The sound 7NEWS' Mike Amor still hears 25 years after 9/11

When veteran 7NEWS reporter Mike Amor thinks of 9/11, he can still hear a distinct chirping sound.

No, it didn’t come from a bird native to New York, but from the safety devices worn by hundreds of firefighters buried beneath the rubble of the World Trade Centre.

Called PASS devices, they activate automatically when the wearer is motionless, making them easier to locate.

The pings went on for days and nights until their batteries and the hope of finding the firefighters alive ran out.

“It was like a chorus of those voices,” Amor told Mediaweek.

There are simply some sounds the brain refuses to forget.

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The day the world changed

Amor spent 17 years as Seven’s United States Bureau Chief, building a career from the sort of assignments most journalists encounter only through archive footage.

He reported from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, covered three US presidential elections, including Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008, and was sent to conflicts in Libya and Gaza. He also covered two coups in Fiji.

But one story has stayed with him more than any other.

On 11 September 2001, Amor found himself in New York as America came under attack.

“Americans watched it unfold on breakfast TV, effectively, and we’d just come out of a pretty peaceful few years, and this was the biggest attack on the American homeland since Pearl Harbour,” he said.

“And with Pearl Harbour, people just read about it.”

The attacks would reshape American foreign policy, propel the country into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and leave consequences that travelled far beyond the ruins of Lower Manhattan.

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‘My head was spinning’

When the attacks began, Amor was in a taxi trying to reach Manhattan as authorities moved to close the bridges and tunnels leading into the island.

The car radio carried a torrent of reports. Some were accurate. Others reflected the fear and confusion swallowing the country whole.

“We had the radio on, we were in the taxi, and our taxi driver was Israeli, and he immediately knew it was an act of terrorism,” Amor said.

“We were listening to the radio and trying to get back into Manhattan Island because they were shutting down the bridges and tunnels, and the taxi driver was wailing; we’re trying to calm him down; we’re listening to reports of attacks at the Pentagon, that a plane was missing going towards the White House, that bombs had gone off outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

“A lot of it wasn’t correct, but too much of it was.”

Amor had been raised in Bendigo. Now, suddenly, he was racing towards the centre of an attack that would divide modern history into a before and an after.

“I’m a boy from Bendigo, and I’m like, my goodness, I found myself in the middle of this massive attack in probably what ended up being the biggest story of my career,” he said.

“My head was spinning. I don’t mind telling you that, you know, I think sometimes as a foreign correspondent, you see things that your brain just can’t compute, and that was certainly one of those days.”

His fear was visible in his earliest reporting.

“You can see my initial piece to camera, and I look petrified,” he said.

Communications were limited. Information arrived in fragments. The dimensions of what had happened were still impossible to comprehend, yet Amor and his crew had to keep reporting.

“I think as a journalist, if you can get your way through that, just speaking from a journalist’s point of view, you can get your way through anything,” he said.

“You can’t walk away from an event like that.”

A chorus in the darkness

As night fell, Amor made it to the outskirts of Ground Zero.

The towers were gone. Mobile phone infrastructure had been destroyed with them. Rescue workers searched through the wreckage while fears remained that surrounding buildings could also collapse.

Then came the sound.

“In the middle of the night, because we didn’t see any time, we managed to get access to the outskirts of the area, the foundations of the World Trade Centre,” Amor said.

“But you could hear people in there searching, but you could also hear that squawking.

“I couldn’t hear phones, because the phone towers were on top of the World Trade Centre, so you couldn’t hear them, but it was like a chorus of those voices, because there were hundreds of them that were missing at this stage.

“And that continued. I can’t remember for how long, but it seemed like forever.”

The devices were designed to lead rescuers to firefighters who had stopped moving. Yet in the ruins, many kept sounding when the people wearing them could no longer be reached.

“They kept squawking all through that first night and into the next day, but so many of them weren’t there, only their alarms,” Amor said.

“The next day you could still hear it.”

The people left behind

The scale of 9/11 is often told in numbers. Nearly 3,000 people were killed. Hundreds of firefighters never returned to their stations. Thousands more would later become ill after breathing the toxic dust that blanketed the site.

But Amor remembers the attacks through the people whose lives were split open by them.

“There was a woman whose husband, Stephen, was in the World Trade Centre, and he was communicating with her,” he said.

“Saying that we can’t, that I’m here, I’m in the area that’s being hit, and she was saying to get out, get out. And then they just went silent, of course, when the tower came down. He had a young child.”

That child is now an adult, having lived almost her entire life without her father.

“That just occurred to me that she’s now obviously well and truly into her 30s and has lived most of her life without her father,” Amor said.

He also met a firefighter who had called in sick that morning. Someone else took his shift.

“The entire, that entire shift was killed,” Amor said.

“He survived, but he had survivor’s guilt because he was sick that day. Someone took his place.”

For many of those who survived, the attack did not end when the smoke cleared.

“Entire shifts of firefighters were just wiped out, and then so many of them died of diseases afterwards,” he said.

“That whole site was full of chemicals, asbestos.”

The sirens that followed him

Correspondents learn to keep moving. Another live cross to prepare, another deadline to meet, another story already unfolding.

“To be honest, as a correspondent, you have to keep on rolling,” Amor said.

But the mind keeps its own archive.

Amor returned to New York dozens of times during his years in the United States. Each time, the city’s emergency sirens brought something back.

“I found it very difficult to hear New York sirens, you know, emergency sirens. Which are constant,” he said.

“I also can’t get out of my head the personal alarms that the firefighters had on their bodies.”

He believes there “has to be a level of PTSD” attached to witnessing an event of that magnitude.

For Americans, he said, 9/11 also left behind an anger that has not disappeared. A generation was sent to fight in wars born from the attacks; thousands returned injured, traumatised or did not return at all.

“They’re the 9/11 generation,” Amor said.

“I think we forget that, not to mention those who lost loved ones. Many of them didn’t get anything back.”

Twenty-five years later, the scale of what happened within little more than an hour remains beyond his comprehension.

“The magnitude of what happened in that space of, you know, an hour or so from the first impact to the towers coming down, it’s just mind-blowing,” Amor said.

“25 years on, I still can’t believe it happened. If you came up with the worst possible scenario, I don’t think that would even be it.”

And beneath all those memories, one sound remains.

Hundreds of alarms calling through the rubble. Then, one by one, falling silent.

Join 7NEWS live at 6.00 pm tonight for special coverage commemorating the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.