9/11 Remembered: “A light aircraft has collided with the World Trade Center”
Just as I was about to head into the studio to read the hourly news bulletin, the dot matrix printer whirred into action. I ripped the printout off and quickly read it as I walked into the studio. A news flash. It read: a light aircraft has collided with the World Trade Center. I hesitated. I had already compiled the bulletin. I decided to lead the bulletin with it, as a breaking news story.
It was September 11th 2001.
I was a News Reader and Reporter at Active FM in Romford. It was my first proper job.
After that news bulletin the ancient printer worked incessantly. Something serious was unfolding. In those days the internet was in a fledging state. We had one email address for the whole newsroom and just a couple of computers. We wrote our news scripts in Word and everything was done on paper. We tracked down sources using the BT phone directory and Yellow Pages The hourly news feeds of international news were delivered by IRN - Independent Radio News. We had to record them manually every hour and edit them before broadcasting. We fished through reams of paper spewing out of the printer to find the accompanying script, unlike today’s auto capture systems where they appear automatically, ready to go.
The Active FM newsroom and office ©Kieran Hughes
The radio station was on the seventh floor of a tower block occupied by several different businesses. We didn’t have a TV in the radio station so a colleague from the Sales team ran to another floor to borrow one so we could monitor what was happening. That was when we saw the horror of 9/11 unfold. We went into rolling news mode to tell the story of the terror attacks on the Twin Towers that would take 2996 lives. We called around friends and family in New York for updates and got anyone with a connection on air to tell us what they knew. We watched the TV news and saw the second plane hit. We saw people throwing themselves from the buildings in desperation. We witnessed the collapse of the towers. I went in and out of the studio to update listeners in real time. This was how people got their news. Nobody had phone apps or smart phones with 24/7 news on. They waited for the daily papers, or when there was breaking news people tuned in to the radio to listen and be informed.
That evening I went home and cried. I had been on autopilot all day relaying the news. In the warmth and safety of my home the reality started to sink in about the thousands of lives taken and the many more that were devastated.
I bought all the newspapers the next day and I still have them.
9/11 Memorial, New York
