After the dust has settled

Imagine you have just watched the second aircraft smash into the side of the North Tower.
The total shock and horror have immobilised you on a spot perhaps four or five hundred yards from the building. Pandemonium is all around and the emergency services are desperately trying to move people further away from the disaster area.

After half an hour or so your neck is aching with the strain of looking up but so awesome is the scene unfolding before you, you simply cannot move. Glancing left and right you are aware that large crowds of people are doing exactly the same as you.

Just then someone shouts and points skyward.

You realise that the Tower is collapsing and smoke, dust and debris is being spewed out of the top of the building. You are hypnotised with terror as if in slow motion the structure begins to fragment and collapse. At that moment several people turn to run sparking a mass stampede away from the scene. Millions of tons of burning concrete and molten glass are hurtling, at enormous speed from thousands of feet, towards the ground.

Blind panic grips you as you realise that the pyroclastic flow of red hot debris is fast gaining on you. Your lungs are bursting as you run faster than you have ever run in your life.

At that moment, you are overtaken by the roaring, belching cloud and completely enveloped in red hot choking dust.

Still you run.

The dust is everywhere.
You are running blind.
Your lungs, your ears, your eyes, your mouth and every crevice in your body is caked in the cloying material.

Just as you expect to die the hurtling momentum of the cloud slows. You reach the comparative safety of cleaner air before collapsing.

You have never been so terrified in your life.
Your heart is pumping several times faster than normal.
Your life will never be the same again.

But, at least you are alive.

After the dust has settled

Taken directly on location from
an exhibition at The Barn,
Worth Matravers, Dorset.
October 19th to November 1st 2009