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FeedWesterville and the 9/11 beam
In May 2009, Westerville firefighter Tom Ullom traveled to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland, where a cemetery of beams from the collapsed World Trade Center towers awaited.
“You had to walk on some to get to the other pieces,” says Westerville Mayor Kathy Cocuzzi, who joined Ullom and then parks development coordinator Michael Hooper on the trip. “I got that feeling you get when you’re walking on someone else’s grave, wanting to be respectful.”
Looking for an artifact from 9/11 to place in a proposed memorial park to firefighters, the group chose a beam that had spanned the 98th to 101st floors on the first tower attacked—directly above where the plane struck. It was battered, unrecognizable and twisted nearly inside out: a fitting metaphor for what happened to the country that day.
Ullom had been hoping for this trip since 2002, when he started to make phone calls “once a month or more” to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A physical tribute to first responders from a day when they were needed most, Ullom says, seemed like a necessary addition to his plan to create a memorial for his friend Dave Theisen, a Westerville firefighter who died during a blaze in Crooksville in 1998.
On June 26, the city will hold a dedication of the Westerville Fire Fighters’ Memorial and First Responders Park. Besides a monument for Theisen (to be added later this year), the park will display the storied steel that made its way to Central Ohio thanks to Ullom’s perseverance and one surprising Westerville connection.
After choosing the 18-foot beam they wanted, red tape ensued. The steel was used in the NY Port Authority investigation of the attacks and its release needed to be approved by a federal judge. They also almost lost the piece to the museum at Ground Zero, which was considering using it for a display.
And there was the issue of transporting the two-and-a-half ton object. Ullom searched for a crane operator in Maryland to lift the piece onto a truck.
“I called a guy and he wasn’t really interested until he asked where I was taking the steel,” Ullom says. “He said, ‘Oh, are you taking it to Washington or New York City?’ and when I told him, he said, ‘You gotta be kidding me . . . I will do it for nothing.”
The guy on the other line, Josh Van Dyke, grew up in Westerville.
Ullom says community and high school connections opened other doors in providing funding, engineering design, transportation and even temporary housing for the steel. Residents got a first glimpse of the beam last Sept. 11 when it was featured during a Westerville parade.
“It’s been a long journey for that steel,” Cocuzzi says. “It’s going to have a permanent home here so we never forget, and it’s going to be a great educational piece for future generations.”
