By 
It’s been 23 years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a group of firefighters, police and sheriff personnel and other first responders gathered at the downtown Watertown Fire Station Wednesday morning for a solemn ceremony to honor those who perished.
A handful of city officials and citizens attended the ceremony, which began with a flag raising by the Watertown Fire Rescue Honor Guard. After Assistant Fire Chief Scott Jongbloed welcomed the crowd, Fire Chaplain Hand Roso offered prayers. While noting the tremendous sacrifices of those who died, he focused on the survivors.
“Here we stand to focus once again on this immeasurable sacrifice,” Roso said. “Not one of body, blood and tissue, but of husbands, wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, family members and friends. In their place, there continues to be sadness, loneliness and emptiness.”
After Watertown firefighter/paramedic Tiffany Vohlken spoke on the history of the tolling of the bell, the Honor Guard lowered the flag to half-staff while Jen Dingsor played Taps on her trumpet.
The September 11 attacks were four coordinated terrorist suicide attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. On that morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the East Coast to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and aimed the next two flights toward targets in or near Washington, D.C., in an attack on the nation’s capital. The third team succeeded in striking the Pentagon while the fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania during a passenger revolt. The September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in history.
Most of those who perished were civilians except for 343 members of the New York City Fire Department and 71 law enforcement officers who died in the World Trade Center and on the ground in New York City and 55 military personnel who died at the Pentagon.
“We do this to honor the pride and tradition of firefighters,” Firefighter and Paramedic Alex Defea said. “Those firefighters on Sept. 11 knew what they were charging into that morning, and they went in anyways. This is to honor those brave souls.”
Watertown Fire Rescue, along with the Watertown Police Department and students from Lake Area Technical College’s Med/Fire program will be completing a “stair climb challenge” Sept. 12 which challenges first responders to climb 110 flights of stairs representing the 110 floors of the World Trade Centers. The challenge start at 9 a.m. at the stadium. This challenge is usually done on Sept. 11, but do to federally-mandated pre-scheduled Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting (ARFF) training, the challenge was pushed to the next day.
