Here's a contribution from our Highly-Placed Professional.

'I was in the World Trade Centre in 1993, when that truck bomb blew up. I sat right above the explosion, and felt the shock-wave go right through my seat. Even though we were on the 91st floor, our office filled with smoke within a few minutes. We then spent 2 hours walking down very hot stairways in semi darkness. I remember how frightened everyone was. There was a deathly quiet as we descended the stairs, not knowing if we were heading straight into the fire. Of course, we all managed to get out fine, but we felt we'd had a close shave. I returned home covered in soot, just a white circle round my mouth where I'd held a scarf to breathe. I recall seeing people on the Subway who'd also made it out, and they all looked the same.

That experience made what occurred on 9/11 all the more poignant for me. My kids still thought I worked in the Towers, and were really concerned when the teachers at their New York school told them what had happened. Loads of my friends called me, from the US and the UK, thinking I was still there. But I wasn't. So, for the second time I felt I had beaten the World Trade Centre curse. But of course I had friends and colleagues who weren't so lucky. And one poor chap who had just started a job at Tulletts. A fantastic, charismatic bloke who was a pleasure to have known and worked with. Gone in an instant.

We lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, but when I got home that day, I felt strangely drawn to the wreckage of the Towers. I went there every day for a week, beating the police cordon and cycling down there quickly from the Upper West Side. I remember that, on the West Side Highway, there was a daily procession of wrecked vehicles, dumpsters full of debris, and smashed up fire trucks, being towed up to an assembly point to the north of Harlem. People came to watch and support the workers, but it was like something out of a Mad Max movie. And every day huge barges took all those twisted girders off to the landfill site on Staten Island-Fishkill. (It had been closed for years, but there was so much debris they had to open it). It was also there that they sorted out the human remains and did forensic testing to identify the bodies.

But let me tell you what it was like when we got downtown, and to within a few hundred feet of the shards of wreckage that were all that were left of the Twin Towers. This was 2 days after the attack, but there was still smoke drifting about, and more noticeable, a really strong metallic smell which stuck in your throat and gave you a headache. There was thick dust on the sidewalks and under the awnings of buildings. And, in places, this was as much as a foot deep! It was like powder snow, only gritty and heavy to the touch. I was told later it had loads of asbestos in it, but who knows. The shards of the Tower themselves were by now iconic, and we felt quite voyeuristic looking at them, so close up - twisted, silver, broken and shrouded in smoke. But  having worked there for three years, I could still identify that distinctive lattice work pattern in the uprights. I'd been to summer lunchtime concerts in this very place. (Even seen the Monkees there once). These thoughts kept going through my head. How could such a vibrant area of town, with so many people, become such a no-man's land ?  And what was the point of destroying it all ? And I remember it was eerily quiet - no birds, no people, no traffic.

We felt edgy as hell, because we knew that we weren't really meant to be there. But there were no police to speak of, so we headed back uptown, hoping to find a bar or something. The whole Battery area was effectively closed. You had to go well past the meat packing district to get some semblance of normal life. I went down there a couple more times before the clear-up started in earnest. It was my own little pilgrimage. I just felt so lucky not to be working there any more. And I tell you what else I felt - I felt guilty. Everyone had their own way of reacting, but I actually felt guilty. Why had I lucked out and changed jobs, moved on, when others like my market mucker had moved right in there, up on the 101st floor ?

It's funny, for years after, you'd be taking a cab in New York, and it would have the map of the city right behind the driver, with 'Rudolf Giuliani, Mayor' written at the bottom. And my kids would push their pudgy little fingers onto the picture of the World Trade Centre that was still on the map, and say, 'Boy, you were lucky, Daddy!' They didn't know the half of it, bless them'.

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