Mike Amor on the September 11, 2001 memories forever ‘burned into’ his soul as fallout of terror continues

A quarter of a century on from the deadliest terror attack in history, the devastating fallout of September 11, 2001 and the new world order it reckoned continues to bleed today with the recent Bondi Beach massacre.

7News anchor Mike Amor was at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, New York, 25 years ago and has never forgotten the day that fundamental extremism reared its ugly head.

He recounts the haunting “electronic chirping” of fallen firefighters’ safety alarms echoing through the dust-choked streets of New York, a sound he says “burned into your soul.”

He can’t erase the memories of a city gripped by unfathomable terror, the wail of sirens, and the inescapable reality that we had entered a brutal new era.

“It really is hard to believe it’s 25 years — I’ve forgotten many other things in my career, but the subsequent days after 9/11 are going to stay with me forever,” Amor said in an exclusive interview with The Nightly.

“I can’t watch any of the documentaries, I tried but I just found it too traumatic to be honest with you, also I used to find it hard going back to New York, which I did dozens upon dozens of times in the subsequent years and the police sirens as well just kind of took me back to that day.

“There was just so many of them going rushing into the World Trade Centre site and that kind of all brought back that — I found it hard to sleep in New York City after that.”

Amor was only in his 30s, a young Australian correspondent sent to cover Lleyton Hewitt’s US Open victory the night before the unthinkable struck.

He was in the back on a taxi — running late to the airport to catch a flight.

“I still remember how it was a beautiful September day, crystal clear blue skies, New York in September is picturesque,” Amor said.

“We drove into the Midtown Tunnel, came out the other end, and the whole world had changed.

“Remember, we’re still talking flip phones back then and I had multiple missed calls, and before I could even answer them, it rang again, and it was the late night producer in Sydney saying, ‘you know a plane hit the World Trade Centre’.”

The taxi was heading in the opposite direction to the burning tower — but the building stood-out amongst the concrete jungle’s skyline.

“I looked through the back window of the taxi, and it almost framed it perfectly,” he said.

“You could see the first tower with a big hole and at that stage the smoke was just starting to come out of it, and I think immediately you knew that it wasn’t an accident.

“It was evident to our Israeli taxi driver, he just started wailing and said ‘they’ve got us here, they’ve got us here’, and he knew it was a terrorist attack.

“Everything just spun out of control after that.”

As their taxi tried to make its was back into Manhattan, the local radio stations were scrambling to make sense of what was unfolding.

There were reports of another plane missing — heading towards the White House — a car bomb outside the U.S. Supreme Court and another aircraft going down in Pennsylvania.

Before any of it could be verified, Amor says the second tower at the World Trade Centre was struck by a huge airliner.

“It was just thinking, holy shit, what the hell am I in the middle of,” Amor said.

“I think initially we just didn’t comprehend the magnitude of it.”

The reality hit home for Amor as the rubble of the collapsing 110-storey office buildings settled and the family and loved ones of the almost 3000 innocent victims began their heartbreaking search.

“At first a man came up to me (with a photo) and said ‘have you seen this person?, my son,’ and I’m like, you know, no,” he said.

“It’s kind of like unusual, and then it became a torrent of people doing the same - it was, they’re so desperate to find anyone that could help them locate their loved ones.

“One of the American journalists I was next to end up breaking down, they (families) were just so distraught and you could see the look of loss on their face.”

What he also couldn’t have comprehended at the time, was that the nightmare he was experience would haunt the world and his career for the next two and a half decades, including most recently at home on the golden sandy shores of Bondi Beach on December 14 last year.

“It led America and other countries like Australia into two wars, one of which only just finished five years ago, and hundreds of thousands of Americans served in those wars and are still carrying the impact of that,” he said.

“We saw multiple terrorist attacks spin out of that which I have covered either personally or from a distance — in Paris, the Boston bombing, and more recently Bondi Beach.

“This flow-on effect has impacted the world for decades, and still is, so I think it’s imperative not only to remember the people that were lost that day on 9/11, but also the lessons that we should have learned from that day, of which there are many.”