September 11th, We will Never Forget!

W e w i l l n e v e r fo r g e t . . .

September 11, 2001

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 SECTION C

The day the world changed ...

THEALPENANEWS.COM

Page 1A from the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The News.

INSIDE

Public safety changed after 9/11...........................2C

Pages from Sept. 12, 2001...................................3-5C

What it was like covering 9/11.................................6C

How 9/11 changed local government......................2C

How 9/11 changed schools......................................6C

The changing ways we remember..........................6C

2C ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ Thursday, September 9, 2021

Heightened alert After 9/11, police, military, firefighters, federal gov’t learned to work together

By JULIE RIDDLE

law enforcement branches united efforts to keep such a tragedy from happening again, local public safety leaders said.

In the days after the towers fell, Smith remembers, police responded to fights as frightened residents waited in bumper-tobumper lines for gas.

The FBI provided local police agencies with watch lists of people considered suspicious. If any of them were stopped, police were not to arrest or detain but only to report the encounter to the federal government, Smith said.

He only had to report someone on the list once, he said.

Federal authorities also instructed local police to keep a close eye on certain buildings and other infrastructure that could be targets to terrorists. A deputy with the Alcona County Sheriff’s Office at the time, Smith watched for suspicious people at the Alcona County Dam. He began to see Border

News Staff Writer

ALPENA — On Alpena County Undersheriff Erik Smith’s first day as a police officer, the Twin Towers fell.

“What did I get myself into?” Smith wondered as he watched news coverage of the second plane hitting a tower on televisions inside the Alcona County Jail.

That was 9/11, the terrorist attacks in which hijacked commercial airliners brought down both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroyed a portion of the Pentagon in Washington, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, and killed nearly 3,000 people, entangling the U.S. in Middle East wars from which we’ve only recently disengaged.

For police, firemen, and military members in Northeast Michigan, 9/11 instilled fresh resolve to protect those in their care even as police kept a more careful eye on the public and

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Patrol and Homeland Security watercraft in Lake Huron near Alpena — something he never saw before 9/11, Smith said.

After the terrorist attack, everyone became more security-conscious, both police and the people they protect, said 1st. Lt. John Grimshaw, commander of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post.

Grimshaw worked downstate at the time as a member of an FBI fugitive task force. When the first plane hit the tower, the federal building in Detroit locked down completely.

Grimshaw went to the Detroit Michigan State Police post to wait for instructions. His superiors did not ask him to handle any immediate threat.

“Then again,” he said, “no one knew, at the time, what was a threat.”

In following days, police heightened their vigilance at the Mackinac Bridge and increased patrols everywhere — both to help News Photo by Julie Riddle residents feel safe and to Col. Jim Rossi, commander at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, speaks look for suspicious activity, at the CRTC last month.

Grimshaw said.

