We all know where we were when it hap-pened. Most of us turned on our tele-

vision sets to watch unfold a day our nation will never forget.

There was panic and uncertainty as smoke and fire billowed out of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

Was it an accident? Was it a bomb?Thursday marks the seventh anni-

versary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.While millions of Americans con-

soled each other through empathetic tears, New York City’s emergency service workers, along with its citizens, took action.

Through utter chaos and blinding smoke, men and women of all walks of life came together that day to help.

One of those men was Tetonia resident Dell Cullum.

A volunteer NYC firefighter at the time, Cullum was in the city taking pictures for a story on high rise fires he was working on for a magazine.

He had just left the World Trade Center when the first plane hit.

“It was kind of confusing,” he recalled, of those first few moments after the impact.

Minutes later, the second plane hit the South Tower.

“That’s when we knew that it wasn’t an accident,” Cullum said.

The horror began to set in, and people began gathering around the two burning buildings, not thinking that either of them would fall.

“It was like a huge trap,” Cullum remem-bered. He wonders if maybe the attackers thought of that in their plans. Did they know that crowds of citizens would gather around?

Cullum said some of the most tragic events of that day occurred between the time when the second plane hit and the first tower collapsed.

“There were body parts,” he said. “People

were jumping. It was horrifying.”As Cullum saw more and more of

his firefighter buddies rushing to the disaster, he put his camera down and said, “I’m going to help.”

Cullum didn’t know it at the time, but another plane had just crashed into the west wall of the Pentagon; and passengers on yet another flight would soon manage to steer hijack-ers away from their target and cause their aircraft to crash into a field in Pennsylvania.

Cullum ran toward the twin towers and met a fellow firefighter who was bringing a bloodied woman covered in soot out of one of the buildings.

Cullum was going to go in and rescue anyone he could find, when his friend, Denis Germain told him to bring the woman to safety.

As he began walking the woman away from the tower, Cullum looked back and saw Germain head back in.

“It seemed like five minutes,” Cullum said. “But it could have been 30 seconds [later]” when the tower collapsed.

Rescuers never recovered Germain’s body. He is one of the 343 firefighters who lost their lives on that fateful day in which a total of 2,992 people were killed. His picture and

I n T e t o n V a l l e y B1 teton valley news - Sept. 11, 2008

SEE INSIDE

Boys, girls soccer take winsSEE PAGES B3, B5

Remembering Sept. 11, 2001Valley man tells his story of courage seven years later

By Lisa Nyren

The sun sets over the New York City skyline and the Empire State Building, right, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Gone from the famous view is the two towers of the World Trade Center, they were destroyed by a terrorist attack early that morning.

AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser

Smoke billows from one of the towers of the World Trade Center and flames as debris explodes from the second tower on Sept. 11, 2001. In one of the most horrifying attacks ever against the United States, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in a deadly series of blows that brought down the twin 110-story towers. This year will mark the seventh anniversary of the attacks.

AP Photo/Chao Soi Cheong

Photo courtesy of Dell Cullum

Tetonia resident and former New York City firefighter Dell Cullum stands in a dust-covered building at ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001. Papers that flew from the twin towers litter the ground.

Sept. 11 continued on B14

Page B14 - September 11, 2008 - Teton Valley News

a brief biography can be found in an alphabetical list of victims complied by the New York Times in a special section of its Web site, www.topics.nytimes.com under the subject head-ing, “Sept. 11, 2001.”

A thick black smoke rushed from the crumbling tower. “You couldn’t see a thing,” Cullum recalled.

Still with the injured woman, Cullum began lead-ing her away from the rubble. The force of the smoke coming down the block was incredible, he said. It was so powerful that it pushed him through the entrance of a Marriot hotel.

“I’ve never felt anything like that in my life,” he said.

The hotel’s windows shat-tered. “Then instinct took over.”

Cullum said he knew that his friends were out there in the midst of this, that people needed help.

“I lost all fear,” he said. “I went out just like everybody else.”

As the hours wore on, the panic, the frenzy, the screaming endured.

“It just didn’t let up,” he said. “It was constant. It smelled like death. You could barely see. It was like a war-zone.”

He said he could hear people cry-ing for help all over, and, most strik-ingly to Cullum, he could hear the

firefighters’ motion alarms going off. The alarms sound whenever a fire-fighter stops moving.

“It was just ringing everywhere.”For the next three months,

Cullum, who was a rescue instructor, worked to save anyone who was still alive.

He roped down into the wreck-age to find those who were trapped. He helped distribute food and water brought in by owners of area busi-nesses.

“You didn’t sleep,” he said. “One minute you’re helping [with the food] and the next minute you’re hauling out half of a body, all the time thinking ‘Is that my friend? I can’t even tell.’”

