As part of our coverage 20 years after the 9/11 attacks, we take a look back at how we covered it at the time, and the stories of the local people caught up in this global incident.

"THE EARTH QUAKES".

This was the front page headline on the 8am edition of the News & Star on Wednesday, September 12, 2001.

With an image showing the devastating aftermath of the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York - emergency service personnel searching among a rubble-strewn street, the building's skeletal structure just visible through the smoke behind them - the front page also proclaimed: "Anger and death toll rise in America."

The true horror of the attack, which shook the world and which caused global political upheaval which continues to this day, was still raw.

Inside the paper, the team had assembled an astonishing amount of coverage of the incident - and of the Cumbrians caught up in it.

There was the four Cumbrian lads - Graeme Brough of Dalston, Neil Graham of Kirkbampton, Simon Yeowart of Thursby, and Guy Woodcock from Caldbeck - who'd visited the top of the towers on September 10, snapping what were among the last pictures ever taken from the pinnacle of the structure. The former Caldew school students were trapped in their hotel and trapped in the city; all flights were grounded.

There was the Cumbria-based New Yorker Marcia Fotheringham, who had been desperately calling her brother in New York and had finally got through after three hours. He regularly worked at the World Trade Center, but not on that day. "It was one of the great reliefs of my life," she said.

There was Peter Myers, the New York deli owner, back in Keswick on holiday, who was on the phone to his daughter in New York as she told him the second plane had gone into the tower. His deli lies less than a mile from the site of the towers. "Something like this is so enormous, it's outside of anyone's normal remit," he said at the time.

And there was the Whitehaven man, John Quinn, also desperately calling a relative in New York, who cleaned windows on sky scrapers near the towers. They had been at the top of one when the planes came into view. "Look at them," he'd said. "Aren't they low."

Away from the twin towers, there were other attacks that day, too. A third plane hit the Pentagon near Washington DC, and a fourth was hijacked and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

In all, almost 3,000 people died in the attacks.

In the News & Star Comment column on the day, we said: "Initial shock and sheer disbelief this morning give way to a common dread that we are teetering on the edge of something unimaginable.

"What next, we ask? Where will it all end?

"The world is a different place this morning."

READ MORE: Memories of 9/11