They covered 9/11, and what they saw will never leave them

in all of that confusion was it clear to you that the tower was going to collapse that the towers were going to collapse

uh was it clear no I do recall in the time that we saw both towers burning and I saw the the intensity of that black smoke that at some point when I was able to turn to the producers and turn my mic off because someone else was speaking, I do say, can we please get a structural engineer on the phone so that I can understand what's happening in that building right now? I will tell you that in my mind, if there was going to be a structural failure, it wasn't going to happen as fast as it did.

And the way that the towers fell upon themselves, if you'll excuse the term so cleanly, I think you assume that if a tower is going to fail, it's going to topple over.

That's what I kept watching for.

I didn't understand as I was watching the coverage.

They were saying the World Trade Center collapsed.

I'm like, well, how far over did it fall? Did it reach Battery Park? Did it fall uptown? And it just imploded.

If you think of this Pfizer building problem that we had earlier this summer, the – the structural columns on one side of the building failed, and you can sort of envision if the columns on one side failed, the whole thing comes over in one direction, like when you knock over a tower that you built with your kid's Lego.

But I had considered the possibility that there was going to be a structural failure at some point.

It never occurred to me that it would happen as it did and so quickly.

And the tragedy of the FDNY sending 300-plus people into that building because of what we do, which is unique in New York, which is what they call the interior attack.

You know, they fight the fire from inside a burning building.

Very strange.

Nobody else does it.

It seems to have worked in New York for a few centuries, but it didn't work on that day.

Was any dimension of that in that first round of reporting that a lot of people had run into this building when it collapsed?

We could hear the radio transmissions.

So we understood... how many firefighters and how many police officers were moving toward the world trade center we could hear that they were climbing we could hear that they were trying to get people out so as terrible as the thought was you knew when you saw the pictures of the tower coming down that those first responders were inside there it was inevitable that that was the conclusion they had responded there to help people get out they were heading toward the stairs with their full firefighting gear on climbing those stairs the math only added up one way

How was your health afterwards? I know you were a pretty good distance being in the studio, but a lot of people did pass through there.

And what we now know is that almost any level of exposure in the eight months following September 11th really exposed people to a lot of problems.

I have never knowingly had an impact from that.

I probably should have registered with the health fund to just state the fact that I was down there.

I was mostly in the newsroom.

We were on 42nd Street at the time, so we had considerable distance.

The only time in those first three weeks that I was actually at the World Trade Center site was when they did... effectively a photo op they they they said that they were going to invite one of the anchors from each of the the local tv stations to come down uh it was police commissioner bernie carrick at the time who who walked us through and that i was right there in the middle of it for for an hour but aside from that we had we had other people who were far more exposed than i was