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A haunting live NY1 broadcast from the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 shows the world suddenly change in real time — as the news segment shifts from mundane to terrifyingly tragic.
Morning news anchor Patrick Kiernan is first seen covering ho-hum stories about the weather, local primary elections and school dress codes — before the station abruptly airs footage of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center’s north tower.
“This is a live picture from our camera on the Empire State building looking toward the World Trade Center,” Kiernan says in the report, which went viral Thursday on X ahead of the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack.
“You can see the plume of smoke from the top of one of the World Trade Center Towers,” he says calmly, adding it appears to be a large fire. “I don’t have a lot more detail on this other than that at the moment.”
The heartbreaking footage then captures reporters piecing together live and in real time that planes had been highjacked in a likely terrorist attack — one that would turn out to be the deadliest in American history.
When Kiernan takes a call from a witness, George Shay, he frantically describes hearing explosions and seeing a massive tire “smash down on the street in front of me” as he drove into the city via the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
“I heard an enormous explosion then I heard another enormous explosion and it scared me,” Shay says, adding debris filled the air.
“I looked out the window and what appeared to be an enormous tire smashed down on the street in front of me.”
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
The NY1 anchor man then cuts him off to report a plane had crashed into the tower.
“I’m just getting word from our assignment desk that we have information that a plane has crashed into the side of the World Trade Center,” Kiernan says in the footage.
The segment then grows more tense as a second plane crashes into the south tower — and horrifying footage shows it falling, as smoke fills the streets of lower Manhattan.
“That tower is not there anymore,” Kiernan says somberly.
“A dramatic scene. This is, uh, clearly going to mean hundreds if not thousands of people injured as that building has fallen.”
Before the event changed the world forever, Kiernan was shown flashing a New York Post headline about local primaries for his well-known “In the Papers” segment.
He also highlighted a New York Daily News story about Whitney Houston cancelling a concert due to her drug problem and a snoozy New York Times science story about dental implants.
“That’s what’s in the papers this Tuesday,” he says, innocently before the tragedy unfolds.
Daniel McFadin, a reporter for Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, tweeted the footage Wednesday.
“Somebody, somewhere in NYC for whatever reason recorded the New York 1 morning news broadcast on Sept. 11, 2001,” he said on X.
“They wound up recording history. It starts at 8:30 a.m. ET. You get 15 minutes of news from the Before Times. Then the world changes.”
A total of 2,977 victims were killed on Sept. 11, 2001 when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into the WTC’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
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