From the moment the first plane hit the World Trade Centre North Tower on September 11, 2001, the entire world changed forever.
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While residents of Manhattan awoke in the morning to the scene of a tower shrouded in gloom, it was nearing midnight in Tasmania.
The first plane hit at 10.26pm Tasmanian time, with many in the state not learning of the tragedy until the following morning as they watched in horror over their breakfast, or as their children's cartoons were disrupted by breaking news.
For many, it was the front page of the newspaper - covered in photographs of the deadly attacks - and the inside lined with images of the towers succumbing to the hits, teetering on the brink of collapse, or entirely in ruin.
Whether through planes hitting the twin towers, the pentagon or ending up in a field in Pennsylvania, 2977 innocent people almost instantly lost their lives.
Former Tasmania Police Northern District Commander Brett Smith can remember the moment he learnt of the horrors.
"I'd just transferred down from Burnie to Hobart and my wife and I were unpacking boxes in the new house," he said.
"The house had AusStar and I'd only just turned it on to make it work that morning. About midday we saw it on CNN and it remains quite vivid in my mind. We knew we had to get the boxes unpacked, but there were moments we felt forced to go sit on the couch and just watch as everything unfolded. We were just so engaged with it."
But it was within moments he realised his professional life would never be the same.
Though he was a Detective Inspector at the time, counter-terrorism was still on the radar of Tasmania Police, having considered how it would, and the country would, respond to an attack similar to that which had happened 23 years earlier when Sydney's Hilton Hotel was bombed.
"I knew when I saw it had happened ... this was going to change things going forward because of the method and style by which the attacks were carried out," Mr Smith said.
"It was certainly something I had never imagined could happen, and I'm not sure whether it was on the radar nationally or internationally."
Though terrorism was not new to Tasmania Police, Mr Smith said 9/11 reinforced the notion that an attack could happen anywhere at any time.
"I think what 9/11 did was change and sure up the approach. It appeared to have been something that was very difficult to predict and come to terms with," he said.
The immediate state and national response was swift.
Within hours flights were grounded to the US, leaving a number of Tasmanian locals stuck in the US, or unable to embark on their overseas travel.
Defence barracks in Launceston and Hobart went on a heightened state of security as part of a nationwide change in defence preparedness.
Then Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown in the wake of the attacks put it simply: "These events will change every life and every corner of the globe. No one will remain unaffected".
Mr Smith said Tasmania Police was no different.
"It's fair to say, from a Tasmania Police perspective, it was one of those watershed moments where things changed," he said.
"It made us consider how we dealt with and approached counter-terrorism. From that moment on there was definitely a heightened level of alertness in the counter-terrorism space. Exercising ramped up, as did education and training, and there was greater connectivity around the country."
As Tasmanians reckoned with the impacts of the 9/11 attacks, awareness grew about how wide-ranging the talons of terrorists could spread.
Seeing buildings fall in other parts of the world was a somewhat familiar sight, but watching two of the tallest buildings in the world crumble in a country home to the "world's most powerful military" was something new - and with it came a swathe of changes.
Not only did the Tasmanian approach to counter-terrorism evolve, so too did the nature of terrorism.
In October 2002, less than a year after the twin towers fell, the first of two terrorist attacks on Bali occurred. This time, the threat to Australia became even more apparent, and significant discussions were had to coordinate a more localised approach to counter-terrorism.
Tony Mulder was the man leading the Tasmania Police approach.
Mr Mulder had been the Operations Support Commander in charge of intelligence areas, forensics and support, as well as the Special Operations Group and bomb response.
For years prior Mr Mulder had been helping coordinate responses to any potential terror threats in Tasmania and considering intelligence from within Australian and Tasmanian borders.
Despite his background, when Mr Mulder first heard the news as it was unfolding he thought it had just been some terrible accident. But when news filtered through of the second plane hitting the south tower, he started to consider it had been a terrorist attack.
Mr Mulder said in the years prior there had been a national understanding of terrorism, and exercises were frequently held to hypothesise the best ways to navigate hostage situations. But he said 9/11 was different.
"Prior to 9/11 and subsequent attacks, there was a massive shift to ensuring we kept our ears open. These things had been bubbling away for a long time, but after 9/11 and the events that followed we could no longer just let that happen," he said.
