A virtual ceremony will be held Saturday by members of the London Fire Department to mark the sombre 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The ceremony will honour and pay tribute to the firefighters who gave their lives in New York two decades ago, as well as the firefighters who have died while serving the City of London.
“We also take this time to pay tribute to all first responders and to all of our military services serving our country in times of war and peace,” read a tweet from the London Professional Firefighters Association (LPFFA) on Thursday.
Like last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the ceremony to be held virtually instead of in person as it has in years past. The ceremony will be streamed on LPFFA’s Facebook Page.
Nearly 3,000 people died and more than 25,000 were injured in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when four hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field near rural Shanksville, Pa.
The attack and subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center killed 343 members of the New York City Fire Department, becoming the deadliest single incident for firefighters in the United States.
Hundreds of Canadian fire crews descended on the city in the wake of the attacks to offer support to local fire crews who were sifting through the rubble, looking for those buried under steel, concrete, and glass.
“It was constant fire engines driving up and down the streets,” Londoner Mike Peerless recalled this week of being in the city that day.
Peerless, a lawyer with McKenzie Lake, had flown into New York that morning for a meeting not far from the World Trade Center, and witnessed United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the south tower from his cab at 9:03 a.m.
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“So many of those people, as it turned out, were harmed,” he said of the emergency personnel who ran into the towers. “So many of those first responders were running up the stairs trying to help people when the buildings came down.”
“Although I had never thought of the idea that those buildings would come down, undoubtedly those people knew that perfectly well, that that was a risk, and they still put themselves out for us.”
Peerless wasn’t close enough to Ground Zero to see fire crews and others trying to rescue people from the rubble — lower Manhattan below 14th Street was shut off for several days to all but local residents — but he remembers seeing countless first responders coated in ash sitting on curbs, leaning on emergency vehicles, in a state of shock or crying.
“To think about what New York City firefighters or police officers would see in their lives, and to have them reacting like that, really brought home to someone like me who was walking around, and hadn’t really seen anything on TV yet, … just how awful it was,” he said.
The LPFFA’s 9/11 memorial will be streamed on the association’s Facebook page.
-— with files from Matthew Trevithick and The Canadian Press