Ross Valley Fire Department brings a part of 9/11 history to Marin County

The Ross Valley Fire Department has obtained a piece of steel recovered from one of the World Trade Center's twin towers and is using it to create a monument to those who died on 9/11.

The concrete and stucco monument that will house the relic will be unveiled during a dedication ceremony at 9:11 a.m. Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the tragic event. The monument will be placed permanently at the entrance to the Ross Valley fire station at 777 San Anselmo Ave. in San Anselmo.

By 9:11 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 757, had already slammed into the World Trade Center's south tower and American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, had torn into the north tower. The south tower would begin to collapse by 9:59 a.m., and the north tower would follow suit at 10:28 a.m.

Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of the attacks, including 343 firefighters and paramedics.

"We were working that morning, and I remember turning the television on early in the morning and seeing what was going on," said Ross Valley fire Capt. Dan Stasiowski.

Stasiowski remembers being overwhelmed by "the unbelievability of it. The sheer magnitude of it."

It was Stasiowski who in 2002 noticed a curious item that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had placed on a website for firefighters. The item advertised the availability of pieces of steel from the World Trade Center to fire departments, police departments, emergency

medical services agencies and related community-based organizations "to further insure their community never forgets 9/11." It specified that the pieces could not be acquired for personal collections, sold or used for fundraising.

Stasiowski submitted the idea to his superiors, and Ross Valley fire Chief Roger Meagor quickly approved it. But it wasn't until May that the department learned it would get its 12-by-16 inch, 65-pound piece of history. The only cost was delivery from New York.

Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said the authority has distributed about 1,200 pieces of twin towers steel to all 50 states and seven foreign countries including Italy, England, Canada, France and Germany.

"We got far more requests than we could accommodate," Coleman said.

The pieces of steel that have been distributed were collected from the rubble pile in the weeks after 9/11. Anticipating that a memorial and museum would be erected at the site, the Port Authority hired an architectural firm to decide which pieces to save, "with an eye to what pieces were going to best define what happened on 9/11," Coleman said.

"Some are twisted in such a way that you look at them in awe as to how a piece of steel with such strength could be so mangled," Coleman said.

After the National September 11 Memorial & Museum selected the items it wanted, there were lots of steel pieces left, ranging in size from a 2-by-3-inch piece to 36-foot-long columns and beams weighing more than a ton. The Port Authority decided to give the pieces away instead of continuing to store them in Hangar 17 at John F. Kennedy Airport.

Coleman said, "The Port Authority is not in the business of running museums."

JoAnne Lewis, an administrative assistant for the Ross Valley Fire Department, said, "When we received the box, it was emotional, no matter how small it is in comparison to those huge buildings."

By Richard Halstead
Marin Independent Journal