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Craig Schafer remembers the ‘powerful’ dedication of responders after 9/11 attacks

Photo by Deb Gau The idea to build a 9/11 memorial in Marshall came out of a trip Craig Schafer took to observe recovery efforts at the World Trade Center after the terror attacks of 2001. Schafer said the dedication of the people who went through the ruins of the Twin Towers was something that’s stuck with him for the past 20 years.

MARSHALL — The impact of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was felt across the country. But one of the things Craig Schafer said has stuck with him over the past 20 years was how people came together to help each other in the aftermath.

“They moved forward, not backward,” Schafer said of the responders who spent months carefully sifting through the ruins of the World Trade Center towers in New York. “That drive that was bigger than them, that’s powerful.”

In 2002, Schafer had a unique chance to see the 9/11 recovery efforts in New York, through his job as an emergency response specialist for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Schafer, who is now a Marshall City Council member, said the trip left a lasting impression on him. It also helped spark the effort to build the 9/11 Memorial in Marshall’s downtown.

After 9/11, one of the questions state agencies had was whether Minnesota would be ready for a disaster like a terrorist attack, Schafer said. “I pushed to try to contact our counterparts out east,” he said. Together with work colleagues, Schafer made a couple of visits to New York, first in December 2001 and then in July 2002.

On the first trip, they were only able to see outside the perimeter of Ground Zero, Schafer said. But in walking around the area around the World Trade Center, they saw everything from city workers trying to restore utilities, to the memorials and fliers for missing people posted at places like fire stations, and the fence outside St. Paul’s Chapel near Ground Zero.

When they came back in July, the MPCA staff were able to meet with representatives from the city of New York. They were given a chance to see how responders were screening rubble from the World Trade Center, searching for human remains or belongings to return to victims’ families.

“They would take everything out of Ground Zero,” and load the debris on barges, Schafer said. “And they moved everything from Ground Zero to Staten Island.”

At a landfill in Staten Island, responders raked through the debris, and then put it on conveyor belts for screening.

“They looked at everything down to a quarter-inch (in size),” Schafer said. At the time he visited the site, there were only two screening lines running. Earlier in the recovery process, there would be 10 or more lines of people working, Schafer said. “They worked day and night for nine-and-a-half months.”

When Schafer was observing the recovery efforts at Staten Island, he only saw three times when human remains or personal belongings were found. Workers recovered a small fragment of a skull, a security guard’s handgun, and a man’s driver’s license, he said. If human remains were found, they would go to be DNA tested, to try and identify them.

“They had that much respect for the individual remains,” Schafer said. It was something that stuck with him from observing and talking with responders, he said.

Bringing back a beam

During the visit to Staten Island, Schafer also saw “a number of beams and other remnants” of the Twin Towers set aside, for possible use in monuments. It sparked an idea.

“I never expected to bring anything back,” Schafer said. But he ended up talking with Marshall city officials, including then-Fire Chief Marc Klaith, about creating a local 9/11 memorial.

“Looking back, there was no hesitation in my mind we wanted to do that,” Klaith said. A memorial would be a way to show respect for emergency responders, especially those who lost their lives on 9/11. “We care about those people, no matter where they are,” he said.

On Labor Day 2002, Schafer and a colleaguedrove back to New York to pick up a section of beam from the Twin Towers. On the journey back to Marshall, they made a stop near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at the site where United Flight 93 crashed on 9/11. “Every place we went, people would ask about the story of the beam,” Schafer said.

It would end up taking 10 years, and support and collaboration from the city of Marshall and the community, to complete the 9/11 Memorial at the corner of Main Street and East College Drive.

“I couldn’t be prouder of it, or of the city of Marshall,” Klaith said. He said the community’s response shows how much it embraces people who protect others, from law enforcement, firefighters and first responders to members of the military.

Over the years, people have come from across Minnesota and other states to visit the beam and reflect. “It’s just peaceful there,” Klaith said.

20 years of change

The two decades after the Sept. 11 attacks brought many changes, including the U.S. going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Area residents were among the military service members deployed overseas, including members of the Army National Guard unit in Marshall. Community members also mourned the deaths of area soldiers including 1st Lt. Jason Timmerman, who was killed in Iraq in 2005, and Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Kahler, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2008.

Schafer had family members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, including his son Tyler, who was deployed in Iraq in 2005-06, and later went back as a security contractor. Schafer’s nephew served in Afghanistan in 2004-05, and his grandson has also served tours in east Africa and Afghanistan. The emotions in having a loved one serving in war are complex, Schafer said — there’s pride as well as pain.

Community members, and especially military families, helped each other through Marshall area deployments. “There’s a real network of support” among military families, Schafer said.

Schafer said he thought the anniversary of 9/11, and the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, might bring up mixed feelings, especially for people who have lost loved ones or who have lasting injuries. But it’s also important to remember American soldiers made positive impacts over the past two decades, he said.

“They did change the lives of a 20-year generation in Afghanistan,” he said.

All these years after 9/11, it’s also important that people remember not just the horror of the attacks, but the ways people reached out to help and serve others. In thinking about the responders who stepped up during and after 9/11, “The strong thing that struck me was their love for people they didn’t know,” and their dedication to something bigger than themselves, he said. “They went back every day.”

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