14 September 2001
Ambulance workers sent to the scene after the first hijacked airliner ploughed into the World Trade Center's north tower in Lower Manhattan were also among hundreds caught when the towers imploded.
As more members of the emergency services were risking their lives picking through the rubble of the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington for survivors, British public service unions expressed their condolences and sympathy.
Andy Gilchrist, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said: 'Words cannot express our feelings at this time. Our hearts and thoughts are with all our brothers and sisters in the American Fire Service who are still dealing with this tragedy.
'We all watched the tragic scenes unfolding and we knew that a number of firefighters must have lost their lives. As members of the public were running out of the building, firefighters, as always, were running in.'
Many of the firefighters sent to the scene initially were presumed dead, and New York police reported that 85 of their officers were missing.
In New York, 170 hospitals were working round the clock to cope with casualties. Bernadette Kingham, vice president of St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village – the closest to the WTC – said: 'Within the first couple of hours of the crisis, we had hundreds of people show up and just stand quietly in line to donate blood.
'The spirit of caring, the spirit of trying to all pull together and help each other has been overwhelming.'
The hospital dealt with around 360 patients on the day of the disaster. Fifty were seriously injured and five died. Fifty-four of those injured were from the emergency services.
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