Dearborn, with the largest concentration of Mus- scale-attacks includes both portant in overseas com- more rigorous fire codes, lims outside the Middle watchfulness at the local bat) to events such as the such as those that require East at the time, according level and interagency coop- recent first-in-the-nation steel beams able to withto Grimshaw, made Mich- eration. landing of military aircraft stand the heat of burning igan a location of concern “Everybody started play- on M-32, the CRTC — jet fuel. for federal authorities, be- ing together” after 9/11, he and Alpena’s part in its Firefighters now considcause the 9/11 terrorists said. existence — helps the U.S. er more carefully how long belonged to Islamic exA national urgency for military be the strongest it a building has been burntremist groups. Residents agencies to work togeth- can be, and, “that serves as ing before rushing in to there were under intense er changed the makeup of a deterrent to future poten- save property, such as at a scrutiny, facing threats training held at the Alpena tial conflicts,” Rossi said. 2019 fire at Alpena’s Habfrom people angry about Combat Readiness Train- “No doubt about it.” itat for Humanity ReStore, what had happened in New ing Center, according to Images of responders when firefighters longing York, and police had to Col. Jim Rossi, CRTC rushing toward the tow- to go into the building had protect the Muslim popu- commander. ers in New York as others to hang back to keep themlation from abuse while rePre-9/11, one military rushed away increased pub- selves safe. maining alert for anything unit at a time would use lic appreciation of those The essence of firesuspicious, Grimshaw said. the base to train, and joint sworn to protect them, said fighting, however, hasn’t Since 9/11, the CIA, events like CRTC’s annual Andy Marceau, community changed that much in 20 FBI, and other federal Northern Strike exercises risk reduction officer with years, Marceau said. When agencies have stepped up — in which several Amer- the Alpena Fire Depart- a home or other building the amount of intelligence ican military units train ment. burns, firefighters, like shared with local-level law alongside servicemembers The fire department will police, put themselves beenforcement. Such shar- from around the globe — hang a large American flag tween people and danger. ing stems from an under- didn’t exist. from its tower truck outside “I know what I signed standing, Grimshaw said, The tragedy highlighted the Alpena Public Safety up for,” he said. “At any that prevention of large the need for the U.S. Army, Facility on Saturday, the given time, when I come Air Force, Marines, and 20th anniversary of the at- to work, something could other military personnel to tacks, and everyone who happen. There could be a be ready to respond to a works at the building will catastrophic failure and I conflict jointly to present think about the responders could not come out.” the most effective offense who lost their lives in the Julie Riddle can be possible, Rossi said. tragedy, Marceau said. reached at 989-358-5693, From Northern Strike to New buildings in North- jriddle@thealpenanews. military testing of drone east Michigan, as around com or on Twitter @jridaircraft (increasingly im- the country, now must meet dleX.

20 years later, 9/11 continues to shape local government

By STEVE SCHULWITZ News Staff Writer

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About 3,000 people died

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in the attacks.

One of the most prominent moves the federal government made was the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, a new government agency empowered to oversee international and domestic air travel and lead the screening and security at airports.

After 9/11, what passengers are allowed to do at and take into airports and on flights has changed significantly, Steve Smigelski, manager at the Alpena County Regional Airport, said. He said the list of items not allowed on planes has grown substantially, and the vetting of passengers and contents of their luggage is much more thorough.

“I remember when you could take a pocketknife on the plane, but now you can’t even take a pair of nail clippers because they could be used as a weapon,” he said. “It is a totally different world.”

As technology advances, Smigelski said, he anticipates the screening process will become more advanced and more efficient, but he doesn’t see it becoming more intrusive.

A little over the year after the terror attack, the federal government established the Department of Homeland Security, which united several agencies under one umbrella dedicated to protecting U.S. territory.

Government, see Page 7C

Thursday, September 9, 2021 ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ 3C

Page 2A from the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The News.

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4C ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ Thursday, September 9, 2021

Page 3A from the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The News.

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Thursday, September 9, 2021 ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ 5C

Page 4A from the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The News. Go to this story at TheAlpenaNews.com to see a photo gallery of pages from that edition.

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6C ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ Thursday, September 9, 2021

From fire drills to lockdowns, days of service, 9/11 changed schools

By CRYSTAL NELSON

ton. A fourth intentional crashing was thwarted by passengers who forced the Special to The News LINCOLN — Interven- plane down in a field in tionist Gail Gombos and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Literacy Coach Sue Elmer Experts believe that plane were working at Alcona El- may have been headed for ementary School on Sept. the White House or the 11, 2001 when they began U.S. Capitol.

News Photos by Crystal Nelson Those attacks, which hearing news that a plane Alcona Elementary School Interventionist Gail Gombos killed nearly 3,000 peohad crashed in New York. is pictured in July at the school in Lincoln.

Gombos, who was ple, pulled the U.S. into war with militant Islamic breastfeeding her youngest child at the time, said extremists in Afghanistan pointments. She said it was thing like that were to hapher husband brought her to and Iraq, wars that killed late morning — maybe pen today, they would be the school to nurse when more than 6,000 additional around 11 a.m. — when able to get updates quickly he began telling her about American service members an emergency meeting was on cell phones and coma plane crash in New York. and contractors over the called at the school. puters, such as the Google “I walked out of the of- following two decades.

