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Oldsmar Remembers Solemn Date

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By Vivienne Green | The Suncoast News

Published: September 15, 2007

OLDSMAR, Fla. - The sun shone with peculiar brightness on a reverent crowd gathered around the 9-11 memorial at Oldsmar Fire Rescue Tuesday.

It was the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks.

A pastor said a prayer. Then for a few silent minutes, city leaders and citizens stood focused on a distant memory.

"We shall never forget the energy, compassion of our police officers and firefighters as they rushed into the building to save lives at the expense of their own," Mayor Jim Ronecker stressed earlier on in the remembrance ceremony at the station on Pine Avenue North.

Before he spoke, Fire Chief Scott McGuff promised the station would never stop hosting a tribute to the 9-11 victims. His concern was "these ceremonies are becoming fewer and farther between."

But, he could take heart at Tuesday's crowd. It was slightly bigger than last year's, with close to 200 hundred residents from Oldsmar, Safety Harbor, Palm Harbor and neighboring cities attending.

Among them were two 9-11 survivors: Patricia Fierro of St. Petersburg and Anne Koster of Palm Harbor.

In separate interviews, they shared their 9/11 stories.

Both had been inside the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in southern Manhattan when it was hit six years ago.

Fierro was getting ready to enter an elevator going up to the 88th floor. The North Tower, also known as 1 World Trade Center, was the initial target of the 9/11 terrorist hijackers.

Before she could enter the elevator, "the door closed me out," Fierro said. Seconds later she was thrown to the floor by the huge impact of the commandeered American Airlines 767 slamming into the building between its 92 and 98th floors. Fierro scrambled underneath a table for refuge and was soon afterwards assisted down the stairwell and out the building.

"If I hadn't missed the elevator I would have died," she recalled.

Koster was on the 81st floor of the 110-floor skyscraper at the time the jetliner struck.

"I called my husband and started going downstairs with co-workers," she said. Before reaching the ground floor, a friend asked if they could both stop and rest for awhile. Her friend sat on the steps of the stairwell, but Koster refused.

She kept on going and made it out seconds before the tower fell. Her friend did not make it out in time. She lost 15 friends that day.

One thing that still lingers in Koster's mind is the overwhelming sense of community as the nation mourned together six years ago.

She shares the fire chief's concern: "After it happened, for years there was a remembrance ceremony at every firehouse. Now where are they?"

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