One horror on the heels of another

The daughter of the most senior New York firefighter killed on September 11 was about to pick up her children when the house shuddered and a mushroom cloud of smoke rose two blocks away.

Tara Davan, daughter of First Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan, was at home in Rockaway, a neighbourhood about 24km from the rubble of the World Trade Center. She called her husband, Brian, also a firefighter.

"Brian, you're not going to believe this," she said frantically, "but a plane crashed a few blocks away. I'm not kidding you. A plane just went down. They've done it again."

The tight, middle-class neighbourhood is home to scores of police and firefighting families, many still mourning those lost in the terrorist strikes of September 11. Many other locals had worked at the trade center for brokers Cantor Fitzgerald.

Many locals thought the roar of the stricken American Airlines Flight 587 was the Concorde.

Then they saw the aircraft flying low, too low, and ran into the streets.

"We even have plans for what happens when a plane comes down but we never thought it would actually happen," said one resident.

For the first time in weeks, Fire Chief Pete Hayden had a day off from leading the department's task force at the World Trade Center. As he walked his dog, Guinness, the groans of an aircraft pulled his eyes to the sky.

"I saw heavy smoke behind the left wing," he told the New York Times. He watched the wing come off, then other sections, possibly the tail.

"She started to corkscrew, and then the last several hundred feet she went straight down," he said.

Hayden ran the nine short blocks to the crash, followed by dozens of other firefighters who heard it, and went to work.

One of the plane's engines fell into the back garden of 414 Beach 128th Street. At noon it was still lying there, lodged between the back of the house, its small garage and a modest speedboat.

The main house was intact, though with all the windows blown out, and the family had escaped.

The house had been just like any other in the neighbourhood until yesterday morning.

A stuffed scarecrow made of straw and a bedsheet was propped on its front steps, left over from Hallowe'en. On the small front garden stood a gnome holding an American flag, presumably placed there after September 11.

What turned out to be an engine crashed to the ground at a petrol station.

This was one small stroke of good fortune amid the carnage. The engine narrowly missed a fuel tanker parked on the street outside and came to rest a few feet from the pumps.

The 84-year-old mother of the station owner, who usually keeps an eye on business in the forecourt, had taken the day off.

Ground zero yesterday was at Beach 131st Street and Newport Ave.

No names were officially released but the locals knew for whom to fear: the retired couple in the obliterated corner house, the father and son who had moved on to the block recently, the mother and son for whom the father was searching without success.

"If it's an accident, it might make it easier to accept," Ann Erhard, who had been working at her computer when the power went dead and the house shook, told Newsweek.

"If it's terrorism, it's just that much harder. We were just starting to recover. People were smiling a little bit more on the streets."

Congressman Anthony Weiner had just been at one of the memorial services held daily at the De Sales Church over the past two months when the tragedy happened.

"This is just a mammoth aftershock after the earthquake of September 11," he told the Independent. "Just as people were returning to some kind of normalcy here, there is catastrophe again."

Fern Liberman, another Rockaway resident, said: "This community was hit so hard by the trade center [atrocity]. A lot of firefighters ... policemen, and we had a lot of people at Cantor Fitzgerald.

"We were hit very hard. Just on the heels of one horror, another."

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