By Mary Ann Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. — Twenty-five years after the crash of the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 — the last of four terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — the reclaimed strip coal mines have reverted to fields of grass bending in the breeze like ocean waves.

In the gently rolling fields, a boulder marking the impact site of the Boeing 757 and a stand of hemlocks are the only visible remains from that day left on the landscape at the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stonycreek Township, Somerset County.

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Among the dignitaries expected for the 25th anniversary, the families of Flight 93 passengers and crew will again visit.

Only 3 miles away from the memorial via back roads is the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department station, which will host the Flight 93 families for its annual public open house, with some help from the actor Gary Sinise’s foundation.

Within a month of the 2001 plane crash and every year since, the small, rural fire company has provided respite for families of the 40 passengers and crew who died trying to wrest control of the plane from Middle Eastern terrorists.

Many of the firefighters, including Brad Shober, the president and assistant chief of the Shanksville VFD, were on the ground that day 25 years ago, rushing from their day jobs to help where needed. That mission to assist has morphed into an annual gathering at the firehouse, a landing place for the community to share memories on every anniversary.

“There’s a whole lot to never forget,” he said in an interview last month at the Shanksville station, recalling what he told students born after 9/11 before he retired from his teaching job three years ago.

“If that plane would have kept going, none of this in Shanksville would have mattered. There would have been a lot worse in D.C. But because those 40 people stood up and took the first steps in that war, we have it. We can count that day as not a total loss.”

Over the years, the fire company has been invited, sometimes along with its “United We Stand” tanker truck, to parades and 9/11 ceremonies. U.S. presidents, vice presidents and governors have visited them.

“Podunk Shanksville, it’s our little town, but it’s involved with world history at this point,” Shober said.

‘Let’s roll’

On Sept. 11, 2001, Shanksville and other Somerset County volunteer firefighters did what they normally do on a Tuesday morning: They worked their day jobs.

It was a pleasant day with sunny bluebird skies when Shober taught his industrial arts class at Fort Hill High School in Cumberland, Md., about 38 miles from his Shanksville home and the fire department.

A teacher across the hall told Shober to turn on his classroom TV, in time for him to watch live the second commercial plane slam into New York’s World Trade Center shortly after 9 a.m.

“There’s a whole lot to never forget.”

Roughly a half hour later, a third commercial flight overtaken by terrorists crashed into the Pentagon. Flight 93, originating from Newark, N.J., and headed to San Francisco, was hijacked near Cleveland, at about 9:28 a.m.

On Flight 93, terrorists commandeered the cockpit and turned the plane southeast, toward Washington, D.C. Minutes before Shober headed to the faculty lounge for lunch at 10 a.m., the passengers devised a plan to take over the cockpit.

Flight 93 passengers and crew made 37 phone calls from the plane’s Airfones to alert authorities and call loved ones, from 9:28 a.m. until the crash at 10:03 a.m., according to the National Park Service.

At 9:33 a.m., one of the terrorists, recorded in Flight 93’s cockpit, exclaimed, “In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate.”

At 9:47 a.m., flight attendant CeeCee Lyles called and left a message for her husband:

“Baby, you have to listen to me carefully. I’m on a plane that’s been hijacked … I want to tell you I love you. Please tell my children that I love them very much and I’m so sorry, babe. Umm. I don’t know what to say … I’m trying to be calm … I hope to be able to see your face again, baby. I love you. Good-bye.”

Among the last words heard on Flight 93 were from passenger Todd Beamer, who famously said, “Let’s roll,” as the passengers and crew stormed the cockpit.

The assault was recorded and continued until the crash. Authorities believe the hijackers retained control of the plane and chose to crash rather than lose control of the aircraft, according to the National Park Service.

Witnesses on the ground in Pennsylvania saw the irregular flight of the plane.

Almost upside down, the aircraft plowed into the ground at a 40-degree angle. Plummeting at 563-580 mph, the plane’s right wing and nose hit first. Carrying about 5,500 gallons of jet fuel, the aircraft exploded in a ball of fire, according to federal investigations.

Nearby residents felt the impact and saw the plume of smoke.

About a half hour later, another teacher told Shober about a plane crash in Somerset. He called his wife, who told him all the local fire companies were in Lambertsville, in a field and former strip mine area in Stonycreek Township.

Shober got permission from the school principal to leave; the school announced an early dismissal because of the national emergency. He jumped in his Ford pick-up truck and headed to Shanksville, but, along the way, he stopped by the Berlin fire station where firefighters had just returned from the crash site.

He joined other firefighters at his station loading up supplies to take to the crash site, including packing his pick-up with food from a Hawaiian luau donated by Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center after that event was cancelled because of the attacks.

When the fire companies arrived at the crash site, they soon realized there were no survivors. The firefighters carefully doused blazes in the trees and on the ground — still lingering from the jet fuel, which permeated the air.

When Shober arrived at the crash site early in the afternoon, he expected to see a plane, at least the fuselage, in the crater that was about 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

But there wasn’t a plane, or discernible parts; there were wing impressions in the dirt. “I would liken it to taking a model plane and dropping it in the snow, and the print it would make.”

Much of the plane had disintegrated, with many of the remains smaller than a notebook, spread through the woods, and paper found miles away, he said. Plane parts and other small items hung from the hemlocks and other trees, some of which caught fire.

Shober found a 40-inch plane piece that might have been part of an axle about 2,300 feet from the crater. The largest plane piece he saw was the size of a car hood; it had three windows.

“You would see pieces of seats and personal effects lying everywhere.”

He saw an open Bible on the ground and believed it came from one of the passengers.

“I wished I had walked over to see what page was open to see if it was a fitting verse or not,” he said. “We were told not to disturb anything. It was a crime scene.”

