September 11 21st anniversary: Yorkshire survivor recounts twin towers collapsing onto him before escaping through the rubble

It was September 11, 2001 and the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center had collapsed around him.

Paul contemplated the destruction before him. Somehow, he was alive. He was going to survive.

Minutes earlier, he had stirred from his unconscious position on the ground. He’d been there for what must have been 25 minutes, knocked to the floor as he tried to escape the falling debris when the first of the towers began to peel away.

Paul has no recollection of the second following suit but it had done so as he lay there. Less than two hours after hijacked planes crashed into the towers, both of them had collapsed. And hundreds of lives had been lost.

‘You’re probably going to die here’, Paul’s own thoughts had raced as he roused. ‘You’ve done it this time.’

A cinematographer, Paul had survived a major helicopter crash during his filming exploits, leapt from a sinking ship in the North Sea and escaped death when a volcano erupted around him in Nicaragua. But nothing came close to this.

“I remember thinking about the family and thinking they won’t know where I am,” he recalls. “I’m buried in all this debris and this hell.”

Paul began to crawl through ‘blackness’, as more debris fell around him. “Everything was really hot, my trousers were burning as I crawled through all this red hot debris.

“I was trying to get air - my mouth was blocked with thick cement dust. It was in my mouth, in my nose, in my ears, in my eyes. I was looking for air to breathe.”

Paul reached out his arms to feel a way through the rubble and struck a car with his right hand. It was a welcome discovery - if he could crawl alongside the vehicles, he could cling on to the hope that the air would be clearer further down the street.

“As I got to car number three, I ran my hands along it and felt a firefighters’ outfit and I shouted to this guy ‘can I use your air bottle?’ but I think he was dead. He didn’t reply. So I kept on crawling and crawling still trying to get this gunk out of my mouth. It was horrific.”

Eventually, visibility started to improve, the air fractionally clearer. “Officials think I must have been the first living person right in the epicentre,” Paul says, “which is quite incredible really.”

Perhaps even more remarkable is that Paul and his family were due to be out for breakfast in the Windows of the World dining complex at the top of the north tower at the time the hijacked plane hit.

His son and daughter, both living in the UK, were due to visit New York with their friends - and Paul and wife Hilary, known as Micky, had booked the celebratory meal for 8.30am on September 11, just 16 minutes before the plane struck.

Last minute changes to work shifts meant his daughter had already flown home and his son was halfway across the Atlantic Ocean on his way to New York when the terrorist attack unfolded.

“We’d have been there,” Paul says. “And I wouldn’t have been here talking now.”

Twenty one years have now passed since that day but Paul, originally from Leeds and now living near Northallerton in North Yorkshire, recalls it clearly in a new audiobook he has released to mark the anniversary.

9/11 Wrong Place Right Time: Me, My Wife & Muffin Our Cat has been two years in the making for Paul and a sound engineer.

A personal recollection intercut with live recordings from the planes and from the first emergency responders, its content tells the story of the time leading up to 9/11 for Paul and his family, the horrors of the day itself and the weeks and months afterwards when he spent time in New York with others who also survived.

“My family keep asking me to stop talking about it,” says Paul, “But I think it’s probably my way of getting it out of my system.”

His experiences will also form the final chapter of a book on Paul’s life and career, featuring his 50 years behind the camera. That began at the age of 16 as a press photographer for the Yorkshire Evening Post, before Paul became a film cameraman for the BBC and then later set up his own independent production company.

He spent time as a director in the documentaries department at Granada Television and then joined United Productions’ documentary team.

Back in 2001, Paul was in the US filming a series focused on the law enforcement unit of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA). He and his crew were little over three miles away from the World Trade Center when they heard that a plane had crashed into one of the towers.

Paul found himself making his way to the epicentre, to witness the events unfolding before him. He reached the base of the towers just as the Assistant Chief Fire Commissioner for the New York Fire Department was arriving to set up a command post. Paul was given the go-ahead to film him and his crews.

“In any story documentary, you need a character to carry it through and I thought this guy’s going to be my main man,” Paul recalls. “This was some half an hour before the towers collapsed and we didn’t know they were going to come down otherwise we would not have been where we were…

“All the fire appliances came to our position and reported in. Then they were sent into either the north tower or south tower and they were getting commands from fire chiefs actually in the ground floor of both the towers, who were sending them up the stairs to try and rescue people.

“I was right at the centre of it. Had the towers not collapsed, that would have been the centrepoint of the control room for the whole operation.”

Twenty minutes into filming, Paul recalls hearing what sounded like an explosion. “I panned the camera around just to see the top of the south tower peeling away like a giant umbrella opening literally above me…

“As soon as the firefighters saw what was happening they were shouting ‘run, run, run’ but I stayed there for a couple of seconds with my sound recordist and stuff was travelling at speed towards us…

“Then we started to run down the street and as we did, I kept my camera running - it was pointing over my shoulder at what was happening. I could hear it and it was this incredible sound, like being on the main runway at Heathrow Airport with jumbo jets taking off above you.

“As we ran down the street, the sound got louder and louder and I remember the camera leaving my hand in slow motion and that’s when everything went black and I was knocked unconscious.”

It was only when Paul made his way back to the apartment block where he was staying with his wife and their cat Muffin - a rescue from one of the ASPCA jobs he covered - that a colleague made him aware of a gash to his head.

Micky and Muffin had fled from outside of the apartment block, close to the towers, when they first started to collapse.

Micky was making her way back through Battery Park towards the block when she spotted Paul’s crew ushering him onto a stretcher. He ended up at a hospital on Staten Island for treatment.

“I think it’s affected her (Micky) more than me,” he says. “We did have a house in America at the time of 9/11 but after, we decided that we would return to the UK and I think that day still haunts her, probably more so than it does me. I’ve seen lots of disasters before. And though I wasn’t used to what I saw that day, I think I can actually cope with it.”

Still, Paul is under no illusions of how close to death he came. To use his own words in the introduction to the audiobook, “I’ve had four near-death experiences while filming but this is in no doubt the one where I should not have survived.”

9/11 Wrong Place Right Time: Me, My Wife & Muffin Our Cat is available at www.kobo.com