One month later: New Yorkers can't escape the horror

11.45 am - By DAVID USBORNE

NEW YORK - The autumn fog seemed almost to mock us. Against an otherwise flawless sky, it came in from New York harbour in thick, grey banks and paused to linger over the southern tip of Manhattan.

If you saw it, you could only have thought one thing. The awful smoke. They are replaying our Armageddon.

New Yorkers don't need any more reminders. But today was different. It was exactly one month from the day that everything changed for the city, if not for the country and the world. Getting back to normal has become a patriotic duty for Americans. But this was an anniversary and it had to be marked.

Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor, did it by standing on the small wooden platform they have built near the southwest corner of what used to be the World Trade Center. It was a good place for him to preside over a memorial service for the 343 firefighters and 23 police officers who were lost when the towers fell.

The service was simple with a moment of silence at 8.48 am - the time that the first plane struck.

Things were more elaborate in Washington, where thousands attended an outdoor service for the 189 who died when another plane ploughed into the Pentagon that same terrible morning. They held it on the lawn on the good side of the Pentagon, where there is no gash. President George Bush made a speech about the "evil-doers" who had caused so much pain. Everyone had tiny American flags to wave.

The platform that Mr Giulini climbed onto - it looks like a scaffold - was not built for yesterday's service. It is there for relatives of the dead. Every day now they come, sometimes in groups of up to fifty, just to see. What do they see? They see workers in helmets and yellow diggers with enormous jaws taking bites from the mounds of rubble. It will be three more months before they reach ground level.

And they see a grotesque tomb. Bringing them to the scene is just one more way the city has found to help the bereaved cope. It is the same as giving them urns with soil from ground zero. Because most of them have not seen the bodies of their loved ones and have nothing to bury.

More bodies will be found, however. Today, they uncovered a woman. She was intact, almost, a handbag by her side.

And there is still smoke. It rises from several spots across the mangle of concrete, like tiny volcanic plumes. It seems impossible after so long, but the experts say it is normal. As the debris is removed - 260,00 tonnes of it by yesterday - so more oxygen gets down to the remaining hotspots. They say that fires will be burning where the towers stood for weeks more.

And the smell will remain also. One month on, hope of finding anyone alive has gone, hasn't it? Perhaps for all except the tiniest children. Like 5-year-old Aidan Fontana, whose father Dave was a fireman with Squad 1 in Brooklyn. His mother, Marian Fontana, finally said it to him in Burger King the other day. "Daddy is dead," she said gently. "You're a liar," he replied. The boy is planning a welcome home party for Dave.

New Yorkers don't need reminders, because they are still everywhere. The sound of bagpipes seeps from the heavy doors of St Patrick's Cathedral almost every day as mourners arrive for still one more funeral service. The missing handbills, with pictures of the perished, still flutter from walls and lamposts. And when the wind changes and blows from the south, in Manhattan we smell the carnage all over again.

- INDEPENDENT

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