To call this place sobering would be an understatement.
To see this area in person brings back the events of that morning — and the months (years) that followed— in an incredibly sensory way. I remember Klink hung his gigantic American flag over the entire front porch so you couldn’t even see our house anymore (it was a Perkins flag;), and another to hang in the center of the salon. It’s unfathomable to think of what happened here. Or, rather, the minutes before what happened here.
The monument was designed to show the last minutes of flight 93 before it incinerated at the crash site. For such a difficult project, it’s beautifully done. I spent about 2 hours here and rarely heard another person speak.
The walkway into the memorial is the documentation of the last seconds of the flight path. You can see 9:37:46 stamped in the granite on the walkway. There are several of these as you walk towards the end of the path.
9:37:54
9:38:01
The black observation point is the end of the top part of the memorial and the last documentation of the flight path. In the video you can see the top memorial which is the trajectory and the crash site memorial. It takes several minutes to understand that you are actually walking the last few seconds of the flight.
Carved in the white granite wall at the base are the names of the 33 passengers and 7 crew members that were killed.
In the video you can see a large boulder was placed at the impact point. The partition/wall was placed at the boundary of the crash site and only family members are allowed on the other side.
As it should be.
At the bottom of the memorial there is an area where a tree was planted for each soul that was lost.
At the entrance to the memorial they constructed The Tower of Voices. A 93 ft tall monument of wind chimes. One chime for each voice that was lost that day. Still a work in progress and not fully functioning, I will come back some day when it is finished to hear the voices sing.
If you find yourself driving the PA turnpike, just north of Somerset, take a detour and go experience this place.
#neverforget911
