I spent a lot of time on the anniversary of 9/11 watching TV videos of the awful events of that day of 25 years ago. I gave some time recently in a piece for the NTV Evening News explaining how in the early hours of September 11, 2001, in our newsroom in St. John’s, as in newsrooms around the world, we were consumed with covering the story. There was work to be done in terms of using our limited resources to get the story told. That received our full focus.

Our own first hurdle was to find a way get a microwave signal out of Gander. Gander was the town so central to telling the story of plane loads of people who had “come from away” to our province. By way of information, I can tell you that, although we had no television station in Gander, we could send a microwave signal from a tiny concrete building used for telecommunications by a private company that was not in the TV business. They helped us and it worked. We had two TV crews motoring to Gander and a place from which we could transmit their pictures to St. Johns. It is hard to explain but there is a sense that in being able to do that made us feel good although “good” is not the right word.

Within the television business there is a phrase that is called getting “lost in the lens”. What it means is that no matter how horrific a story is, there is an obligation to cover it to the best of our ability. NTV was not an exception in the “lost in the lens” phenomenon. In our newsroom we could see coverage from New York and Washington and everywhere else. Most of the channels were “program” feeds but there was one CBS off-air channel that was being used to co-ordinate that networks coverage. The talk on that channel wasn’t from anchors or news people. It was from producers of various levels directing coverage from ground zero and elsewhere. It was talk about camera availability and technical requirements and all of the thousand of little details that go along with that. It was busy but it was calm and very much under control. If you think I was surprised by that I was not. It is the way things go. It is not a reflection of being hard or not caring. It is just a matter of focus and not of emotion.

That brings me now to the 25th anniversary of 9/11. In Newfoundland we remembered the planes and people who had found shelter in Gander and St. John’s and other places. We have been for centuries a place of shelter. Good for us. It speaks well of us but the anniversary of 9/11 this year took me to my own television set and American networks and the awful images of the Twin Towers in New York falling and the aftermath of it all. Some pictures I had seen for the first time and some stories I had heard for the first time,

In the end some numbers confronted me from that day. Over 1,700 humans died in the collapse of the North Tower. Another 1,000 people died in subsequent collapse of the South Tower. From the fire department another 343 people were killed. The grim total was 2,996 people killed. That included those on planes that were hijacked and included the hijackers themselves.

The shots of the smoking rubble at ground zero had a great impact on me but so did some other shots. One of those was a long parking lot of cars. It was in New Jersey. It was cars parked while their owners went to work on Sept. 11th by commuter train to the World Trade Centre.  They were the cars of hundreds people who weren’t coming home that evening.  It was a another chilling image  from a day that changed our understanding of our flawed world.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca