Wilmington Fire Department honors 9/11 victims with World Trade Center memorial

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WWAY-TV) — The Wilmington Fire Department held its annual 9/11 memorial ceremony Friday, honoring the lives lost and the first responders who answered the call on Sept. 11, 2001.

At the memorial outside the Wilmington Fire Department’s Empie Park station, dozens of community members gathered to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

At the center of the memorial is a steel beam from the World Trade Center, a piece of history that honors more than 340 firefighters who died responding to the attacks.

“We had a couple of our firefighters who asked for permission to apply for this piece of steel from the World Trade Center,” retired Battalion Fire Chief David Hines said.

Hines helped bring the beam to Wilmington. For the department’s application to be approved, officials had to show that the steel would be permanently memorialized.

“And we ended up getting it and our two firefighters went up to New York City to pick it up at a warehouse near an airport,” Hines said.

Once the beam arrived in Wilmington, firefighters, EMS personnel and law enforcement officers — including retired first responders — came together to build the memorial.

For Wilmington Fire Chief Steve Mason, the most memorable part of the project was seeing people from across the community come together to build the memorial in just one week before it was dedicated in 2013.

“A lot of these people we didn’t even know and, like I said, it didn’t matter,” Mason said.

Mason said the effort reflected a community determined to honor eight local fallen firefighters as well as the hundreds who died on 9/11.

Mason was with his fire crew at the Empie Park station on Sept. 11, 2001, when they watched the attacks unfold on television.

“And we all had the same immediate reaction that we saw thousands of people die and who knows how many firefighters, cops, paramedics, people trying to help died as well,” Mason said.

Mason said the attacks changed the way he viewed his job as a first responder. His training, he said, eventually extended beyond responding to fires as the threat of terrorism became more apparent.

“When I joined the fire department I signed up to go to fires, we get on the big red truck and squirt water on fires, we help people do a number of things but never in my wildest imagination did I think I could be on a military base training with chemical weapons because what was becoming apparent at the time was terrorism was on American soil,” Mason said.

Mason said a few of the men he trained with lost their lives on 9/11.

Now, he said, the memorial serves as a daily reminder of their sacrifice and the importance of never forgetting what happened.

“It is in a very public place and we have lots of visitors and people that pass by here. The Cross City Trail literally runs right in front of it and so it’s just our way of saying ‘Never Forget,’” Mason said.