Tombs of sorrow in New York

By JEREMY REES AND AGENCIES

At Ground Zero, where once the titans of finance made their deals, the scene of devastation is occasionally lit by fireballs.

Flames erupt when the debris of twisted girders and shattered concrete are removed and air ignites the still-smouldering wreckage.

"We got a problem with fireballs," says a firefighter.

At the corner at Number One Liberty Plaza, the upmarket Brooks Brothers clothing store has been turned into a temporary morgue in the former men's shirt department.

Officials evacuated the 54-storey building near the ruins, fearing it might collapse, but they later reopened it.

To reach the makeshift morgue, doctors trudge through a mix of pulverised concrete and the pulp of paper and documents that a few days ago filled the 1600 offices of the World Trade Center.

Inside, National Guardsmen, with M16 rifles, stand guard over a dozen orange body-bags. None of the bodies inside is intact.

Rescuers continued to try to sift through the rubble, looking for survivors, but last night the grim realisation had set in that the twin towers of the World Trade Center, once symbols of financial power, are probably now a tomb for the thousands of bodies buried under masonry.

Firefighters, wielding long poles with attached cameras and listening devices, probed crevices for signs of life.

Only seven storeys of the 110-storey north tower remained. The south tower is a two-storey heap of rubble. Between them cranes worked to remove stones from rubble five storeys high.

When the towers collapsed, fatally weakened by the inferno of 1000 degrees C ignited by the aviation fuel in the planes' full tanks, they set off a cloud of dust that blanketed New York's financial district.

The concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan were a mess of twisted girders, boulders of concrete, wrecked cars and choking dust.

In the blocks south, corner markets still have fruit neatly stacked in pyramids in the front but covered in soot. Cars, streets, doughnut carts, abandoned bicycles, signs, rubbish bins - everything is blanketed by soot a few inches thick.

The grit of pulverised concrete, insulation and asbestos still fills the air, making it necessary for firefighters to wear masks. Nurses use bags of saline solution to rinse the eyes of workers picking through the rubble.

The smell of gas hangs over the site from ruptured pipes.

An elevated walkway that once ran between the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center along the Hudson River has fallen to the ground, blocking a street.

The heart of New York's financial quarter is now the world's largest crime scene.

The Center was surrounded by the famous landmarks of American moneymaking. Wall Street starts 200m away. The American Stock Exchange building is closer. Around it are the skyscrapers erected by the giants of world finance: Dow Jones, Merrill Lynch, Bankers Trust, American Express, Chase Bank, AT&T.

A block away from the towers is the southern end of Broadway. About 800m away is Battery Park, home to forts built to defend New York harbour from attack in the war of 1812, and views out to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the gateway for immigrants from the Old World to the New.

Yesterday, the air of Lower Manhattan, usually bustling with commerce, was heavy with silence, split from time to time by sirens.

New Yorkers were faced by a series of barricades through the city.

The great imponderable is how many other buildings have sustained damage. Yesterday, emergency crews estimated 100 buildings could have been damaged.

Rescue efforts have to be repeatedly stopped as parts of buildings around Ground Zero crumble away.

Just hours after the attacks, another World Trade Center building, Number 7, collapsed.

Across the street, One Liberty Plaza, the 54-storey home for Nasdaq, was damaged but still stands.

But at the centre of the devastation is the 500m expanse of rubble that was the twin towers. The rubble is not just being dumped. Trucks are taking it to a huge indoor warehouse on Staten Island.

There members of the FBI's Evidence Response Team pore over every broken piece, looking for anything that will yield clues to the atrocity.

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Emergency telephone numbers for friends and family of victims and survivors

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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Air New Zealand flights affected

Air NZ flight information: 0800 737-000.