Five years later, memories of a trying task

Lauer still is amazed at not only what was playing out on the TV screens but also what was going on inside Studio 1-A.

“I’m looking at a stage manager, a person I’ve looked at every day since I took this job, and she’s got tears streaming down her face standing next to the camera that I’m broadcasting into,” Lauer says. “It was a very bizarre scene inside the studio because were all justifiably terrified of what was happening.”

Former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw, who rushed on the air from a morning workout, says it was hard to keep his composure that day.

“You’re constantly reminding yourself that you have a greater obligation, which is that you are the connection between the people watching and the event,” Brokaw says. “Your job is to provide them with as much reliable information as you can in a cool, calm way. That is why they invented the role of the anchorman. It’s not just to read the news every night but to be there during these very difficult times.”

There were more shocks in those early hours. As the fires in the World Trade Center burned out of control, the networks received word that something had happened at the Pentagon. NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, Jim Miklaszewski, was on the air when he heard a rumble coming from the other side of the Pentagon.

“I don’t want to alarm anybody right now, but apparently it felt just a few moments ago like there was an explosion here at the Pentagon,” he said. It was only a few moments later when ”Today,” like the other programs, showed billowing smoke from the Pentagon where American Airlines Flight 77 had just crashed.

Scrambling downtown
Meanwhile, the twin towers continued to burn, and dozens of news crews rushed to the scene even as thousands of Lower Manhattan workers and residents fled uptown to safety. MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield had been getting ready to go to work in Secaucus when the first airplanes struck. Instead of going to New Jersey, she chose to go to the World Trade Center site to cover what she believed would be a story of a massive fire and rescue. Instead, she, like thousands of other people, would be plunged into a kind of hell.

Banfield tried the subway from uptown, but the subways stopped running. Taxis refused to head south into the maelstrom, and Banfield was forced to run about 40 blocks down Sixth Avenue. She was about 25 blocks away when the South Tower fell, reporting on it via cell phone to MSNBC, then got within a block of the site.

It was 10:28 a.m., and the North Tower crumbled in front of her. She and hundreds, maybe thousands of other people on the street were caught up in the rumble and the debris that rained down and blocked the sunlight. Banfield, along with one other person, ran, terrified, to a locked front door. Banfield broke a window, opened the door and shut it quickly as the awful gray descended.

They opened the door twice — when an NYPD officer rapped on the door and when a World Trade Center security guard frantically knocked. Even today, she doesn’t know how long it took and how long the four were in the vestibule, covered in dust and debris.

“I was absolutely terrified. I was shaken, and I was absolutely unsure of what had happened. It was pitch black. The last thing I saw was 110 stories coming down in all of like five or eight seconds,” recalled Banfield, who is now an anchor at Court TV. “It happened so fast that processing the real facts and details were next to impossible.”

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