Jay Jonas was one of just a handful of firefighters who escaped the collapse of the World Trade Center. But for him there is unlikely to ever be an escape from the memories of 11 September, 2001. The same is also true for the Fire Department of New York, which lost 343 men when the Twin Towers collapsed within minutes of each other. ?Everyone is waiting for the magic day when people will say that it?s like before 11 September. But that?s not going to come,? said Chief Jonas, who heads the 2nd Battalion in Lower Manhattan. The events of the day are still being felt ? the last of the 343 firefighter funerals was being held just three days before the second anniversary.

And the losses go on, said Chief Jonas. In the two-year aftermath, some of the sad things continue to happen. ?There are a lot of firemen who sustained lung injuries. They are having to retire prematurely, sometimes 10 years prematurely. I look at the Fire Department orders and see who is retiring. I see many who are my peers and that?s a shock. It?s a second wave. We had the unbelievable shock of 343 guys dying, now we have the more subtle departures... the exodus continues.? Reminders of the World Trade Center tragedy are everywhere in the firehouses. In Chief Jonas? office an aerial view of downtown New York shows the Twin Towers in all their glory. As well as showing how the towers dominated the landscape, the picture also prompts thoughts of the successes of 11 September. Nearly 3,000 people died as the planes crashed, but tens of thousands were evacuated safely. On the same wall is the roster of officers in charge on that day. ?Dead, dead, dead, dead,? the chief repeats as his finger points to name after name. As he leaves his office for daily rounds of crews under his command, Chief Jonas passes photographs of firefighters who went to help those trapped in the World Trade Center and who did not come out.

The battalion chief himself needs no photographs to remind him of what happened on 11 September, 2001, saying he has ?very, very vivid recollections of that day?". He was leading Ladder Company 6 up Staircase B on the 27th floor in the North Tower when they heard and felt what seemed like an earthquake but was the South Tower crashing down. Chief Jonas told his men to evacuate ? commanders were giving the same order but the radios were not picking it up ? but their exit was slowed when they stopped to help an injured woman. As others ran past them, Chief Jonas kept his group together helping the woman go step by step until her legs gave out on the fourth floor.

He stopped to look for an office chair to carry her down when the North Tower began to collapse, with the forces generated picking up a fireman and hurling him down two flights of stairs and throwing debris at the others. When the shuddering stopped, they found themselves hurt but not badly, and in a fairly intact part of stairwell. Yet fires were breaking out around them and they could not reach other firefighters calling out for help on their radios. And they were trapped. After about three hours, Chief Jonas saw sunshine coming through a hole above him where there used to be 106 floors of a skyscraper. Soon after he and the 11 people with him were rescued, all alive, to emerge into a vastly changed city.

Yet the chief refuses to be overwhelmed by what happened. He calls his first fire after returning to work a ?comforting? experience. ?It was a routine fire, it was one room and the fire went out and nobody got hurt and nobody got trapped. It reinforced that you could go into a serious incident without anything bad happening. That was a good feeling.?

And last month, when New York along with huge tracts of the north-eastern United States and Canada was hit by a blackout, Chief Jonas was not one of the many who thought they had again been targeted by America?s enemies. ?I said: ?I was at the last one. If this is a terrorist attack, it?s nothing ? light a candle.?"

living in the aftermath

Growing up in 9/11?s shadow

Cherilyn Curia is a bubbly, talkative girl, confident that she is Daddy?s Special Girl. But she has not seen her father since one day in September 2001 when he went to work in the WTC and never came home.

She is one of thousands of children who lost a parent when four planes were hijacked and deliberately crashed in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. But Cherilyn and the other orphans of 11 September have to live their lives on a more public stage where complete strangers will recall the anniversary and perhaps even feel they shared in the loss, whether they knew a victim or not.

Cherilyn was old enough to have stored up plenty of memories of her father, Larry, who worked as a broker for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower. "He was really cool," she told. "He loved me and I loved him. We had this bond because I was the first child. He took me to the city ? just to be there ? and on ?Take your daughter to work day? we had a lot of fun." She worries more for her little brother Mitchell, who was just four when Larry died. But she promises to help in a big-sisterly kind of way and says there are pictures of their father all over their home in Garden City, Long Island.

Though the good memories of a father doing what good dads do are a benefit of her age, Cherilyn was also old enough to understand how much life and everything else around her had changed. She knew about the attacks when she got home from school on the Tuesday but it was when her mother woke her early the day after to say that daddy had been involved and that people at school would be talking about it that it really began to sink in.

She went to school that day and found teacher, classmates and friends all reacting differently to her in a way that has not totally changed in the two years since. Cherilyn has good friends but said: "There are other kids who are just nice to me but two years ago they weren?t. These ones are nice to me because I don?t have a father." It is a similar story for many children across the tri-state area around New York City: they may be the only kid on the football field without their dad there cheering, friends may avoid them rather than trying to think of what to say as Mothers? Day approaches, or they may simply be having a good day when someone else thinks they should be sad.

Many of them are now being brought together by a group called Tuesday?s Children, founded as a family support network by Chris Burke, who lost his brother Tom ? a father of four boys ? in the destruction of the World Trade Center. For Cherilyn, Tuesday?s Children means special days out and a few hours each week with a mentor in whom she says she can confide anything. At a Tuesday?s Children Labor Day picnic at the Shea Stadium home of the New York Mets baseball team, Bryan Ruiz-Diaz is decked out in the team colours and ready to get an autographed ball. 0The boy from Valley Stream, Long Island, is far more reserved and does not volunteer information about his father Obdulio, an architect who was at a meeting on the top-floor Windows on the World restaurant when the first plane hit. Even at just six years old in 2001 he noticed the way others reacted to his loss, even those he thought were friends. "Sometimes they passed me in the hall without saying hello," he said. But the mentoring programme run by Tuesday?s Children has teamed him with John Perkett who spends time with him every Monday. Bryan?s two older sisters, Vanessa and Pamela, also have Monday evenings out and the three mentors have become like an uncle and two aunts according to the children?s mother Rosa, filling in for the adult friends and relatives who stopped coming by after Obdulio?s death. Bryan is not sure how to categorise John, but he says he will stay friends with him for ever and enjoys their time together. "Going down the water slide is really cool," he said. Cherilyn recognises that her mentor is one of the good things to come out of bad.

But she puts into words what surely the other children feel too. "If my dad was here I probably wouldn?t be going to the great camp that I?m going to and there are things I wouldn?t have had. But I probably would choose him after all this. He?s my father."

Rachel Clarke