Capital City Fire/Rescue stationed one of their ladder trucks bearing the flag near a heavily traffkicked stretch of Egan Drive Friday morning in remembrance of the 9/11 terror attacks.
“It’s just to remind people,” said CCFR Assistant Chief Ed Quinto in a phone interview. “People have a tendency to forget 9/11 and one of our mottos is never forget.”
The memorial, Quinto said, was as much for the more than 400 firefighters and law enforcement officers killed in New York City and Washington, D.C., as the over 2,000 civilians and military personnel who died in the deadliest terror attack in history to date.
“We just want to put it up there, to remember these people who sacrificed their life for us,” Quinto said. “We’re not just remembering our firefighters. We’re remembering our EMTs, police officers, civilians, port authority. You have to be aware anything can happen. You hope it doesn’t happen, but you have to take every day and just live it.”
Quinto said the tradition of stationing a truck alongside the highway is at least eight years old. Usually there’s an in-person ceremony, but this year would be all-virtual.
Juneau Glacier Valley Rotary club shared a virtual ceremony online at https://vimeo.com/456453612.
A day of service
Sept. 11 is a day of remembrance, but for AmeriCorps members, it’s also a day of service, said Shari Paul, director of United Way of Southeast Alaska’s AmeriCorps program.
AmeriCorps volunteers place three-day supplies of emergency rations into a container on Sept. 11, 2020. They had packed over 8,500 such supplies by 12:30 p.m.. (Ben Hohenstatt / Juneau Empire)
Paul said AmeriCorps members across the country use the day to work on service projects in honor of 9/11. In Juneau, more than a dozen members packed three-day emergency meal supplies into totes, which were placed in Conex boxes, which Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska will then have shipped by barge to 23 Southeast Alaska communities.
“This is huge for us to have this kind of help,” said Jason Wilson, public safety manager for Tlingit and Haida, who said it was hoped the first Conex box would be shipped out Friday.
By 12:20 p.m., 8,500 kits had been packed near Tlingit and Haida’s emergency operations center building on Concrete Way.
Tlingit and Haida President Richard Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson said the cost of the emergency food rations and the personal protective equipment that will join eventually join the MREs is not yet finalized, but over $3 million of federal coronavirus relief money has so far been spent on three-months worth of supplies.
Peterson said that he was hopeful the supplies could help buttress resource-rich but remote Southeast communities against the effects of the pandemic as well as any other future disaster —or interruptions in ferry service —that may make the supplies useful.
AmeriCorps volunteer Aidan Chadwick places a three-day supply of emergency rations into a container on Sept. 11, 2020. The work was part of United Way of Southeast Alaska AmeriCorps program’s day of service in recogntion of 9/11. The supplies packed by volunteers will be shipped by Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska to 23 Southeast Alaska communities. (Ben Hohenstatt / Juneau Empire)
He said he appreciated the impressive work ethic of the AmeriCorps members.
“Just having those extra hands and bodies has saved us about four or so days,” Peterson said.
• Contact reporter Michael S. Lockett at 757-621-1197 or mlockett@juneauempire.com. Ben Hohenstatt contributed to this report.