“I just remember a sense Chromebook laptops isElmer said she remem- of sadness and fear,” Elmer sued by the school. fice after feeding her and I could tell by everybody’s bers hearing about a plane said. “Part of me wanted “Kids are on Chromeface that it was pretty seri- that had crashed in New to keep all of our kids here books now and they would York. She said they didn’t because you didn’t know be seeing that information ous,” she said.

That plane crash turned realize at the time what was what was going on. It was as well,” she said. out to be deliberate. Terror- happening, but they felt so different than anything Elmer said school has ists hijacked four planes, something wasn’t right. in our lifetime than you had changed a lot since the atNews continued to trick- ever experienced.” crashing two into the tacks, although she wasn’t World Trade Center towers le in as kids came in tardy Elmer, who had gown up sure how many of the in New York and one into or parents dropped off kids with family in the military, changes are directly related the Pentagon in Washing- returning from doctors ap- said terrorism wasn’t a to 9/11. She said some of thing people thought about the changes are because of at that time. how things are today.

Meanwhile, Gombos “We used to just have said that, while they tried fire drills and, now, we to keep normalcy in the have lockdowns and we classroom, they also want- have reverse evacuation ed to know what was going drills and we have preon. cautionary procedures for “It was very much a people entering the buildjuggle of wanting to get ing, where, in the past you information, but keeping would just walk into the normalcy for the children,” building,” she said. she said.

Gombos said that, each Gombos said that, after year, teachers have some that morning’s emergency kind of lesson planned for meeting, teachers calmly Patriot Day, the U.S. holinformed the kids that a iday declared by former major event had happened President George W. Bush and let them know they to honor those who died on were safe.

9/11 and traditionally obElmer said school was served through volunteer not dismissed early that service activities. day.

She also said that, during Twenty years since the the Alcona football game terrorist attacks, Gombos on Friday, the school will Alcona Elementary School Literacy Coach Sue Elmer is said technology has really honor veterans who graduchanged. She said if some- ated from the district. pictured in July at the school in Lincoln.

A Tuesday unlike any other

Sept. 11, 2001was a Tuesday like so many Tuesdays before.

Then it wasn’t.

Back then, Tuesday was garbage day for me. I would take my garbage out to my parents’ house. Sometimes, I would get out there early enough for a short visit with my mom, sometimes not. She had ceramics with her friends those days and left the house around 9 a.m.

STEVE On that Tuesday, I started the day a little slow because of a late night in MURCH the Alpena newsroom on Monday. I Former Alpena News was lying in bed, taking my time to Editor start the day, when the phone rang.

“Oh my god, turn on your television. Someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center,” my mom said.

I’m sure those are words thousands of people heard that morning around the same time I heard them.

Before I got the television to a station that would have news: “Holy **** they just hit the second tower.”

My mother didn’t use foul language, but the S-word was one she would say once in a while, and you knew it was serious.

Instantly, my mind hit fifth gear and I was dressed and out the door to get my garbage to my parents’ house so I could get back home, shower, and head to work. During the time that I was driving to drop off my garbage, then-News Publisher Bill Speer called. We scheduled an editors meeting for as early as News Editor Rich Wertz and I could get to the office.

In the interim, Bill had called all the reporters and set up a time for the staff to meet. We set a plan in place, which anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows is a practice in futility, because news — especially breaking news — is an ever-changing beast.

We put together a list of stories for the reporters to work on, knowing the list could — and likely would — change.

The staff wound up doing a wide range of stories, from local reaction to the attacks to detailing what the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center did and from what was going to be affected locally to how to talk with your kids about the tragedy.

The staff plowed forward on stories, all the while sneaking a few minutes to watch the news on TV. The entire building was glued to radios downstairs and the television upstairs, exactly as every workplace in America, I would think. The employees who worked downstairs would come upstairs to take a few minutes to watch the news, trying to put images to the words they were hearing from their radios. That was in the early days of newspapers’ presence on the internet, so breaking news wasn’t something we were equipped for, and there was no such thing as social media to get the word out about events other than advance notice to us or more immediately to the radio stations.

Candlelight vigils and other gatherings were called in the local media.

As the day wore on, Rich and I put together the pages that weren’t going to be affected by coverage of the attack, saving as much time as possible to work on the pages that would carry that news.

As it turned out, the entire first section of the paper was attack-related.

