My 9/11: 'As we watched the pictures of the towers coming down, we held hands and wept'

The shippers were coming in two days. All weekend we'd been packing four years of living in Washington into boxes and we were pretty much done. So I set off for the office nearly on time.

I had just taken the down escalator to the Friendship Heights metro when the first call came. It was Malcolm Downing on the foreign desk in London. He said: "You'd better get to New York." A train, I thought he said, had hit the World Trade Center. A train? That's a bit careless, I thought, heading back out of the Metro to go home and grab my gear. Then Martin Turner, the bureau chief, rang and said a plane - oh, a plane - had hit the World Trade Center. Still careless, I thought, throwing together a few changes of clothes, mobile phone charger and radio gear; anything not already in a cardboard box.

My husband said he'd run me to the airport. We turned the car radio on. Yes, a plane had hit a World Trade Center tower; it was on fire. Martin called again. Jon Leyne, one of the Washington correspondents, had got to Reagan to find the airport was closed; all flights cancelled.

Instead, we headed for the 10am train to New York from Union station. On the radio, the NPR defence correspondent was speaking from the Pentagon. Something was happening, but he didn't know what.

As we got closer to the station, itself less than half a mile from the Capitol building, the traffic was hardly moving. I looked at my watch and said "I'll make the train if I run." I barely looked back, intent on making my train. I did. I found one Washington correspondent, Tom Carver, already on board, but another, Rob Watson, had just got off. No-one was sure what had happened at the Pentagon.

The train was full of crews and journalists heading to New York. As it started, the driver announced: "Last train to New York, last train to New York." We all scrambled to press our record buttons.

When we got to Baltimore it was clear the train was going no further. Tom and I cut round the back of the station, hailed a cab and debated if we should take it all the way to New York. Then Martin called again: yes, the Pentagon had been hit by a plane too. And another plane had just crashed in Pennsylvania. Tom and I looked at each other in disbelief. Martin wanted Tom back in Washington; I was to continue to New York.

I called our travel agent and asked her to find a car rental close to the highway between Baltimore and DC and book me a car. Amazingly, she managed it. Tom took the cab on south, while I set off on the long drive north.

The I-95 was eerily empty. I turned on the radio. Peter Jennings from ABC was describing the scene in New York. Both the World Trade Center towers had been hit, and both had collapsed. The Manhattan bridges were closed.

I called a colleague from the news agency APTN. She was 20 miles ahead of me driving a van load of gear to New York. How was she going to get into Manhattan? Her parents lived in New Jersey near the Hoboken Bridge and she was going to work it out from there.

I called another journalist friend, Fiona Guthrie, who I'd stayed with just two weeks earlier and who lived north of New York: could she keep a check for me on the best routes in? I drove on listening to Jennings' calm voice describe utter chaos.

I felt I must be the only person who hadn't seen the pictures by now. But as I got further north I saw soon enough: a huge black smear across the sky, as if a child had dragged a dirty hand from left to right across the Manhattan skyline. I tried not to think too hard about what it meant and to concentrate on how I was going to get to the BBC bureau on Broadway.

First attempt to cross east, no chance. There was a long line of cars with people standing gaping at the rearranged skyscape. I reversed rapidly, checked the map and aimed for the Weehawken Bridge. No good: there were police blocking the highway. I asked in my most British accent how I could get across to join the BBC operation in New York. They weren't at all impressed and just waved me back.

My mobile was running low so I stopped at a diner to recharge it and get some coffee. Fiona called to say the Tappan Zee Bridge north of New York was open. If I headed across there she'd meet me at White Plains train station. If the trains were running, we could get to Grand Central; if not, she'd drive in with me. It was getting dark when I finally parked up at White Plains, but, Fiona beamed, the trains were running.

When we boarded the next train a guy in our carriage had his bicycle, a face mask and a large bottle of water. In what seemed like minutes - after the endless hours of driving - we were at Grand Central Station, its cavernous halls almost entirely empty. We caught the shuttle train, which was also empty, across to Broadway. That was deserted too.

The bureau was busy. There was a deceptive aura of calm, almost as if we'd just got back from a lunch break. It was nearly 9pm Eastern time, 12 hours after the biggest terrorist attack ever on US soil.

Correspondent Jane Standley and cameraman Chuck Tayman were putting the finishing touches to their breakfast piece; they'd been flat out all day. In the absence of the staff producer Diane Tucker (in New Mexico filming a long-planned feature), freelance Debbie Geller had been running things like a tyro. I followed her upstairs to APTN where we fed our tapes to London, to check on the satellite bookings, memorising door codes and names as I went. Later, I sat down with Debbie, a New Yorker through and through, and together, as we watched the pictures of the towers coming down, we held hands and we wept. I sent people off to get some sleep and come back for an early start the next morning.

But Steve Evans, the BBC business reporter, who'd actually been in the other tower when the first one was hit, wasn't ready to stop. I mentioned a story that had been in all the weekend papers about the massive funeral for three firefighters who'd died in a paint fire in Boston the week before. "What on earth would they do for all the guys who'd died in the World Trade Center?" I wondered aloud. Minutes later I heard him tell the same story on BBC Radio 5 Live, just one of the myriad two-ways he must have done that day.

One day blurred into the next. The Miami correspondent toured hospitals discovering medical teams on standby for the casualties that never came. Business editor Daniel Dodd drove in from Halifax where his plane had been grounded. A Welsh reporter on holiday turned his hand to bilingual reporting.

I can't remember if it was the second morning or the one after that when the bureau doorbell rang furiously at 6am. There was an English voice on the intercom; a man sounding utterly distraught. I told him to come up.

He was on holiday in New York, he said, and was desperate to call home to tell his family he was OK. But he couldn't find a phone that was working. I wasn't surprised: the collapse of the towers had disrupted call networks and I could still only call London on the ISDN line or by using a long string of numbers that routed the call via a cheap call deal in the Mid West. I wrote down his wife's number, dialled and got an English voice at the other end. "Call from New York," I said, and gave him the phone. He just wept into it; I busied myself clearing up the studio next door.

Finally, on Friday the London news teams got across the Atlantic after three frustrating days stuck on the ground. Andrew Roy, who'd been the Americas bureau chief until a few months before, rang to say they'd just crossed the Canadian border. His Kiwi drawl had never sounded so welcome. 

Soon there were dozens of people crowding into the bureau demanding hotel rooms, desks, cameras, tape stock and, above all, permits for Ground Zero. After a quick handover with Andrew, I was grateful to be sent off to eat and sleep.

I sat in a restaurant and called a friend who lived one street from the World Trade Center. Minky was in a New Jersey hotel - she'd been evacuated a few hours after the attacks. She was OK but clearly in shock. I realised I wasn't quite together myself and tried to sleep.

The next two weeks were a blur of demands from London and from the teams visiting from London. Tony Fallshaw, one of the cameramen, built me a tape library so we could keep track of the key images. The One O'Clock News editor wanted the piece we'd sent overnight re-cut, so the picture editor was woken up at 4am. I discovered I'd got $45,000-worth of hotel bills on my credit card from all the rooms I'd been holding for the London teams.

Then my husband rang. The shippers were coming, two weeks late. We needed to go through the final packing list. I walked down Broadway saying "Ship", "No. Plane baggage", "Ship", "Plane", "Ship". It seemed wonderfully uncomplicated.

Fiona Anderson was the BBC's Senior Newsgathering Producer in Washington.

The is the second in a short series of personal memories of the coverage of 9/11, around the tenth anniversary of the attack, the first being 'My 9/11: I missed the second tower being hit - the phone line didn't reach the door'.