Twenty five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Montgomery County community members and leaders in Rockville joined the rest of the nation in observing the day that changed the world one quarter of a century ago.
They gathered at a park at the corner of East Jefferson Street and Maryland Avenue, where there is a plaque engraved with the names of the 11 Montgomery County residents who died in the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
The park also has a bench dedicated to each person. During the ceremony, the names of the 11 victims from Montgomery County were read aloud while flowers and flags were placed at the benches.
Remember that day
Sam Villani, who serves as a battalion chief for Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service, worked at the Station 21 on Veirs Mill Road in 2001. He made the decision to drive to New York City to help.
A flag hung outside during the ceremony
“And I spent three days up there helping out on my own volition, not representing Montgomery County Fire Rescue,” Villani told MCM. “For some reason that day, I just felt compelled as I think many other Americans did.”
He helped in the bucket line, which was a line of people passing buckets of rubble away from the attack site, among other response efforts, like putting out a fire that reignited in a mid-rise building in front of the towers.
“I remember it starting out just like any other day,” Chase Fabrizio, MCFRS assistant chief, told MCM. He was with another organization at the time. “The weather was great. It was a nice summer morning.”
“I remember hearing reports of planes striking the World Trade Center and when the first plane hit, you think this has got to be an accident,” Fabrizio said. “There’s no way that we would be this vulnerable and that we’d be able to be hit like that. The second plane hit and it was obviously evidence that we were under attack.”
Fabrizio remembers coming over the hill in a neighboring jurisdiction and looking over and seeing smoke coming up from the Pentagon.
“It was a surreal moment. We knew that obviously our lives have changed and the coming days were going to be challenging,” he said.
Fabrizio told MCM that MCFRS crews responded to the Pentagon. They went down to provide firefighting efforts and medical support to the teams working there. Maryland Task Force One, which is one of the FEMA urban search and rescue teams, was also deployed and worked at the Pentagon searching for and removing human remains and trying to give families closure.
“All I could really think about was those poor souls who, didn’t know anything, except for the ones in the airplane that got hijacked,” James Carter, a Vietnam war veteran, told MCM. Carter said he was home doing work when it happened. What he remembers about that day: “All hell breaking loose.”
“Then the second plane hits, and then the third plane,” recalled Carter, who is affiliated with the organization Honor and Remember. “I was only three years old when Pearl Harbor happened,” he said. Carter said he imagines the public reaction to 9/11 was similar the Pearl Harbor attack.
During the ceremony, County Executive Marc Elrich, a former teacher, said he was teaching in a Montgomery County classroom, “when I was told to come to the library and watch the TV.”
Rockville Mayor Monique Ashton remembers being in the area and trying to locate friends. She was in graduate school at NYU near the Twin Towers and remembers looking at the skyline every day, “and then no longer seeing it there.”
County Council President Natali Fani-González remembers being in school, going to class when she heard the news. She watched it on TV with her friends in shock. It was five years after she came to the U.S. from Venezuela.
What is important to remember today?
9/11 memorial at East Jefferson St and Maryland Ave in Rockville
“It doesn’t take a terrorist attack to find common ground with everybody,” said Battalion Chief Villani. “Public safety, we run into harm’s way for complete strangers. We don’t know them. We risk everything for people we don’t even know. If we can do that, I think society can figure it out. We need to get along with one another. We’re on this planet together.”
Fabrizio said he remembers a sense of community in the aftermath with peole taking care of one another.
“Set aside your differences and support each other. We can’t forget the men and women of all public safety from the fire, from the police, from our 911 operators, everybody that is out there helping making the mission be met,” Assistant Chief Fabrizio said. “We also can’t forget that we have a large workforce that is since retired. They’re still battling with the mental and the physical scars of that day. And we continue, unfortunately, to lose members of public safety from the exposures and the toxins from working at both sites.”
Carter hopes 9/11 is always remembered even outside of big anniversaries, although he is concerned.
“Tomorrow it’ll be forgotten,” Carter said. “It’s like the 250th anniversary, most of the original hype is all gone. ‘It’s over.’ No, it isn’t, it’s still got a few months to go.”
The county executive said we can honor the people we lost by remembering who they were.
“We honor the people who responded by caring for those who continue to live with the consequences of that day and we honor this history by refusing to allow tragedy and fear to turn us against our neighbors,” said Elrich.
Fani-González said it “takes love to fight anything that’s so horrible as what happened on 9/11.”
“We can choose to not have another national tragedy, to unite and to show our humanity and to come together as a country,” Ashton said.
Remembering the lives lost from Montgomery County
Bench in Rockville dedicated to a local resident who died on 9/11
- William Edward Caswell
- Dr. Gerald Paul Fisher
- Capt. Lawrence D. Getzfred
- Michele M. Heidenberger
- Angela Marie Houtz
- Teddington Hamm Moy
- Lt. Darin H. Pontell
- Scott A. Powell
- Todd Hayes Reuben
- Patricia J. Statz
- Ernest M. Willcher
