Las Vegas fire station’s 9/11 ceremony has prayer, ‘tolling of the bells’
As uniformed first responders stood silently Saturday morning, Carolann Roberts walked up and touched a piece of the World Trade Center displayed at Las Vegas Fire Station Five and began to pray.
County and state officials were minutes from the 6:45 a.m. start of the Las Vegas Fire Department’s remembrance ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but no one made a sound as Roberts closed her eyes, clutching her Bible in the hand not touching the piece of metal.
She left the fire station quickly and exchanged words with few people, but in those brief moments, she set the mood for a somber anniversary.
“There’s a lot of people talking about it, but nobody’s praying about it,” Roberts told a Review-Journal reporter in a brief conversation.
The ceremony at 1020 Hinson St. started shortly before the time of the south tower’s collapse at 6:59 a.m. PST. Fire Department spokesman Tim Szymanski began with the “tolling of the bells,” a tradition he has carried out every year since the attacks to honor the firefighters who were killed.
“Every year it gets more and more powerful,” said Frank Pizarro, a retired New York City firefighter and Las Vegas resident who sang the national anthem Saturday morning.
The tradition stems from the time before radio communication, when alarm boxes on street corners acted as fire alarms. When someone pulled the alarm in the box, it would trigger bells in fire stations to alert firefighters where to go.
If a firefighter was killed in the line of duty, dispatchers would ring the bell three times in sets of five, which Szymanski did for the hushed crowd of about 100 on Saturday.
The crowd, which included Gov. Steve Sisolak and Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo next to each other, stood still for a 10-second moment of silence. Then Pizarro started to sing.
It’s getting harder for the 53-year-old to sing because of lung disease and cysts in his sinuses, caused from the dust and industrial debris at ground zero, Pizarro said.
Pizarro wasn’t working when the attack happened. But like so many other first responders, he rushed to his fire station and spent the next several days assisting with recovery efforts. The injuries from that day caused him to leave his job with the New York City Fire Department in April 2017, he said.
The anniversary felt more powerful this year, Pizarro said. It may have been two decades, but he remembers the attack as if it happened yesterday.
“It took everything in me not to fall apart singing that national anthem,” he told reporters after the ceremony.
Szymanski said each 9/11 anniversary has felt as significant as Saturday’s ceremony. Those few days after 9/11 were some of the hardest of his career, when no one knew if more attacks were to come or where they would strike.
“I don’t think the people that are young realize the significance of it,” he said.
Also at the fire station is a seedling from the Survivor Tree, which was recovered from the site of the 9/11 attacks and later nursed to health. In 2013, a seedling distribution program was launched to share the symbols of resilience and hope, and Las Vegas was selected to receive two of the seedlings after the Route 91 Harvest festival massacre, which occurred on Oct. 1, 2017.
The seedling at the fire station was planted about two weeks ago, and the second seedling was planted at Police Memorial Park following another 9/11 remembrance ceremony later Saturday.
“These trees will help us never forget all those police officers and firefighters and fellow countrymen we lost on that terrible day,” Las Vegas Councilman Stavros Anthony told the crowd of about 200 at the park.
Remarks from Lombardo, Fiore
The event was organized by the city of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Ten-13 Club, made up of retired New York City police officers. Some officials who spoke on Saturday during the event called for increased support for police officers.
Councilwoman Michele Fiore denounced “defund the police” movements and compared protesters in Las Vegas last summer to “terrorists.” Many of the protests in summer 2020, which happened after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, were held by Black Lives Matter protesters.
“Never forget 9/11, always remember ‘united we stand,’ and never let a terrorist organization like we had here bully our police officers,” Fiore told the crowd.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, who is running for governor as a Republican, commended those who responded to 9/11 for “running towards danger, versus away from danger.”
“I want to thank each and every one of you out here, with that acknowledgement, because you understand the sacrifice that takes place, unlike a significant number of people in the United States today,” Lombardo said. “They make a habit of bad-mouthing the police, bad-mouthing first responders.”
Officials on Saturday also released dozens of yellow and blue balloons, each with the photo and name of a police officer who died during the attacks.
Christopher Kelly, a former New York City Police Department officer who responded to 9/11, would have normally spent the anniversary attending a memorial for his cousin, a firefighter who was killed in the attack. But on Saturday, he went to Police Memorial Park alone, and was happy to see the large turnout.
“It’s normally a day that I try and sleep through,” Kelly said.
Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter. Review-Journal photographer Ellen Schmidt contributed to this report.
