SAN FRANCISCO, CA — A steel beam from the remains of the World Trade Center made a Bay Area tour Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11 attacks in New York City.
A procession led by a modified truck connected to a trailer with gull-wing doors carried a 16,000-pound steel beam from Santa Rosa, across Marin County, over the Golden Gate Bridge, and ended in a ceremony at Pier 27 in San Francisco honoring the people who lost their lives that day.
The event, coined the Steel Across America tour, was organized by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. Its purpose is to travel to 35 cities across the country to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, with San Francisco being the 23rd stop.
The Tunnel to Towers Foundation was founded in the aftermath of 9/11 with the stated mission to "do good." The nonprofit helps veterans, first responders, and their families to pay their mortgages, build smart homes for people with severe injuries, avoid homelessness, and continue educating and remembering the stories related Sept. 11, 2001.
Stephen Siller Jr. is the In the Line of Duty Program Manager for the Tunnel to Towers Foundation and was nine months old when his father, Stephen Gerard Siller, died as he helped rescue people from the World Trade Center. He said his father ditched his car at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and ran with over 60 pounds of equipment to get to the Twin Towers, an act that led to the inspiration for the foundation's name -- Tunnel to Towers.
"The feelings have come and gone. It's been a bit of an emotional roller coaster, but I really just feel grateful," said Siller as his eyes became watery. "No matter where we've gone in the country, the support has been unbelievable. So for me, a kid who was nine months old at the time, 25 years after, to be traveling the country, and there's thousands of people that want to hear my dad's story, thousands of people that want to make sure they never forget. It's beautiful."
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie was almost brought to tears as he recounted being in New York City as events unfolded and seeing the loss of life around him. He pointed out that one of the aircraft, United Airlines 93, was a San Francisco-bound flight that was brought down by passengers in Shanksville, Penn. in a heroic move to prevent it from crashing in Washington D.C.
"The reason I get emotional is because I was down there that morning in New York," said Lurie as he fought back tears and a choked-up voice. "It was my fourth day of work at a place called the Robin Hood Foundation, and I was still figuring out which subway route to take, and I ended up on Broadway Street. One route could have taken me, and I would have been in the World Trade Center, underground."
First responders from the Bay Area also participated in the recovery efforts in the months following the attacks. San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen was one of 13 San Francisco Fire Department firefighters that grabbed their gear and traveled to New York City as soon as flights resumed to help with recovery efforts. He said the legacy of wanting to help people remains with him and how he fulfills his role as fire chief.
"I think we were unaware of what we were going to face when we got there. We just wanted to help," said Crispen. "The events of 9/11 were clearly a demonstration of an incredible evacuation effort and rescue effort by the FDNY, and we study that very closely. A lot of our high-rise protection mechanisms have been improved since then to allow people to evacuate easier and to be notified earlier in case of a disaster or an emergency in their building."
Retired New York Fire Department Battalion Chief John Carroll talked about what it meant to him to have people across the country remain united in their support for first responders.
"It makes me feel great because it shows that America still cares," said Carroll. "These people that come out to support the foundation, to support our service members, to support our first responders -- it shows that America is the greatest country in the world because of the people that live in it."
The next stop will be Seattle, but the foundation and officials who attended the commemoration hope to remind the public that the memories tied to 9/11 will not be forgotten.
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