The biggest discussions concerned how we would present the news of the day to our readers on Wednesday morning.

The size of the paper grew from the usual 16 pages to 20 pages. Back then, we didn’t receive as much news from the Associated Press, because we subscribed to a smaller news feed, so we were a little concerned about the amount of content we’d receive, hoping that we wouldn’t receive many of the same stories. No worries there.

Bill came back to the newsroom in the evening to see what was happening and provide input. We turned our attention to the artwork we would select on Page 1A and how AP Photo the page would be displayed. This was the earlier days of In this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 file photo, a person stops to read names in New Jersey’s memorial to the 749 people from the state lost during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist Murch, see Page 7C attacks on the World Trade Center, as One World Trade Center, now up to 104 floors, is seen across the Hudson River from Jersey City, N.J.

As the decades pass, the act of remembering evolves SHANKSVILLE, Pa. (AP) — The hills in Shanksville seem to swallow sound.

The plateau that Americans by the millions ascend to visit the Flight 93 National Memorial, to think of those who died in this southwestern Pennsylvania expanse, sits just above much of the landscape, creating a pocket of quiet precisely where quiet needs to be.

It is a place that encourages the act of remembering.

Twenty years have passed since United Flight 93 made its final descent, chaos unfolding aboard as buildings burned 300 miles to the east. Nearly one-fifth of the country is too young to remember firsthand the day that changed everything.

Yet at the memorial’s overlook, near the patch where the plane hit, remembering is the whole point.

Remembering is not merely a state of mind. As those who beseech us to never forget the Holocaust have long insisted, it is an

act. And when loss and trauma are visited upon human beings, the act of remembering takes many forms.

Remembering is political.

Those who disagree about the fate of Confederate statues across the American South demonstrate that, as do those who dispute how much the war on terror and its toll should be part of discussions about 9/11 memories.

Remembering arrives in ground zero ceremonies and moments of silence and prayers upon prayers, both public and private. It shows itself in folk memorials like those erected at the sides of lonely roads to mark the sites of traffic deaths. It is embedded in the names of places, like the road that leads to the Flight 93 memorial — the Lincoln Highway. It surfaces in the retrieval of “flashbulb memories” — those where-wereyou-when-this-happened moments that stick with us, sometimes accurately,

sometimes not.

There are personal memories and cultural memories and political memories, and the lines often blur.

And for generations, remembering has been presented to us in monuments and memorials like Shanksville’s, fine-tuned to evoke

memories and emotions in certain ways.

Yet while monuments stand, remembering itself evolves. How 9/11 is remembered depends on when 9/11 is remembered. What,

“My mother didn’t use foul language, but the S-word was one she would say once in a while, and you knew it was serious.”

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Thursday, September 9, 2021 ∫ THE ALPENA NEWS ∫ 7C

How 9/11 changed air travel: more security, less privacy DALLAS (AP) — Ask anyone old enough to remember travel before Sept.

11, 2001, and you’re likely to get a gauzy recollection of what flying was like.

There was security screening, but it wasn’t anywhere near as intrusive.

There were no long checkpoint lines. Passengers and their families could walk right to the gate together.

Overall, an airport experience meant far less stress.

That all ended when four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

The worst terror attack on American soil led to increased and sometimes tension-filled security measures in airports across the world. The cataclysm has also contributed to other changes large and small that have reshaped the airline industry — and, for consumers, made air travel more stressful than ever.

Two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, which required that all checked bags be screened, cockpit doors be rein-

forced, and more federal air marshals be put on flights.

There has not been another 9/11. Nothing even close. But after that day, flying changed forever.

Security measures evolved with new threats, and so travelers were asked to take off belts and remove some items from bags for scanning. Things that clearly could be wielded as weapons, like the box-cutters used by the 9/11 hijackers, were banned. After “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s attempt to take down a flight from Paris to Miami in late 2001, footwear started coming off at security checkpoints.

Each new requirement seemed to make checkpoint lines longer. To many travelers, other rules were more mystifying, such as limits on liquids because the wrong ones could possibly be used to concoct a bomb.

