As it happened: 9/11 survivors tell LBC the chilling stories they have carried for 25 years

That completes our blog on the 9/11 coverage for the day. 

Read our summary article: 'We'll never forget', says Trump, 25 years on from 9/11 attacks, and 'that's why we fight today'

Steve, from Islington, once worked as a horse-and-carriage driver in Central Park.

When he returned to New York in April 2002 for a friend’s funeral, he went back to the stables where he had worked. A block away was a fire station where he had known firefighters and drunk with them in a local bar.

“They were all gone. They were all gone, every one of them,” Steve told LBC.

“There was a plaque up there for them.”

Steve also remembered his friend Orio Palmer, a New York Fire Department battalion chief who died while trying to rescue people in the South Tower.

“He was very brave, but he was a man we used to drink with and had great craic with,” Steve said.

“Everyone’s getting out and they’re going the opposite way, walking up with all that equipment.”

Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have been pictured at the Pentagon as a service marking 25 years since the 9/11 attacks gets under way.

Guests were seated outside in the Pentagon courtyard on a cloudy day in Virginia.

Sarah, from Thruxton, had travelled to New York for Michael Jackson’s anniversary concerts and planned to fly home on 11 September 2001.

She and her husband had booked breakfast at the restaurant at the top of the Twin Towers that morning, before returning to their hotel to collect luggage for an evening flight from JFK.

But a delay packing their bags changed their plans. Her husband went to buy another suitcase when shops opened in Times Square.

“I could hear all these sirens,” Sarah told LBC. “I was like, something’s going on.”

From the 18th floor of the Marriott Marquis, she could see smoke rising over the city.

“I could actually see the smoke,” she said. “I went a bit hysterical.”

Unable to contact their four children in the UK, Sarah said the fear they felt was overwhelming.

“My poor kids thought I was dead,” she said. “They thought, ‘Mum’s not coming home.’”

The couple could not leave New York until Saturday, eventually flying from Newark.

In New York, family members of the victims, many carrying pictures of their loved ones, at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

The ceremony began, as always, at 8:46 a.m. with a moment of silence to remember the shocking instant when Flight 11 the North Tower.

Shortly after, victims' family members began reading aloud the names of all 2,977 people who died.

In a reminder of the time that has passed, some readers were children who had never met the relatives they lost in 2001.

Former presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have all attended today’s 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York.

President Donald Trump is marking the anniversary separately at the Pentagon, which was hit by a hijacked plane during the attacks.

Vice President JD Vance is among those attending the service in Manhattan.

LBC's Shelagh Fogarty tells the story of a firefighter who survived 9/11 and recalls the most distressing sound he had ever heard.

The heroic firefighter had been standing on the rubble at Ground Zero the day of the 9/11 attacks.

The worst sound he heard, she says, “was the beepers the emergency beepers of his colleagues under the rubble, all probably dead.”

“He said it was the most frustrating sound and distressing sound he'd ever heard because he knew the beep.”

She went on: “It was a very specific sound, he said, that meant it was to help you find a colleague if they were trapped in a fire or trapped in some other rescue scenario.

“And he knew there was no rescue.”

Ron Clifford, an Irishman working in the North Tower, helped a badly burned woman escape the building on 11 September 2001.

His story was recalled by LBC's Shelagh Fogarty, who saws the woman was hysterical and convinced she was going to die. 

"She was hysterical. She was insisting she was going to die"

"And he managed to get her down the full height of that building, essentially, and out onto the street and into an ambulance. 

Shelagh described it as "an extraordinary achievement by him and the other people helping him."

As they were leaving, they heard the impact of the plane hitting the South Tower.

Only when he arrived home later that day did Mr Clifford learn that his sister, Ruth, and his niece, Juliana, had been on the plane.

They had been travelling to Disneyland.

9/11 survivor Mikaila Cruz told LBC's Shelagh Fogarty that she took the last elevator in the second tower before the second plane hit the building.

After evacuating Tower One, she says she saw a colleague go back inside, claiming to have been told there was nothing wrong with the second tower.

“I said, ' What are you doing?”

“Port authorities said: There’s nothing wrong with Tower Two; everybody go back to work.”

“I saw three gentlemen go into the elevator.

She said suddenly the elevator stopped, and she promptly left the building.

“As soon as I left the building, I felt a shadow of something over me – as if this whole city was overshadowed by something. I didn’t look up, but I felt something crash.”

She says that this was the sound of the second plane hitting Tower Two.