Terrorist attacks of 9/11 remembered in South Strabane ceremony
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
On a clear, cloudless morning much like the one 24 years ago, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were remembered in a ceremony on the outer edge of the Washington Mall parking lot Thursday.
It happened near the site of a marker remembering the 2,977 people who were killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in the Somerset County community of Shanksville almost a quarter-century ago. In the years since, the ceremony hosted by the South Strabane Township police and fire departments has started at 8:45 a.m., right around the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
“It’s important that we continue to gather annually to remember those who were lost,” said Drew Hilk, chief of the South Strabane Police Department.
It was noted at the ceremony that many people who survived the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, or were first responders in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, continue to feel the effects of what they endured. Dr. Wesley Attwood, a senior investigator with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, pointed out that there are thousands of Americans still dealing with challenges to their physical and mental health as a result of the work they did on 9/11, or in the days and weeks that followed.
“As we remember those we lost on that tragic day, please remember the thousands of people who continue to live with the health effects,” Attwood said.
Patrick Fitch, a former Secret Service agent and Greene County resident, remembered visiting the wreckage of the World Trade Center one month after it fell when he was protecting Vicente Fox, who was then president of Mexico. He remembered that “nothing could have prepared us for what we were about to see. There was a smell in the air, the smell of death.”
He added, “I had a lump in my throat the size of a softball. … We must never grow complacent and always remain vigilant.”
The annual 9/11 ceremony took place as the mall is being torn down to make way for a Costco store. Jordan Cramer, South Strabane’s fire chief, said he had been in contact with Chapman Properties, the company leading the redevelopment project, and that the ceremony would continue in the years ahead “in some form.”