“It’s a much bigger hassle than it was before 9/11 — much bigger — but we have gotten used to it,” Ronald Briggs said as he and his wife, Jeanne, waited at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport for a flight to London last month.

The long lines created by

post-attack measures gave rise to the PreCheck and Global Entry “trusted-traveler programs” in which people who pay a fee and provide certain information about themselves pass through checkpoints without removing shoes and jackets or taking laptops out of their bag.

But that convenience has come at a cost: privacy.

On its application and in brief interviews, PreCheck asks people about basic information like work history and where they have lived, and they give a fingerprint and agree to a criminal-records check. Privacy advocates are particularly concerned about ideas that TSA has floated to also examine social media postings (the agency’s top official says that has been dropped), press reports about people, location data and information from data brokers including how applicants spend their money.

“It’s far from clear that that has any relationship to aviation security,” says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Remember,

Continued from Page 6C

then, does remembering come to mean on a 20th anniversary of an event like 9/11, even as its echoes are still shaking the foundations of everything?

“Our present influences how we remember the past — sometimes in ways that are known and sometimes in ways that we don’t realize,” says Jennifer Talarico, a psychology professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania who studies how people form personal memories of public events.

Evidence of that is obvious in the past five weeks in Afghanistan, where a 20-year war waged in direct response to 9/11 ended pretty much where it began: with the repressive and violent Taliban in charge once more.

But even within more static forms of memory, such as the Flight 93 National Memorial, the question of how remembering evolves hangs over so much.

In the visitors’ center, visceral, painful artifacts of the moment still bring back the past with astonishing efficiency; twisted, scarred cutlery from in-flight meals is particularly breathtaking. But the variety of remembering that is presented yards away at the quiet overlook and its thoughtful memorial feels more permanent, more eternal.

Paul Murdoch of Los Angeles, the lead architect on the memorial, says it was carefully calibrated to resonate across multiple stages of memory about the event and its implications.

“You can imagine a memorial approach that sort of freezes anger in time, or freezes fear. And that can be a very expressionistic piece

of art. But I feel like for something to endure over a long period of time, I think it has to operate a different way,” says Murdoch, who co-designed the memorial with his wife, Milena.

“Now we have a generation of people who weren’t even alive on 9/11,” Murdoch says. “So how do you talk to people of this new generation — or of future generations?”

That question is particularly potent on this anniversary. Society tends to mark generations in two-decade packages, so there’s an entire one that has been born and come of age since the attacks. That hardly means they haven’t been paying attention, though: They “remember,” too.

Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, studies how nostalgia works. She found something interesting a couple years ago when she was researching how young people encountered stories that resonated with them — both personally and through the news.

Even those who lacked living memories of 9/11, Batcho says, responded with stories about the event. It was remembering as shared experience.

So many first encounters with 9/11 were, in the tradition of an information age, both separate and communal. People in different parts of the country and world, under vastly different circumstances, watched the same live camera angles on the same few feeds and saw the same, now-indelible views of the destruction in the same way. They experienced it apart, but together.

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That formed a communal memory of sorts, even if sometimes people who saw the same things didn’t remember them the same way — a specific camera angle or vantage point, a key figure’s comments, the exact sequence of events. Remembering can be like that, experts say.

“You would think that the memories would be more cohesive and homogeneous,” Batcho says. “It turns out that it’s much more complicated than that.”

The fundamental tension of this kind of remembering — it feels like yesterday but is also becoming part of history — confronts us in the coming days. Memory becomes history. And history — shared history — is held onto tightly, sometimes rabidly. It’s why so many people grasp tightly to comforting, nostalgic historical narratives — even when they’re shown to have been destructive.

When memory does become history, it can become more remote, like a Revolutionary War memorial for people whose passions and sacrifices have been sanded down by time. With distance, it can calcify.

That’s not going to happen with 9/11 for a long time, of course. Its politics are still roiling. The arguments that it produced — and the ways they sent society hurtling in a different direction — are just as intense as in those early days.

And when a nation pauses to remember the morning 20 years ago when it was attacked, it is not only looking over its shoulder. It is also looking around and wondering: What does this mean to us now?

