Pam McCall had covered bombings, plane crashes, train wrecks and calamity of all kinds, but these were events that changed her day. When the World Trade Centre (WTC) towers fell down at her feet, it changed her life. It changed the world.
"I am not going back this year," she said from her office at CBC Radio-Prince George, her home town. "It is too hard. I have been back for other anniversaries and I will go back again, but not this one."
McCall was a senior correspondent for CBS Radio based in New York with veteran credentials with the likes of the BBC and NBC. She had worked in Hong Kong, in Europe, and of course in Canada. She is a graduate of BCIT's broadcasting program, got her start at CJCI radio and then CKPG-TV before moving on to cover the world.
The world came calling louder than she could stand on a hot, sunny day on Sept. 11, 2001. It was her day off and she was headed to the beach but she answered the ringing phone. Her office was frantic for her to come in. A plane had just crashed into one of the twin WTC towers.
By the time she drove downtown from her place on the Upper West Side, the second plane hit.
She got to the scene moments after the second plane hit, and had to run for her own life when the buildings actually toppled not long after that.
She was also exposed to the hope. She was one of only three reporters - one each from print, television and radio - taken down into the bowels of the towers in the aftermath. The underground shopping mall had some pockets of space that might have contained a body, even a survivor, so in they went with a rescue crew. No one was found alive.
"Still, if I drive past a construction site and I smell ground-up cement, I get it all coming back to me," she said.
Another reporter who was also making his way to the scene, that day was in Prince George this week researching a story. Izhar Harpaz was a producer for NBC Dateline with Bob McKeown and the two plunged into the chaos at ground zero that day. Harpaz said everyone knew it was a big story that the first tower had been hit, but when the second collision happened the tone changed.
"I'm originally from Israel. I knew a terrorist attack when I saw one," he said.
Harpaz said NBC cleaned the tourist shops out of handheld video cameras so everyone on staff could film the events, not just the reporters.
Harpaz said he got a bit of sleep that night, but didn't go home for the next five days, constantly working and catching naps at the office.
The interview Harpaz remembers most from that hurricane of human and construction wreckage was an employee of a WTC company who was late to work that day. It was the first day of school for his child. He wasn't sitting at his usual spot in the towers when the planes hit. Everyone he worked with, including his brother, was wiped out.
Harpaz and McKeown didn't even edit the interview, just let his tearful story roll out to viewers raw.
"When that story ran, I broke down in Bob's office and just sobbed," he said. "All those days were built up inside of me, and falling apart like that, finally, was really quite healing."
McCall still gets emotional over the memories and the implications. She said she didn't lose anyone she knew in the attacks, but she was around many who were torn apart by loved ones dead and missing.
"Firefighters were lost; my nephew is a firefighter. With so much focus on the anniversary I am asked about it, and retelling the story brings it all back. Anyone who bears witness to something of that magnitude will be a changed person."
She still feels pangs of guilt - called in the field of psychology "survivor's guilt." She has kept her breathing mask and the reporter's bag she used for those many days of reporting from the front. She also knows fully well that the war in Afghanistan is a continuation of the incident.
"The flipside of all that was the goodness we saw," she said. "Everybody wanted to do anything they could to help, and we saw some spectacular sides of humanity as well."
McCall's work at Ground Zero won her the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association, and the Gracie Allen Award from the American Women in Radio and Television association.
