Bakersfield Fire Capt. Nicholas Kahanic held his 5-month-old son, Krew Kahanic, against his chest as he stood beneath the Sept. 11 memorial at Fire Station 15 in southwest Bakersfield on Monday.
Hundreds attended the ceremony there to honor and remember the nearly 3,000 civilians and first-responders who died as a result of the multiple terrorist attacks on American soil that occurred exactly 22 years ago that day.
Kahanic was attending Tevis Junior High in Bakersfield when the attacks occurred all those years ago, the fireman remembered.
As a youngster, he said, he didn’t fully grasp the magnitude and the ramifications of that shocking day.
But now, as a 12-year veteran of the Bakersfield Fire Department, he has visited ground zero with his colleagues. He knows the New York Fire Department lost more firefighters that day than all the men and women who make up the BFD.
“After you see the site, it’s mind-blowing,” he said. “I couldn’t even put into words what we saw and what we were able to learn about everything, about the firefighters that passed away.”
Monday’s event got underway at exactly 8:46 a.m., the same moment the hijackers directed the first airliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bakersfield City Fire Chief John Frando welcomed and thanked everyone who attended Monday’s ceremony to remember those whose lives were lost, including 400 first-responders, “police officers, EMTs, paramedics and 343 firefighters.
“To say that the events that unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001 were a tragedy would be quite the understatement,” he said. “The events prove that even a superpower may be vulnerable to a senseless attack.
“But the events also proved to be a catalyst in uniting the nation and its people,” he reminded the gathering.
As a Bakersfield Fire Department bagpipe and drum corps performed “America the Beautiful,” with Kahanic on pipes, an honor guard raised the colors to the top of the flagpoles.
Then, as Nikolette Weringer sang the national anthem, the flags were lowered to half-staff in honor of those who died.
Meanwhile, close to 100 sixth-graders from nearby Ronald Reagan Elementary sat spellbound as Monday’s event unfolded.
Sixth-grade teacher Jennifer Eggers said the event was a unique opportunity for the children to come away with a better understanding of the historical significance of 9/11.
“These kids were born in 2011 or 2012,” Eggers said. “It’s important that we teach these up and coming generations why we’re here. And why we have to be here.”
One of those sixth-graders, 12-year-old Colton Walker, said he felt more connected to and more knowledgeable about Sept. 11 after being part of Monday’s ceremony.
“I learned to, like, respect the people that went in and gave their lives, pretty much to protect everybody that was stuck in there and needed help to get out,” he said. “To bring them out through the fire and smoke.”
His family has probably driven past the 9/11 memorial hundreds of times,” Colton said, but until Monday, he didn’t know much about it.
But after listening to Chief Frando, many of those present surely left with new knowledge of the local memorial.
“There’s not a more appropriate site here in Bakersfield to remember the victims and the lives lost and the heroism from that day,” Frando said. “There’s not a better location in Bakersfield to do that.
“Behind me,” Frando continued, “is a girder from the parking structure beneath the north tower. The pentagon-shaped concrete slab is symbolic of the Pentagon, where 200 lives were lost.”
It was also a location to which Kern County and Bakersfield firefighters responded within hours of the attack to aid in the rescue and recovery effort.
“The round concrete slab is representative of the crash site of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania,” Frando told the audience of adults and children.
Attendees heard Frando’s words. And time and again, they heard, “We must never forget.”
Twenty-two years later, it doesn’t appear we have.