AP Photo

Travelers wear face coverings in the line for the south north security checkpoint in the main terminal of Denver International Airport Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2021, in Denver. Two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, a force of federal airport screeners that replaced the private companies that airlines were hiring to handle security.

PreCheck. TSA wants to raise that to 25 million, with the goal of allowing officers to spend more time on passengers considered to be a bigger risk.

At the direction of Congress, the TSA will expand the use of private vendors to gather information from PreCheck applicants. It currently uses a company called Idemia, and aims to add two more — Telos Identity Management Solutions and Clear Secure Inc. Clear plans to use PreCheck enrollment to boost membership in its own identity-verification product by bundling the two offerings. That will make Clear’s own product more valuable to its customers, which include sports stadiums and concert promoters.

“They are really trying to increase their market share by collecting quite a lot of very sensitive data on as many people as they can get their hands on,” says India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group

for digital rights.

TSA Administrator David Pekoske, though, sees Clear’s strategy as helping TSA: “We have allowed the vendors to bundle their offerings together with the idea that would be an incentive for people to sign up for the trusted-traveler programs.”

The TSA is testing the use of kiosks equipped with facial-recognition technology to check photo IDs and boarding passes. The kiosks will also pull photos taken when the traveler applied for PreCheck, McKinney says. That concerns her because it would mean connecting the kiosks to the internet — TSA says that much is true — and potentially exposing the information to hackers.

Despite the trauma that led to its creation, and the intense desire to avoid another 9/11, the TSA itself has frequently been the subject of questions about its methods, ideas and effectiveness.

Critics, including former TSA officers, have derid-

ed the agency as “security theater” that gives a false impression of safeguarding the traveling public.

Pekoske dismisses that notion by pointing to the huge number of guns seized at airport checkpoints — more than 3,200 last year, 83% of them loaded — instead of making it onto planes.

Pekoske also ticked off other TSA tasks, including vetting passengers, screening checked bags with 3-D technology, inspecting cargo and putting federal air marshals on flights.

“Rest assured: This is not security theater,” Pekoske says. “It’s real security.”

Many independent experts agree with Pekoske’s assessment, though they usually see areas where the TSA must improve.

This summer, an average of nearly 2 million people per day have flowed through TSA checkpoints.

Most travelers accept any inconvenience as the price of security in an uncertain world.

Murch,

Continued from Page 6C digital photography and video screen grabs, so there was a bit of an issue with the quality of the photos. Keep in mind that, when ink hits newsprint, the quality isn’t the same as the photos you print on photo paper, and photos in 2001 had issues when grabbed from video.

Many photos that were top choices also showed pixelation even at thumbnail size.

A photo was selected and a headline chosen, debated, changed, then finally settled on: “Under attack” (side note: the San Francis-

co Examiner had the best headline of the day in my opinion: “Bastards”).

The final touches were put on the newspaper and sent to the pressroom by 1 a.m.

We can Monday Morning Quarterback all we want, but, in the moment, I was — and 20 years later, I am — proud of the work the entire staff did on that day.

Nine stories, plus a surprisingly full local sports day.

It’s difficult to sum-

marize the events of what turned out to be a nearly 15-hour day at the newspaper, a day none of us who are old enough to remember will ever forget.

It’s hard to fathom there is a whole generation born since it happened.

I hope that generation and the generations to follow never have to experience what happened on that Tuesday 20 years ago.

But life teaches us tragedy is always lurking. All we can do is be prepared as best we can.

Government,

Continued from Page 2C After the attacks, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began issuing many millions in grants to police and fire departments around the country to help bolster their equipment, technology, and training.

Alpena Fire Chief Bill Forbush, who has been a firefighter for 40 years, said fire departments continue to receive money from FEMA

to upgrade their departments and provide the best training to handle most every emergency.

“Just this year, we purchased a new, $50,000 air-compressor,” he said.

“We have needed one for many years, and the grant allowed us to replace it.

The FEMA grants we still receive today are directly tied to 9/11.”

Forbush said the grant nearly covered the entire cost of the new equipment that would have been a blow to the budget if the city had to pay for it in its entirety.

Steve Schulwitz can be reached at 989-358-5689 at sschulwitz@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ss_alpenanews. com.

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