Peter Goers

He said, I rang my Pan Am contact and I said, a grieving young man from Australia who's lost both his parents, he wants to go to the crash site.

Unless you send a car, my next call will be to NBC, ABC, CBS and the Times, and they'd love this story.

You know, you're holding next of kin prisoner.

And that made it real, Richard.

It was shocking, the devastation, because whole houses had been razed and other houses partly razed.

And this was a sort of epicentre, a ground zero of extraordinary grief and cataclysm.

And you could still smell roasting flesh.

in this suburb of Kenner.

Well, you know, this had been some days and they were, you know, they were exhausted and tired, but they were, you know, wonderful people.

volunteers and professionals and they couldn't have been more courteous to me and for the first time I was united in the suffering.

I wasn't doing it on my own and I had a sense of the disaster and it was hard but healing in a way.

Yes, I think her name was Michelle Trahan.

Yes, she was just a little baby and once the plane hit, her cot turned over so she was protected from the fire by the mattress.

And she was found, I think, a day or two later and that gave enormous hope to the rescue workers.

What happened to the rest of her family, though?

No, she lost, I think, her parents, I think.

A lot of people lost, a lot of people, I knew someone who lost both parents and an uncle and aunt on that plane.

There was, you know, citywide grief.

It was a terrible grief throughout the entire city, of course.

It was a shocking, shocking disaster.