A North Yorkshire man buried beneath rubble after the Twin Towers collapsed on top of him on September 11, 2001, lived to tell the tale — but was diagnosed with a deadly lung disease two decades later.
Filmmaker Paul Berriff, now 80, described an “apocalyptic scene” as he watched buildings and vehicles around him on fire after two passenger airliners were flown into the World Trade Center in New York by Islamist extremists.
The September 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington killed 2,977 innocent people — and Paul, from Northallerton, counts himself lucky to be alive.
Then 55, Paul was in New York with a team from the UK working on a TV series about animal cops in September 2001.
He was at the office at 8.45am on September 11, 2001, when he was told an aeroplane had hit the World Trade Center — thinking, at first, that it had to be a light aircraft.
Speaking to The Press for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Paul said his “news instinct kicked in” and he drove to the scene with a camera and his crew after the first plane hit.
“On the way down, we began to see the two towers,” he said. “Both of them were on fire; the second plane had just gone in — so we knew then it wasn’t a light aircraft.”
Paul started filming as he watched firefighters run into the towers over a period of around 25 minutes.
“None of us knew it was likely to collapse at all,” he said.
Paul remembered hearing a “loud explosion”. “And I swung my camera around just to see the top of the South Tower beginning to peel away. It was like a massive umbrella just fanning out.
“Firefighters started shouting, ‘Run, run, run’, but I stood there with my sound recordist looking through the small view finder on my camera as half a million tons of concrete was hurdling towards me.
“I stood there for a couple of seconds. That's quite a long time, but the buildings at the time were some of the highest in the world so it was taking time for all the debris to descend.”
Another two seconds passed before Paul said he told his sound recordist to run — and they hurried away from the towers as debris continued to “hurtle down” towards them.
“As I was running I kept the camera running — it was over my shoulder still filming — I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear it,” he said.
“It was just like an avalanche but not of snow, just concrete and everything else hurtling towards us.”
But after 10 seconds of running, “all I remember was my camera leaving my right hand in slow motion. Then everything goes black.”
Paul remembered being hit which knocked him unconscious for about 35 minutes.
“I was lying there when the North Tower came down on top of me as well,” he said. “The next thing I remember — and I thought it was a matter of seconds, obviously it was a lot longer — I gained consciousness and everything was just black — blacker than the blackest night.
"I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes were full of all this gunge, my mouth, my nose, my ears — it was just like a cement paste.
“I could hardly breathe — I was hot and sweaty. The ground around me was on fire, stuff around me was burning — I could hear things still falling, but I couldn’t see anything.”
Paul then started to crawl and felt the side of a car, then more cars.
He followed the parked cars which he believed led to the Hudson River.
“I suddenly thought, I don’t think I’m going to make this," he said. "That was the first time in my career that I thought, this is it.
“Because I couldn’t breathe at all — I was gasping and gasping and trying to get this gunge out of my ears, my eyes, nose, mouth — it was everywhere. And everything I touched was burning hot.”
'I must have been the first alive person right in the epicentre of it all'
Paul continued to crawl — still hearing things crashing and falling around him — until he got to the third car, when the visibility started to clear to around 20 yards away.
He said he saw an empty ambulance with its red light flashing and continued to follow the cars down the street.
He stood up after another five seconds of crawling and said “everything was just deathly silent”.
“The building to my right was on fire from the ground floor to the top — all 24 stories,” Paul recalled. “All the fire trucks in front of me were on fire, and ambulances and police cars.
“And in the distance, I could see bits of the building embedded in the road.
“… I must have been the first alive person right in the epicentre of it all. I couldn’t see anybody else — it was just me.”
Paul returned to his apartment, located near the Twin Towers, where he was reunited with his crew, who were all uninjured.
It was then that Paul said he realised he had a “gash” to his head, which required him to be seen by paramedics and taken to hospital on Staten Island for further treatment.
“All of us that escaped that day thought it was great," Paul said. "We’d all escaped death as thousands of others and first responders died around us."
'Something like that shows how fragile we all are'
Paul thought the cut to his head was the extent of his injuries. But around five years ago, he learned that first responders and other people living in the area during the attack developed coughs and other illnesses believed to be caused from breathing in the Ground Zero toxins in September 2001.
It was during a routine hospital visit around three years ago that Paul found there were problems with his lung.
Tests revealed he had pulmonary fibrosis — a rare, incurable condition in which the lungs become scarred, making it harder to breathe — which Paul said was caused by inhaling the dust on September 11, 2001.
He was given five years to live, but Paul said he is “still holding on”. “My consultant sees me on a six-month or yearly basis and says I’m doing alright at the moment. So I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”
US health officials said illness related to the dust and smoke from the towers' collapse have claimed more lives than the nearly 3,000 who died in the attacks.
“It had taken 20 years for it to manifest itself,” Paul said. “Virtually everybody I know that was there that day — and others living in the area that were first responders — have all got these terminal illnesses.
“… It just shows you — we all escape our day but there’s a big sting in the tail of it all.”
But ultimately, Paul said he was “lucky that day” in September 2001.
The experience, he said, “brings it home to you that you’ve got to live every day as you find it and enjoy every day and every single minute. Because you just don’t know what’s coming either from above or behind you.”
“It has changed me,” he added. “I enjoy life and appreciate life everyday now because I think something like that shows how fragile we all are: we walk a thin tightrope.”
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