Dozens of firefighters and other first responders gathered at Frontier Field on Sunday for the annual 9/11 Memorial Stair Climb.
If you’ve gone to a baseball game at Frontier Field, you may have climbed up and down the stairs in the bleachers a few times, but you probably haven’t done that repeatedly in full firefighter turnout gear with another 40 pounds or more of equipment on your back.
But that’s what some of those who took part in Sunday’s event did in an effort to simulate what it took to try and climb the 110 stories of the World Trade Center. The event also benefits programs that help firefighters and their families through the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
Bill Ingram, a fire marshal in New York City, was a guest speaker at Sunday’s event. He was a marshal on 9/11 when his battalion was called to lower Manhattan. He remembers walked near the Twin Towers just before they started collapsing, and being enveloped by the smoke and haze.
Ingram said that a lot of firefighters he knew lost their lives that day.
“It could have been anybody, it was just the luck of the draw that day. But we wanted to try to get our own guys out, and obviously everybody. There were people asking, have you seen this person, the whole city was kind of, everybody was looking for somebody, everybody was affected,” Ingram said.
When Ingram was asked if he constantly remembers what happened on that horrific day, he said that it comes back in waves, there are different events that may trigger memories.
As for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the discussions among his colleagues in the New York City Fire Department, he noted that there isn’t a large percentage of firefighters still working who were on the job that day.
Jack Gligora, a volunteer firefighter with the West Webster fire department and regional coordinator for Sunday’s event, said it’s important to use events like this to make sure younger people know what happened on 9/11.
"As we get older and children that weren’t born then or were too young to remember, a lot of them don’t remember what actually happened, or don’t know," Gligora said. "Through these walks, (we’re) not only raising money to help others, we’re also educating the public and the children of today so they know what happened."
The events at Frontier Field also included a family-friendly walk as well as the stair climb up and down the bleachers.
