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Mountain Home will mark 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks with a ceremony at 4 p.m. Monday at Veterans Plaza, where a piece of steel from the Twin Towers has stood for the last four years.
The guest speaker is John Ceriello, who retired last year as captain of FDNY Rescue 1 after 37 years with the department. Ceriello was a firefighter with Squad 18 in the West Village on Sept. 11, 2001.
“He responded to the towers and worked those events,” said Mountain Home firefighter Tommy Feliccia, who organized the ceremony.
The event is open to the public, and Feliccia said organizers invited state representatives and city officials.
Feliccia also organized the 20th anniversary ceremony in 2021, the one that first brought a piece of the towers to Baxter County.
That is the piece still standing at the plaza today. Feliccia worked with his uncle, retired FDNY Capt. Joseph Russo, to secure a 50-pound section of steel from the fire department, and Russo presented it to the city during the 2021 ceremony. The request started with a letter to the FDNY commissioner.
The steel sat for another eight months while the memorial was built around it. Bill and Jenn Wikoff of Concrete Living in Springfield, Illinois, built the monument free of charge from a sketch Feliccia drew. It was unveiled on Memorial Day 2022 during the North Central Arkansas Veterans Council’s annual commemoration.
The finished memorial suspends the steel between two 6-foot concrete pillars shaped like the towers. “Never Forget” is cut into the base. A silhouette of the Pentagon and the number 93 mark the other two attack sites.
Etched into one of the towers is a small memorial to Vincent “Vinny” Feliccia, a New York City firefighter and Russo’s brother-in-law. A matching dedication honors Russo’s role in bringing the steel south.
“This memorial is the only one in North Central Arkansas,” Feliccia said when he dedicated it in 2022.
After the speeches end, around 6 p.m., every fire department, police department, EMS crew and dispatcher in Baxter County is invited to the Mountain Home Community Center for a meal. Feliccia raised the money through local sponsorships, the same way he did for the dinner in 2021.
“Just like five years ago, we brought everybody under one roof,” he said. “That’s just for those departments and their families.”
He said that first gathering did more than feed people. “That worked out really good. It kind of strengthened bonds,” Feliccia said. “We don’t get to see each other very much other than like when you need us.”
Ceriello stays an extra day to teach. On Tuesday, Sept. 8, he will lead an eight-hour class called Evidence Based Fire Operations at the Sheid at ASUMH, hosted by IAFF Local 4496.
“It’s a free class,” Feliccia said. He said firefighters are traveling in from around the state, from Springdale to Jonesboro to Little Rock.
The lecture covers the Fire Safety Research Institute material and how the International Association of Fire Fighters adopted it, along with wind-impacted fires in high-rise and low-rise buildings, basement fires, engine operations and ladder company search.
That subject is Ceriello’s life’s work. He spent years on the FDNY’s Wind Impacted Fires Project, research that put stairwell pressurization, wind control devices and high-rise nozzles into the hands of working firefighters. No New York firefighter has been killed in a wind-driven fire since 2010.
Ceriello joined the FDNY in February 1988 and came up through Engine 225, Squad 18 and Squad 252 before making captain in 2016. He took over Rescue 1, one of the department’s five elite rescue companies, in 2020. He also served on New York Task Force One, the FEMA urban search and rescue team that deploys nationally.
He has said publicly that setting 9/11 aside, he has seen 48 line-of-duty deaths in his career.
Ceriello flies out the morning of Sept. 9. He wants to be back in New York City for the 25th anniversary itself.
Mountain Home will hold its own observance that morning. “We’ll be doing the stair climb on the 11th again, like I do every year,” Feliccia said.
The climb starts at Bomber Stadium at 8:46 a.m. Friday, Sept. 11, the minute the first plane struck the North Tower. Local firefighters climb the bleacher stairs to match the 110 floors of the towers.
Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. Of those, 2,606 were killed at the World Trade Center, 125 at the Pentagon and 256 aboard the four hijacked planes. Three hundred forty-three firefighters and 72 police officers died in New York.
More have died since from what they breathed at the site.
Russo described that ground when he spoke in Mountain Home in 2021, before there was a memorial to speak in front of.
“I had driven out of these streets earlier in the day, and everything looked normal,” he said. “What I now observed was a moonscape of twisted steel, pulverized concrete, smoke, dust, and the smell of burning fuel.”
To RSVP for the Sept. 8 class, call 870-425-2611 or email [email protected].
