Lt. John O'Neill, Philadelphia firefighter and member of a federal urban search and rescue task force, which was first on the scene.

"I had just come off night work. . . . I came home, got something to eat. My wife was at work, the kids at school. I was home by myself.

"Once the building came down, I knew we were going.

"I got all my gear together, had it by the front door, waiting for the call to mobilize.

"The most vivid memory I have today - even more than Ground Zero - is when my daughter walked into the house and saw my gear, she said, 'You're not going, are you, Dad? Why are you going?' My explanation to her was, That's what I'm trained to do, that's what people do when people need help.

"We left here at dusk, at 8 o'clock. I remember vividly, the sun was going down. It was a very beautiful day, sunny and clear.

"Everyone was anxious. They wanted to get there, they wanted to do something.

"We traveled in a convoy. There were 80 personnel, two buses, two tractor-trailers, two box trucks, pickup trucks and Suburbans.

"There was a lot of paranoia. . . . We were getting ready to go through the Holland Tunnel, and they stopped us. We had to divert out of there because they were worried about a white van that had explosives, which was not too far in front of us, only five cars ahead of us.

". . . Everyone backed up. We were in a convoy, and convoys don't ordinarily back up. We ended up in the Meadowlands and turned around."

O'Neill arrived on the night of Sept. 11. His crew bunked at the Javitz Center and arrived at Ground Zero the next morning. They set up operations in a gym at the American Express Building.

"There was a lot of stuff missing. There was no concrete, no big blocks of concrete. It had all been pulverized. If I can remember the site for anything, it was the dust, all the white dust. It looked like snow.

"You had fire trucks torn in half. You had people all over. . . . There were fire trucks burning, police cars that were burning, ambulances that were burning, all these crushed vehicles.

"The canines on our team are live search dogs. They're looking for lives, not cadavers. . . . One of the dogs, Reilly, had hit on something and gave his sign to his handler, and Chris turned to us, and he said, 'Look, the dog's getting a hit here.'

"There were numerous volunteers, trying to help out. They hopped on the dog before we could size up the situation, and they started right on it. They started shoveling and moving, and moving debris away, and they brought the dog in again. And the dog didn't get a hit again. The dog had gotten a hit on a small piece of a person that might have been there."

Elsie Goss-Caldwell, a West Philadelphia tax preparer, whose son, Kenneth Caldwell, was killed in the collapse of the North Tower.

". . . I was just sitting there on the edge of the bed, getting ready to come into the office.

"Then the phone rang, and it was Kenny. He said, 'Mom, I just want to let you know, I love you.' I was thinking, he's so silly, because the night before we were on the phone just laughing and talking. He had had a busy week the week before because he had to take clients out to dinner and the theater, and I was teasing him, saying I wish I could be that busy.