Cullum recalls the goodwill mes-sages that people began writing on the dust-caked windows and walls of build-ings. Others left messages that they were looking for lost loved ones.

The death tolls began to rise and

families planned services for those they lost.

“I went to day after day after day after day of funerals,” Cullum said. “I can’t tell you how many I went to.”

Cullum stayed until the week

before Christmas, when his com-mander told him to go, even though Germain had not been found. Cullum resigned that year from a 12-year career as a firefighter.

He then decided to travel the country and eventually found himself in Texas working on a ranch without the comforts of modern technology.

“I had nothing and I loved it,” he

said. But Cullum did have a computer and later got himself an Internet hook-up via satellite.

A little lonely, Cullum made him-self a profile on the online dating service Match.com. A Texas woman named Dee was the first to respond to his posting. “It was the luckiest day of my life,” Cullum said.

The two hit it off and they mar-ried.

“I figured she had to see this beau-tiful country,” Cullum said of Dee, who had rarely been out of Texas. So they packed up and hit the road and found Teton Valley about two years ago.

“We love the Valley,” Cullum said. “We’re here to stay.”

Cullum did return to ground zero a couple years after the attacks. “It was still a big hole in the ground,” he recalled.

“I could remember everything. It

was so surreal, the whole thing.”As a way to help out, Cullum,

who took hundreds of pictures of that fateful day and those that followed, donated his photographs to a gallery in New York City near the WTC site.

The gallery auctioned off the photos and donated all of the proceeds to a fund that benefits the families of fallen firefight-ers. Cullum’s photos are also credited in a book called “Here is New York.”

At the site of the WTC earlier this month, construc-tion workers began erecting the framework for a Sept. 11 memorial. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center is slated for completion by 2011, according to a report by the New York Times.

The memorial, called “Reflecting Absence” will fea-ture two vast voids where the foundations of the two WTC skyscrapers once stood. It will feature cascading waterfalls and

areas for contemplation and remem-brance. Victims’ names will be writ-ten around the two voids. Currently at Ground Zero, visitors can access the perimeter of the site. They can patronize The Tribute Center, which includes exhibits from Sept. 11, 2001 and the WTC bombing of 1993, and St. Paul’s Chapel, which served as a rest area for EMS workers.

Every year, when the Sept. 11 anniversary nears, Cullum talks about his experiences with Dee, and he keeps in touch with some firefighters back in New York.

“You want to keep the memory of those firefighters [who lost their lives] alive,” he said.

Even now, however, talking about that day in New York brings tears to Cullum’s eyes.

“I don’t think as the years go by it gets any easier,” he said.

Cullum’s dedication, love and respect for firefighters endures though he is not currently on the force.

“It really is such a bond,” he said. “I support them wholeheartedly in everything they do no matter where I am… I’ve never seen such teamwork and professionalism in an emergency service in my whole life.”

The firefighters in particular are one group of people Cullum hopes people don’t forget as Sept 11, 2001 settles into the pages of history books.

“Any way you can assist the fire department, through fundraisers, aux-illary,” he said, is what people should do. “Volunteership in fire service is so important.”

Cullum’s main message, however, is one of simplicity and honor.

When asked what he would like people to take away from his story, he replied, “They should never forget.”

THE FACTSSEPT. 11 TIME LINE:

8:46 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time) American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into WTC North Tower

9:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 flies into WTC South Tower

9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 hits the west wall of the Pentagon

9:58 a.m. South Tower collapses

10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Pennsylvania

10:28 a.m. North Tower collapses

TIME FROM IMPACT TO COLLAPSE:North Tower: 102 minutes

South Tower: 56 minutes

NUMBER OF DEAD:WTC: 2,759 (includes

hijackers and plane passengers and crew)

Pentagon: 125 (includes hijackers and plane passengers and crew)

Flight 93: 44 (includes 4 hijackers)

FIRST RESPONDERS KILLED AT WTC:NYPD: 23

FDNY: 343

Port Authority Police: 37

EMS: 3

Source: 9/11 Commission Report; New York Times

NOTABLE WEB SITES9-11commission.gov

topics.nytimes.com (Sept. 11, 2001)

national911memorial.org

nyc.gov/html/fdny

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Sept. 11 continued from B1

Flowers and messages scrawled in debris cover the ladder truck of Ladder Company 24 in New York Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001. Ladder Company 24 lost 7 firemen in the attack.

Photo courtesy of Dell Cullum

Dell Cullum stands in front of the rubble at ground zero in New York City.

Photo courtesy of Dell Cullum

New York City firefighters and workers watch as the remains of the World Trade Center’s twin towers are cleaned up.

AP Photo/Amy Sancetta