"As a consequence, we updated our intelligence surveillance capacity and the capacity to monitor various groups. But I never saw it to be an ethnic group or a religious group, it was always about people who were going to do stupid things."
In the immediate wake of the attacks the already formed Standing Advisory Committee on Commonwealth and State Cooperation for Protection Against Violence, or SAC-PAV, had a phone hook up to discuss what they would mean for the country going forward.
But Mr Mulder said it was the first bombing attack on Bali in October 2002 that saw Australian counter-terrorism make its most significant movements to protect the country.
"It took the Bali bombings, for Australia to really wake up and realise the world was changing," he said.
"The thing with Bali is it was only really five seconds away."
From then, SAC-PAV and various other national and state-based counter-terrorism units kicked into gear.
Mr Mulder was enlisted to set up Tasmania's first counter-terrorism project team which was designed to collectively respond to terrorist threats and intelligence from a global approach. Once that had been set up, Mr Mulder became the inaugural counter-terrorism Commander.
Part of his role saw him travel to the UK to understand how international authorities had developed their responses, something that he carried back to Tasmania.
In the UK, and across most of the Northern Hemisphere, major infrastructure and mass gatherings were the areas where most counter-terrorism focus went.
And it was an area Mr Mulder said Tasmania had a lot of work to do.
Upon returning to Tasmania he reviewed operations across the state to hypothesise how certain places, like hospitals and shopping centres, could respond to a targeted attack.
What he learnt was concerning.
At multiple hospitals in Tasmania, the capacity to operate should they be targeted as part of a terrorist attack was minimal.
"The medical capacity one major hospital had was worrying. It had no backup energy generation," he said.
"It had two circuits coming from different transformers, and that was their idea of redundancy. When they were on one of the circuits, the operating theatres didn't have power.
"Another hospital had backup generator capacity that could only run for 45 minutes. And the cooling air conditioner was only run off the mains.
If you looked at the risk of those things happening in isolation it's okay, but then you think if something were to deliberately happen in a terrorist attack, how would you deal with it? You throw that scenario in and all these interesting different anomalies started to emerge.
- Tony Mulder
Mr Mulder said the emergence of terrorist attacks closer to Australia in the wake of 9/11 fortified the way the country and the state approached how it would respond, but, like Mr Smith said, the indication that the method used to carry out attacks had so radically changed presented a problem that continued to rear itself throughout his career.
"The thing with the exercises was, every aggressor uses different tactics, and those tactics change. While the tactics changed, our initial response remained the same," he said.
With 9/11, they weren't taking hostages [like national exercises had hypothesised], they were striking at the bitter heart of what they saw as 'the devil'.
- Tony Mulder
Mr Mulder continued as the counter-terrorism Commander until he retired in 2010. Mr Smith joined him along the way.
Mr Smith was heavily involved in a number of counter-terrorism and preparedness operations from 2003 through to 2018.
In that time he said he saw approaches change and adapt to the way terrorism was changing.
"I ran national and local counter-terrorism exercises and, as a collective, I would say in all of those exercises I got a really strong sense that terrorism has remained very much on a national radar," Mr Smith said.
"In 2018 I undertook some international study in the UK and US with a national cohort of police officers ... that was quite interesting and I gained a lot of comfort that in regard to what we see happen in the world, we are pretty well-positioned in Tasmania.
"But the big thing about any type of terrorism-related things, there's always the risk of complacency. Although I must say, I'm very confident that the national approach is strong, and certainly, locally, we've come ahead in leaps and bounds."
Following the wake of September 11, and in between the two Bali bombings, the attempted hijacking of a plane flown between Melbourne and Launceston gave Tasmanians their closest brush with terrorism similar to that which they had seen in New York.
The man attempted to gain control of the plane, but was overpowered and detained upon landing.
The incident served as a stark reminder that terrorism was an ever-present issue.
"What attacks since then have demonstrated, like the attempted hijacking of a plane from Melbourne to Launceston in 2003, is you're never immune from this sort of stuff," Mr Smith said.
"I think we're always at risk - whether it happens or not I don't know. The terrorism alert in Australia at the moment is 'probable'. There is always a risk, and we should never ever think we're not at risk. We've always said through the national approach 'it's a matter of when not if'.
"The analogy I use is people in the country still don't lock their doors at night time, but the reality is the world is changing. You shouldn't have to lock doors at night, but unfortunately you have to. In the modern world, we just have to remain alert to all the nasties there are."