Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) Like many places large and small, Arlington County will be doing its modest annual September 11th ceremony this morning, complete with a moment of silence at 9:37 am to mark the impact of American Airlines Flight 77 plunging into the west side of the Pentagon. But even with the ceremony staying the same, for some, the mission is changing as the day itself keeps fading, little by little, further into history.
“There are people that are coming into adulthood that were, at best, small children back then,” Arlington’s former Fire Chief, now Deputy County Manager Jim Schwartz told WMAL. That, to him, crystallizes the changing objective of each successive September 11th.
“The Pentagon’s Memorial Foundation is doing a tremendous amount of work to try and keep the story alive,” Schwartz said .”Their goal is to not just keep the story alive, but to create a space where people can explore, examine, study why these kinds of events happen and how we avoid them in the future.”
Schwartz led Unified Command at the Pentagon that day. He still thinks about how complicated that post could have been – but thankfully, that day, it wasn’t.
“For me, the (overarching theme) is still, in part, what the 9/11 Commission said about the response, which was that while not perfect, it stood as a success because of the relationships and trust that existed between the responders.”
The D.C. Region didn’t improvise the regional cooperation that day, Schwartz said, but it has stood as a model for what can be accomplished when this region works together.
“You may have areas of the country where it would be easier, simply because they don’t have the kinds of complications that we do in the National Capital Region,” he said. “And yet, they have not achieved the level of success that we continue to practice here.”
CVopyright 2017 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: U.S. Navy/Brien Aho)
