I was living at the Jersey Shore, commuting to Trenton by way of Seaside Park where I would drop off my two children at school before my 50-mile drive. It was a break-your-heart blue sky day.

As I took a last look at the ocean, before I left town, my sister-in-law called me. She saw it on TV. A plane crashed into the World Trade Center; it seemed bad, crazy. I reassured her. “It’s probably just a stunt, don’t worry.” I thought it might’ve been.

But then I turned on WCBS News Radio 88 AM.

As I drove, the reporters narrated the catastrophe in real time. During the hour and seven-minute drive from Ocean County to Trenton, another plane hit, this time the South Tower, The emergency response. The panic. The questions. How many people are in the building? How many are hurt? Who could have done this? How? Why? The fires. The smoke. The mayhem. One journalist described the progressive collapse of the North Tower, as it happened. She said it looked like runs in nylons, the coming apart. Then, when I was about half-way to Trenton, the reporter phoned in from the street, she saw a man leaping out of a tower window to his apparent death. “There are others.”

A grave, terrible pause.

By the time I parked outside NJN Headquarters, the first tower fell.

Inside our newsroom — shaky determination. Information, phone calls, field reporters deploying to locations. Off-air recordings. Videographer/journalist Tim Stollery was in an edit bay cutting video of the scene. He stopped for a moment and looked at me, shook his head. We said nothing. That’s when the bank of monitors in the newsroom showed the second tower crumbling, crashing down.

Within that first half hour, script in hand, I headed to the studio to anchor the first of several live breaking news cut-ins. I read the words I’d written again, stopped, and felt sudden panic. I turned to our news director and read the first line to him. “Do I really say this? Is this … happening?”

On set, I said the words live. “In an apparent terror attack the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center have fallen. Officials estimate casualties to be in the hundreds, if not thousands.”

Marie DeNoia Aronsohn is Director of Communications for Cambridge in America.

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