THE chief fire officer for Hereford and Worcester, David O'Dwyer has paid tribute to the hundreds of rescuers who rushed towards the World Trade Center to help the dying but were killed themselves.

He said: "As a fire-fighter I asked myself how on Earth could you possibly handle such a situation?

"The men and women who rushed on to the scene were very heroic, because they most certainly would have known their own lives were in grave danger and that there was very little they could do to rescue people from the building.

"Auto-pilot would have kicked in and they would be thinking 'I cannot stand by and let my fellow Americans die without doing something,'."