An ‘invitation to remember’ on 9/11 for those who haven’t had a chance to ‘never forget’

Jesse Roselle, working Wednesday morning to smooth a playground surface at a city park, says he was a year old when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, so his knowledge is what he sees and reads rather than remembers.

A short distance away, local firefighter Brandon Bagwell told one of the harrowing stories from that day during a ceremony observing the 23rd anniversary of the attacks that he’s also shared with people like Roselle.

More than 100 local police, firefighters, military personnel and other people gathered for the ceremony at the park’s September 11th Memorial, where Bagwell offered an “invitation to remember” speech that was also directed at those who have no memories to “never forget.”

Bagwell, program manager for Capital City Fire/Rescue’s Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting unit, said before moving to Juneau he taught at a community college in Nevada. He said his final class of students was the first born entirely after 9/11, when 2,996 people were killed by two planes colliding with the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center and another at the Pentagon, and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania.

“I always knew that was going to happen at some point, but it was the first time I’d actually been faced with that fact,” he said. “So when they started asking questions like they normally do, and they started asking why I ended up in the fire service, my standard answer of Sept. 11 didn’t actually have the impact it normally would. Basically they had no point of reference for what I was getting at.”

Bagwell said he then shared the story of Capt. Patrick “Paddy” Brown, who with 11 other firefighters on New York City Fire Department’s Ladder 3 truck were among the first to respond when a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“You don’t really know much about them until you hear that somewhere on the 35th floor or so they start trying to get a hold of the command post because they’re starting to get reports of where the fire actually was, how far up it was and they couldn’t get out,” Bagwell said.

Emergency radios didn’t work well in the building, so Brown ended up finding a working phone in an office cubicle and calling dispatch, Bagwell said.

“We’re encountering a lot of casualties, a lot of burn victims. We’re trying to send them down first,” Brown told the dispatcher, according to Bagwell. The captain said he was receiving reports the fire was on the 75th floor and so the firefighters with the Ladder 3 truck were continuing to move upward.

“Then, officially, we never hear from Truck 3 again,” Bagwell said. “What happened after that? There’s some debate. And then no one really knows and we’ll never really find out, because all 12 men from Truck 3 that day perished when the North Tower collapsed. It was the hardest-hit company in FDNY.”

Bagwell said on Sept. 10, 2001, “I was a scrawny kid from the cotton fields of West Tennessee,” but by October he had enrolled in training to be an emergency services worker.

“Hopefully stories like that will continue to be passed on and that’s what the ones that come behind us will remember about that day,” he said. “Not so much how awful it was and the loss we all endured, but inspiring part of the men and women who sacrificed so much doing just what duty required of them.”

The ceremony featured other traditions including an opportunity for a procession of attendees to thank the emergency responders lined along three sides of the memorial, and a presentation of the memorial’s history and meaning by Juneau Police Department Officer Ron Shriver. At 9:58 a.m. — the same time on the East Coast the first of the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11 — a raising of the memorial’s flag to half-mast was performed by JPD Detective Kirt Stage-Harvey and Officer Aron Landry while Kelsi Sell sang the national anthem.

The 9/11 anniversary was also observed in other ways elsewhere in Juneau, including U.S. Forest Service employees picking up trash along Egan Drive between 9 and 11 a.m. A tribute to 9/11 emergency responders, as well as current-day ones, was also offered during a midday ceremony for Tlingit and Haida’s Tribal Emergency Operations Center, which played a significant assistance role when about 300 homes were damaged by record flooding from Suicide Basin last month.

“It’s a day of remembrance and it’s those first responders, and those who are just people showing up to save lives, and that’s what this crew does every day,” Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, told those attending the event. “And to all of our first responders, to those who fill up, you will forever be in my debt and you always have my gratitude for what you do for our communities, for the safety and the security that you provide.”

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.