Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Marblehead will once again gather to remember the lives lost that day — including three people with deep ties to the town — and the local service members who later died in the war on terror.
The community is invited to Marblehead’s annual Sept. 11 memorial ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks. The ceremony will begin at 10 a.m. at Memorial Park.
For Fire Chief Jason Gilliland, the anniversary carries an added urgency as a new generation enters the fire service with no personal memory of the attacks.
“I have firefighters working now who weren’t born during 9/11,” Gilliland said. “That’s why every year we try to drive home the sacrifices and the people who perished, so people don’t forget.”
“History tends to forget,” he added.
Marblehead lost three people in the attacks: Dr. Frederick Rimmele and William Weems, who were passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 175, and Marblehead native Erik Hans Isbrandtsen, who was working on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
“It hits home,” Gilliland said. “When you have three residents from the town and they perish in a tragic attack … as long as I’m chief, we’ll continue to do the memorial services.”
Gilliland was at the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy in Stow on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, teaching structural firefighting.
“Somebody came out to the drill yard and said, ‘A plane hit the towers,’” he recalled. “That was an interesting ride home. Silent.”
The images that followed remain vivid 25 years later.
“There was a constant loop of footage of the towers,” Gilliland said. “It was surreal. You didn’t see a plane in the sky.”
Gilliland said Marblehead firefighters were not dispatched to New York after the attacks because those deployments were handled by specialized federal rescue teams.
The attacks did not change the fundamental mission of firefighters, he said. What did change was the training. Police officers and firefighters now routinely prepare for terrorist attacks and other large-scale emergencies, Gilliland said, although the fundamentals of rescue and firefighting remain largely the same.
Sept. 11 also transformed, at least for a time, the relationship between first responders and the communities they served.
“It’s awful that it takes a tragedy,” he said. “Every household had an American flag flying. People came to the fire house, dropping off food and cars.”
For firefighters, studying Sept. 11 has become part of understanding their profession. Gilliland said the attacks have been extensively examined in fire service publications and are discussed at the fire academy.
“You try to read what you can,” he said. “Hundreds of trade journals were written on 9/11 for firefighters alone. They talk about it at the fire academy.”
But there is another lesson that cannot be found in tactics or training manuals.
“From an emotional side, trying to understand what they went through,” Gilliland said. “We go to funerals all the time. It’s important to make sure you recognize and support the firefighters and their families.”
In 2006, Marblehead dedicated a memorial honoring Rimmele, Weems and Isbrandtsen. The monument also honors two local service members who died while serving in the war on terror: Army Staff Sgt. Christopher N. Piper and Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Christopher B. Shay.
Across the bottom are two words that Gilliland believes remain as important a quarter-century later as they were when the memorial was dedicated: “Never forget.”
For Gilliland, that means remembering not only what happened in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, but the individual people behind the names on Marblehead’s memorial — and the families who have carried those losses for 25 years.
“There are no second chances. Keep the families of those individuals in our thoughts and prayers,” he said.
