I led Newsday's coverage the morning of 9/11. Here's what I'll never forget.

"It’s been dead," photo editor Kim Chapin told me. It was early on Sept. 11, 2001, and I had just returned from several weeks in Europe.

I was a new editor on Newsday’s Long Island desk, trying to catch up before the morning news meeting.

"The only thing we have today is that primary," Kim said. "Boring."

Then I looked at the television screens. Smoke was pouring from One World Trade Center.

"What’s happening at the WTC? Is this back from 1993?" I asked Kim.

"Oh my God," Kim shouted back, grabbing one of the phones. She started dispatching photographers to the Twin Towers.

Her sense of urgency had answered my question. A newsroom clerk and I grabbed a list of Long Island desk reporters who lived in or near downtown Manhattan. I started sending them there.

The joy I felt at seeing the glistering Manhattan skyline as I drove from New Jersey over the George Washington Bridge on my way to work that brilliant late summer day suddenly faded, replaced by a feeling of dread. The magnitude of what was unfolding could not have occurred to me.

The World Trade Center had been the target of an attack in 1993, when terrorists exploded a bomb in the garage, killing six people and injuring 1,000. But this time, as I looked at the images from the newsroom in Melville, I saw no workers on the roof of the building asking for help like eight years earlier.

Television reporters began speculating it was some sort of fire or smoky condition in the north tower. Maybe a small plane had crashed into it.

Yet in the initial minutes, there was no official word of what was happening at One World Trade Center. Newsday's police and City Hall reporters, meanwhile, were on their phones, dialing city officials nonstop.

In the midst of the chaos, one of the networks said the Federal Aviation Administration was reporting "a passenger jet was missing." I felt a twist in the pit of my stomach.

"Have you seen your TV? Have you seen the news?" I asked when reporters picked up the phones. "Can you please head over to the World Trade Center area?"

"What’s happening?" reporters wanted to know. "Anyone else heading over there? Where exactly do you want me to go?"

A barrage of questions likely to come from inquisitive reporters. I could provide no answers.

This was a time before we all carried one or two cellphones. Google News and social media posts were still in the future. In those days, most reporters and editors carried beepers. A select few had access to BlackBerrys. We used landlines to call each other.

"There is smoke coming from one of the towers," I told reporters. "They think a plane may have crashed into one of them. Report back to me when you get there. Try to find a command center. And be safe."

The phones in the newsroom began ringing off the hook. Reporters and editors started checking in. Readers asked if we knew what was going on at the Twin Towers. We politely told them we didn’t but that we had many reporters and photographers heading to the scene.

"Thank God you are there," my boss, Alex Martin, said on the phone. I still don’t know if he was relieved I had made it through the city OK or if he was pleased I was in the newsroom marshaling the troops.

After talking to Alex, I got back to coordinating with multiple desks, arranging for rewrite. I was running on adrenaline.

It must have been around 9 a.m. that the FAA confirmed the missing jetliner that had taken off from Boston. I figured if that aircraft somehow ended up here, there would be scores of Long Islanders and New Yorkers on the plane, or relatives here who had family on that plane.

Then, the second plane hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m.

For a few seconds, nobody moved. Then someone said what all of us suddenly understood: "We are under attack."

I felt sick. My first thought wasn’t about the newspaper. It was about those I sent downtown. "I’ve sent all those reporters there," I said.

Until that moment, I had been doing my job. Now I wondered whether doing my job had put people I cared about in mortal danger.

I ran toward the telephone bank, where we now had at least four news clerks. I asked them to help me find our reporters.

My thoughts also turned to my family. After a few calls, I learned they were all safe.

But the short reprieve from terror did not last long.

At 9:37 a.m., a third hijacked plane struck the Pentagon.

The search for reporters continued frantically, and there was more urgency now. Stephanie McCrummen and Susan Harrigan had not checked in. There were many more missing in action. In the newsroom, we prayed they were safe somewhere.

"Cruella, are you OK?" my best friend, Lauren Terrazzano, asked on the phone, using her favorite nickname for me. "Who’s downtown? What do you want me to do?"

