"I heard the boom of the first plane, and at first I thought it was loud construction," said Mitch Frank, a reporter for Time magazine who lives two miles southeast of the World Trade Center in Brooklyn Heights. "It’s gonna be a very long day at work, I realized, and I’m a reporter. I’m supposed to be there."

Frank grabbed his notebook and camera and ran toward the Brooklyn Bridge, getting about 20 feet from his apartment when the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

"It was at that point when I realized this was not an accident," he said. He interviewed people on the bridge as a tide of refugees streamed out of downtown Manhattan.

"When I got across the bridge from City Hall, people were heading across the bridge or uptown to get away," he added. "The other half were just standing there. Police were telling people to move uptown, but no one was moving."

Standing at City Hall, just a few blocks away from the towers, Frank heard a loud groan and a few screams. The first tower collapsed.

"At first, it looked like it might teeter and fall on us, but then it just pancaked down," Frank said. "Nobody moved. Everybody was just standing there in shock."

Then a wave of concrete dust and ash billowed out from the site, he said, and people turned and ran uptown.

"We got about 30 feet before the cloud was on us, and it was night," he said. "I couldn’t breathe. I just stood there and waited for it to pass. It was in your nose and your throat."

Frank spent the rest of the day reporting for a special edition of the magazine, which closed the next afternoon. Only a week later did the day’s events really sink in, he said.

"It’s completely surreal," he said. "You wake up and suddenly in a war zone in your own city."

Jena Bridges, a fifth-year law associate, was in a partner’s office at Broadway and 42nd Street waiting for a conference call when smoke and flames erupted from the north tower.

"One of the partners said, ‘Holy s**t!’ I turned around and looked out the window and said, ‘Oh my God,’" Bridges said. "Then as we were watching, we saw the second plane bank around into the second building, and there was this huge ball of fire."

"I didn’t really freak out, I just got really nervous. I was like, ‘I have to get out of here,’" she said. She put on her tennis shoes and walked home to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. "The whole city was walking north," she said.

Heidi Waters Thorsen was on the phone that morning with her landlady because someone had tried to break the lock on her door. Then the landlady told her to go outside and look south down 7th Avenue.

"Just when I was hanging up with her, my husband comes running in the door and says, ‘Take a look at this,’" said Thorsen, a housewife who lives in Greenwich village, only two miles north of the World Trade Center. They flipped on the television briefly and then headed outside.

"I didn’t see the planes hit. I just saw it when it was all on fire," Thorsen said. "We looked at it for a few minutes but figured they’ll put the fires out. We didn’t think it was going to go down."

Dominic Perella had just gotten home to Brooklyn after working the overnight shift at the Associated Press. He was getting ready for bed when his roommate shouted into his room, saying Perella must not have known what happened when he left work.

"We went onto the roof, which has a Manhattan view," Perella said. "We saw the second plane approach. I thought it was a rescue plane or something, and then it disappeared from sight."

He phoned his office, figuring he should head back to work.

"It was total chaos there," Perella said. "Someone picked up the phone and all I heard was yelling."

He got into Manhattan before the subways were shut down. At every stop, Perella said, people getting on would give updates as the Pentagon was hit and then the first tower collapsed.

Once Perella reached work, he said he edited continuously for about a day and a half.

"There are times when it’s been overwhelming," he said.

Tierney O’Dea, an associate producer at NBC nightly news, was at home at 34th Street and 2nd Avenue with the television on as she prepared to vote in that day’s mayoral primary election. She called her office and was told to go to the World Trade Center and meet an NBC television crew.

She got to the base of the towers at about 9:15 a.m., paying off a cab driver to take her that far south, but she couldn’t find the NBC crew. She hired a freelance crew on the spot.

"We were filming rescue crews, evacuations, people jumping. It was really bad," O’Dea said. "I hear this booming plane noise, and I flip out. I see it’s a fighter jet."

When the first tower collapsed, O’Dea and the crew dove into an abandoned bakery about a block away from the World Trade Center and hid behind the counter.

She eventually emerged and was two blocks away on Broadway when the second building went down. Her crew shot much of the footage that appeared on NBC that night.

"I had a cough for two weeks afterward," she said. "I got pelted [with building debris] more the second time. People who didn’t get cover were messed up."

In this melee, she got separated from her crew—they were fine—but she had the tape of the second collapse. She found an NBC truck near Stuyvesant High School, where she lent her cell phone to a firefighter who had lost his entire unit.