My 9/11: to Manhattan in stretch limos festooned with disco lights

We rolled into Manhattan in a convoy of stag-night stretch limos hired in Montreal and driven by large, silent east Europeans.

As we entered New York on Friday 14 September, the brakes began to fail on our vehicle, but it wasn't a problem: the streets were eerily empty as we drove through the crossroads. The next thing we noticed was the smell - a reek of burnt plastic that three days after the 9/11 attacks still left a bitter taste on your tongue.

The surreal journey that ended in vehicles festooned with disco lights had started equally strangely. A jet chartered from Switzerland had touched down on the tarmac in Brussels to pick up a hastily assembled team of journalists dragged from BBC bureaux around Europe. People were pulled off other stories and back from holidays.

Gavin Hewitt was fresh from Sangatte and the refugees story. Philippa Thomas and Richard Lister returned from their holiday in the south of France. Iolo ap Dafydd came from BBC Wales. Then there were producers Manon van Vark and Manoush Zomorodi, and crews from Brussels, John Boon, Xavier van Pevenage and Maarten Lernout.

With US airspace closed, we spent days looking at routes via Jamaica, Canada and Mexico. We endlessly discussed pilot working hours and the danger of flying too soon or, worse, too late. In the end we gambled and flew before airspace opened, to land in Canada along with plane loads of other journalists.

We found the exhausted New York and Washington teams, which had heroically kept the coverage going, cut off from the rest of the world as New York's telecoms system - much of it routed under the World Trade Center - had disintegrated. The teams from London quickly spread out across the city and soon we were rolling for live and continuous TV, anchoring the bulletins, and presenting radio programmes from locations as close as we could get to Ground Zero.

The other things I remember?

- Sitting with Steve Evans in a quiet moment as he described being inside the World Trade Center as the plane hit.

- Jane Standley finding a pastor she knew from her time in Africa who was now working at St Paul's Chapel in the shadow of the Twin Towers. It was the church where Washington prayed on the day of his inauguration as the US' first president and was miraculously spared the destruction all around it, becoming a symbol of hope for New Yorkers. 

- Brian Hanrahan and Steve Evans - on next-to-no-notice - agreeing to commentate over a memorial service for British victims at St Thomas Church where Tony Blair gave a reading. That service, engineered by the ever-unflappable Robin Mortby, was carried live across the UK on TV and radio and, more importantly, across the US.

But the main thing I remember was contacting friends - we'd only left the US in June after seven years in Washington. Every conversation started by asking if they were OK and if all their family members were safe. Everyone sounded in shock and everyone was hugging their kids close.

Andrew Roy is Head of News at BBC World News. He was the BBC's Washington bureau chief until June 2001 when he moved to Brussels after seven years in DC.