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Sept. 11, 2001, started out like any other Tuesday morning.

I was getting ready for my job as a police reporter for The Post, when I saw on TV that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

By the time I got to Manhattan, the buildings had already fallen.

5 Fires blaze from the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. Bolivar Arellano/NY Post

As I got closer to the devastation, the visibility was less and less - and a dense fog hung in the air.

People were walking in 6-inches of ash - the result of tons of pulverized concrete from the collapsed buildings.

When I got to Church Street, it looked like a scene from a movie where planets collided and nothing was left.

The only problem was there was no director yelling  cut!  This was real.

On my right, dozens of ambulances were lined up with their doors open, waiting for the injured who never came.

Coffee carts were sitting empty with donuts and bagels covered in ash. I thought, just yesterday I was in Century 21, now its windows were broken and it was badly damaged.

Streets were buried beneath dust, twisted steel and concrete. Some piles were over 50-feet high.

Smoke hung over the ruins creating a cloud that covered as far as I could see - which wasn't far.

5 A photo of the World Trade Center attacks, their destruction, and the aftermath of the day released on Monday, Sept. 5, 2011. Matthew McDermott for NY Post

The acrid smell was nauseating. I was covered in dust from head-to-toe.

As I walked around, I stepped over body parts and saw a wheel from one of the planes.

I had covered hundreds of crime scenes all over the city, reported on serial killers and talked to murderers in jail. I remembered when 87 bodies were laid out in a gas station on Southern Boulevard in The Bronx after the Happy Land fire.

I remembered 8 years earlier, I stood on these same streets while covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - but even that was nothing like what I was now witnessing.

More coverage on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11:

Cops and firemen were futilely trying to move thousan

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