With chainsaws, the volunteer firefighters cleared vegetation that would impede investigators or pose a safety risk.

Government trailers were brought in and an existing old mining warehouse, about a quarter mile from the crash site, became the command center. An existing access road was black-topped to handle the traffic for the investigation and keep down the dust, Shober said.

Survey grid lines were established, and investigators from different agencies scoured the site, some of them on their hands and knees. With color-coded totes, they collected and separated items by plane parts, personal effects and human remains, he said.

“Somerset County’s Coroner Wallace Miller made sure all 40 families had something from the passengers they could bury, which were identified by dental record and DNA,” Shober said.

Investigators, families stuck in the middle of nowhere

After clearing parts of the site for investigators, supply and food delivery became the fire department’s mission.

“Those September nights were getting cold. People who came weren’t necessarily prepared,” Shober said.

If someone needed a sweatshirt, they got it. When state troopers wanted a few Oreo cookies, they got a full package delivered.

People in Shanksville and surrounding areas cooked and donated food, clothing, tools and other items, so much so that Shober described his station as “more equipped than Walmart.”

“We gave them a place to meet and have solitude.”

It was sometimes overwhelming to feed hundreds of people from an alphabet soup of government agencies, he said.

The Red Cross and Salvation Army fed the workers by day, and Shanksville firefighters took the night shift, ferrying coffee and food to the Pennsylvania State Police who guarded the site. The big thing was driving food and supplies via three pickup trucks owned by the volunteer firefighters.

After the investigation wrapped, the fire company never stopped its 9/11 work.

The Shanksville fire department began its relationship with Flight 93 families when its members, and those from other fire departments, attended and stood in formation for a private ceremony for the 40 dead passengers and crew shortly after the crash, in Indian Lake borough, less than five miles from the crash site.

Afterward, the firefighters met and talked with the mourners and later opened their station for them, rustling up sandwiches, hot dogs and hamburgers.

Within a few years after the crash, the Shanksville firefighters were holding regular open houses with meals for the families when they came into town for formal 9/11 memorial services.

At night, the firefighters would take the kids from the visiting families for fire truck rides.

“We did a barbecue and picnic thing for them, and developed a good rapport. We gave them a place to meet and have solitude,” Shober said.

In 2008, the New York City Fire Department gifted the Shanksville fire department with a 14-foot-tall steel cross cut from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The cross sits beside the Shanksville fire station and is surrounded by American flags when commemorating 9/11.

More than a decade ago, politicians began coming to the fire station’s open house after annual Sept. 11 commemoration ceremonies at the Flight 93 memorial.

In 2024, President Joe Biden (who has visited five times), Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris and GOP nominee and former president Donald Trump visited the fire station on Sept. 11 — two months before the national election.

“It was a circus, but the kids got to see a sitting president, a sitting vice president, a former president — either of which would be the next president — within a couple of hours,” Shober recalled.

Intertwined fates and an actor’s foundation

About five years ago, the Gary Sinise Foundation discovered the Shanksville fire department as part of its mission to honor and support veterans, first responders, wounded heroes, families of the fallen and others.

Linda Lowry, the military and first responder liaison for the foundation, has visited many of the more than 300 firehouses, stations and related sites where Sinise’s foundation has provided more than 300 gift deliveries on 9/11 alone. But Shanksville stood apart, she said.

“It’s a small town with a volunteer fire department in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

When Lowry first knocked on the door about five years ago, she described it as a modest building with a porta-john. The firefighters were making hoagies for a fundraiser.

“I walked around and asked, ‘So what do you guys need?,’” Lowry said.

“We don’t need anything,” the firefighters told her.

They had turnout gear with holes; she thought that would be an easy ask.

“I thought they needed a proper bathroom in-house; they are hosting families and they don’t have a bathroom.”

The Sinise Foundation helped with that and other essentials, and upgraded the firehouse meals for Flight 93 families. But at first, she could not find a caterer in time in the small town.

She bought meat locally and found a grandma who made potato salad. “I was flipping burgers with the firefighters,” she said.

Lowry comes every year.

Numbers for Shanksville department’s open house can vary between 50 and 300 people, including Flight 93 families, other observers of 9/11 and the community.

“It’s about being present. It’s not necessarily about what we can give them. You demonstrate you can be there for them. Trust is built, and relationships are formed,” Lowry said.

At this point, everyone knows each other.

“Through the years, I have noticed healing. They are happy to see each other. It’s their family now. They sadly have something in common.”

One woman, who lost her son on Flight 93, flies from Japan with an interpreter every year to visit the memorial and the open house.

“She is a sweet lady who brings tea for us from Japan. It’s just her way of honoring her son,” Lowry said.

“So many families have come for so many years. It’s their way of honoring their fallen hero.”

The families respect the volunteer firefighters who run toward a crash site to help save lives or recover any remnant. “It’s a mutual respect,” Lowry said.

It goes beyond the fire department and into the community.

“People who owned farms and saw the crash and smoke and how they came together to help — you have to respect people who do that. There’s comfort in knowing that we have people in our world with that integrity,” she said.

Lowry and the firefighters maintain the families’ privacy. Early on, for instance, there were times when the station’s fire trucks blocked the station’s entrance because of the media or for security purposes.

But the annual event is open to the community, Shober said.

In the early years after the crash, an aviation friend of Flight 93’s pilot Jason Dahl would give the firefighters money for a case of beer to enjoy with them when he visited. “Jason would have liked that,” he told Shober.

That friend has since passed away, as did Dahl’s wife Sandy, who also had visited the station.

“Some families live very far away, and they remember in their own ways,” Shober said. “We make the opportunity available to them and are honored to have them.”

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