of conflict with the Middle East.
Michael continues, “I think I’ve got sadder the more it goes on, thinking about what happened there and how it’s impacted all of us. Some of the vision, I must admit, I find it very difficult looking back on it. I don’t love seeing a lot of the anniversary images, particularly of the planes going into the towers.”
Earlier that year, the journalist had relocated to Los Angeles to start his stint as the US correspondent for Nine. He’d been in New York covering an uplifting story – Lleyton Hewitt’s triumphant win at the US Open – and was waiting to depart from JFK Airport when he got word of something big happening in the city.
“I had messaged people to say, ‘Look, leaving Manhattan, heading to the airport’, so some thought I might have been on one of the planes because all of our mobile phones went down, New York just blacked out,” Michael recalls. “They all panicked for some time until I could make contact. And I think, in my circles, people were relieved when I popped up live on air because that was the first they knew that we were there.”
A ‘deathly quiet’ city and weeks of uncertainty
The next 48 hours were a whirlwind of chaos and tragedy. The usually heaving city went “deathly quiet”, sealed off from the rest of the world, and “anyone who was in Manhattan, stayed in Manhattan”.
Michael recalls trying to get some sleep on the sidewalk near their satellite truck as emergency services dealt with the harrowing aftermath. He remained there for weeks, and each day brought its own challenge.
“I found it just too big to describe,” Michael says. “So much of 9/11 was beyond words… I found it very hard at the time. I genuinely found it overwhelming.
“Probably the more emotional part of being a reporter on the ground was in the days and many weeks afterwards, there were photos of relatives who were missing and families wandering the streets saying, ‘Have you seen my husband? Have you seen my wife, my dad, my mum?’
“They were still searching in the hope that somewhere in all that rubble, people might have been trapped and still alive. There was hope and then that hope disappeared.”
A small glimmer amongst the darkness
Michael spent the next few years covering stories between New York, Iraq and areas of the Middle East. Thinking back to the early days after September 11, he remembers one glimmer of light in amongst all the melancholy.
His then-wife Anna was early on in her pregnancy with their son Tom, the eldest of their three children, and he shares, “Probably two weeks later, we were sitting down just taking stock of everything, and it just seemed right – in amongst our team, of camera crews and journalists – that we announced then and there that we were having a baby.
“Maybe it was just the light moment we all needed at a pretty dark time, and proof that life goes on.”
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