Lauren had become an aviation expert when TWA Flight 800 exploded over the waters off Long Island in July 1996, and she was among the first reporters on the scene.

"Don’t go downtown," I urged her. "We could probably use everything you know about airplanes. ... Stand by."

I said bye to Lauren and joined a group of editors going over the news budget when suddenly people started screaming. "It fell! It fell!" they shouted.

It was 9:59 a.m. and the south tower had collapsed on itself. A gigantic cloud of dust covered the area. In the newsroom, people looked astonished. Some cried. I saw one of my bosses grab his head with both hands. He sat slumped over his desk on a pile of papers for a few minutes before willing himself back to the urgent task in front of him.

We were still in a desperate effort to find our own. For hours, we waited and hoped our colleagues were safe.

The day turned even darker. A fourth hijacked plane crashed at 10:03 a.m. in Pennsylvania. At 10:28 a.m., the north tower fell.

The world changed in less than three hours. We didn’t know then if there were more hijacked planes coming. There were more structures collapsing around the World Trade Center.

We kept working. One by one, we found our reporters and photographers. They were shaken and tired from running away from the collapsing buildings. They were grateful to be alive. Some had relatives who worked at the World Trade Center, and they suffered in agony until they found their loved ones.

Throughout that day, we worked with heavy hearts, recording history, providing vital information to our readers. Newsday’s coverage of the disaster included an afternoon extra edition. The paper placed at readers’ disposal all its journalistic firepower, including the large Long Island staff, its formidable New York City reporters, its Albany and Washington bureaus. Investigations, sports, business, features, the presentation desk and the opinion sections all contributed.

Newsday’s Sept. 12 special edition wrapped around the main paper with a 48-page section. Its lead story carried a 130-name byline box.

We had made a blueprint of how we would continue to cover the disaster for days to come. We sent reporters to big hospitals and morgues in and around the city and on Long Island. No bodies came.

The official death toll of the coordinated Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania stands at 2,977 victims, including 497 Long Islanders.

The names of some of the prominent Long Island residents killed in the attack emerged just hours after the towers collapsed. They included FDNY Chief of Department Peter J. Ganci Jr., who was the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the New York City Fire Department; FDNY Capt. Raymond Downey, of Deer Park; and FDNY firefighter Terrence Farrell, of Huntington.

Newsday reporters and editors worked for more than a year to write stories about the victims in a special section we called "The Lost." Their stories were later compiled in a book, "American Lives: The Stories of the Men and Women Lost on September 11." Harvey Aronson, the editor of "American Lives," said this about the victims’ stories: "All were remarkable in the framework of their own lives, the worlds they moved in, the people they touched. A man who gave shelter to a destitute single mother and made her his life and raised a family with her. A firefighter who gave his bone marrow to a stricken child thousands of miles away. A woman who taught math in Uzbekistan and was about to teach in New York City. A janitor who refused retirement because he loved life and the dignity of work."

Newsday donated the profits of the book, published in 2002, to charities associated with helping the victims of the terrorist attacks.

I finished my workday late on Sept. 12. The routes back home to New Jersey were closed. No civilians were allowed on bridges or in tunnels. I made the Melville Hilton my home for a day or two.

For months afterward, I would drive home along the Long Island Expressway and pass caravans of fire trucks, police vehicles and volunteer first responders returning from lower Manhattan.

There were no sirens. Just flashing lights.

We knew where they had been.

We also began learning the names of the people who would not be coming home.

That became another part of our job. Newsday journalists spent more than a year telling the stories of the 497 Long Islanders killed on Sept. 11, not simply how they died, but how they had lived. Firefighters and bond traders. Parents and children. Immigrants and lifelong Long Islanders.

On Sept. 11, 2026, I will once again be in Newsday’s newsroom to help lead our coverage.

The newsroom is different now. The technology is almost unrecognizable. Many of the journalists who worked with me that morning moved on. Some reporters working beside us today are too young to remember 9/11.

But our obligation is the same. Twenty-five years ago, as the towers burned, our first question was: What is happening?

In the months that followed, we learned to ask the more important one: Who were they?

Twenty-five years later, we are still answering it.