COBB COUNTY, Ga. — More than 1,000 people turned out at Truist Park for the Patriot Day Memorial Stair Climb Saturday to commemorate 25 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
That’s the largest turnout since the Atlanta Braves began hosting the stair climb five years ago.
This year, 234 firefighters from the United Kingdom and Ireland participated in the climb, including Taz Maguire from England.
“It’s a somber time for fire stations. We talk about it, the day comes and goes. We wanted to change that. We wanted to bring a piece of this remembrance back to the U.K.,” he told Channel 2’s Bryan Mims.
His group came because of its partnership with the Terry Farrell Firefighters Fund, which generates money to support first responders and their families. The stair climb is the largest fundraiser of the year for the organization, with tens of thousands of dollars expected to be tallied from this year’s event.
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Bronte Jones, also from England, said the 9/11 attacks are seared into the psyche of firefighters around the globe.
“Across the pond and worldwide, it was the biggest loss in the history of the fire service anywhere in the world,” she said. “It’s such a hard thing to put in words, what it means to be here to honor them.”
Robert Galione, a retired New York City firefighter, attended the stair climb. He responded to the disaster at the World Trade Center and figures he lost about 100 comrades and friends.
It lifts his spirits to see so many people climbing these steps to honor the heroism of that fateful day.
“This is unbelievable. You have a lot of people who are forgetting, but then you see this and you realize a lot of people aren’t,” he said.
Barnaby Long, a firefighter from England, said plans to visit Truist Park for the climb had been in the works for about two years.
“We wanted to prove solidarity between both countries,” he said. “This is an incident that has changed the world, the way we firefight across every country in the world, and to be here with as many firefighters as we can get, it’s just something that seemed a no-brainer to do.”
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