Horror, heroism during tragedy

Shortly after the first explosion, an elevator opened at One World Trade Center. A man stood inside, engulfed in flames. Kenny Johannemann, a janitor, said he and a second person grabbed the man, put the fire out, and dragged him outside. Then Johannemann heard a second explosion - and saw people jumping from the upper floors of the 110-storey Twin Towers.

Jerome Giddings of Irvington, New Jersey, was doing some surveying work at Newark International Airport when he saw one of the towers collapse about 16km away. "I was looking through the instrument at the smoke coming from the buildings, and all of a sudden one of them was gone. It just wasn't there," Giddings said.

It almost seemed like a stream of refugees. Pentagon employees walked several kilometres down a closed highway, next to the graves of Arlington National Cemetery, looking for a way to get home. Many of those walking through the Iwo Jima Memorial and next to the cemetery were trying unsuccessfully to call friends and family on jammed cellphone lines.

Clemant Lewin, a banker who works across street from the World Trade Center towers, said that after the initial explosion, he looked out the window and saw people jumping from the building from as high as the 80th floor, including a man and a woman holding hands as they fell. "I'm traumatised for life," Lewin said. "Someone needs to take responsibility for this. This was somebody's father, this was somebody's sister, somebody's mother. We should have seen this coming. I'm disgusted."

Clayton Hill, 23, who works for an internet company, was ordered out of a Manhattan subway just after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He joined a crowd of hundreds looking up at the gaping hole, then saw bodies tumbling out, one after the other. "Everyone would just let out a gasp" as each victim fell, Hill said. Then the tower collapsed and the crowd panicked. "People started running like crazy. I was running and looking back. It was insane."

Joan Feldman, an employee of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in the second tower, said the evacuation was orderly after the first plane hit the other building. She walked down from 88th floor to 78th, then took an elevator down from there. "We had just got out the door when the second plane hit," she told WABC-TV. "There were a lot of police in the lobby level and they were directing people out. I was with a co-worker who was not able to move very quickly. I ran into the street and pushed her under a car because there was falling debris."

In Brooklyn, Hasidic Jews from a local synagogue stood in the burning sun in black garb, handing out cups of water to tired refugees coming over the Williamsburg Bridge. One man gave out free Italian ice.

Frank Salumn said he injured his knee when he grabbed a little girl and jumped onto a tugboat to get out of New York. His pants were ripped and he had an ice pack on his knee as he sat at Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. He was on the promenade outside the World Trade Center when he saw the second airplane crash. "The whole thing came down like a glass house," said Salumn, 36, of Brooklyn.

Robert James, 43, manager of a Modell's sports store near the Trade Center, was in the basement when he heard the explosion, then emerged to see at least five bodies fall from the skyscraper. "They looked like rag dolls," he said. "It was like the kind of thing you see in movies." He was nearby for the 1993 Trade Center bombing, James said, adding, "I don't think I'll work down here anymore."

Many workers from Lower Manhattan were taken across the Hudson River on ferries and stranded in New Jersey. Their cellphones went dead, so they lined up at pay phones hoping to get rides home. Ann Ventra, of Staten Island, used a pay phone to call a relative. "I have no money; I don't even have a quarter," she said on the phone. From her office in Manhattan, she said she saw people on fire jumping from the towers. "Seven, 10 people jumping out of the building. I think I'm just in shock."

Residents far away from New York City listened to radios, watched TV and made calls on cellphones to loved ones. It was the talk of elevators, bank lines, street corners and restaurants. In West Virginia, fear about terrorism was real. "If it made people in small towns afraid to go to work in the morning, I think they really accomplished something in their minds, probably," Russell Kitchen, a legislative staffer at the state Capitol, said during a mandatory evacuation there.

At Antoine's, the 161-year-old restaurant in New Orleans' French Quarter, waiters stood by empty tables. Along Bourbon St, where strangers usually begin partying early and bars stay open 24 hours, drivers delivering beer and liquor to the jazz clubs and strip joints listened to radios, while workers inside clustered around televisions. Manager Paul Greco said: "I think everyone is in shock. It's incredible.'

Full coverage: Terror in America

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These numbers are valid for calls from within New Zealand, but may be overloaded at the moment.

United Airlines: 0168 1800 932 8555

American Airlines: 0168 1800 245 0999

NZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 0800 872 111

US Embassy in Wellington (recorded info): 04 472 2068

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