PEORIA, Ill. – Peoria Fire Chief Shawn Sollberger had been with the department just a few years when the September 11th attacks happened 25 years ago.
He tells WMBD’s “Greg and Dan Show”, as a firefighter that day, he wanted to be nowhere else but New York City.
“I think your natural instincts take over. Your training, your education, many people in that space…military police can have the same type of feelings. And, you know what they’re going through, so you have a little bit of an emotional swing, and all you want is to be there to help,” Sollberger says.
He says it takes a certain type of person to rush into danger, when everyone else is just trying to get out. But, that is exactly what first responders like those who died on September 11th are trained to do.
In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Sollberger says even towns the size of Peoria were forced to come up with emergency directives in dealing with such large scale attacks.
“I just remember the command staff giving a communication out to all of our firefighters…we’re basically all on alert, and all off-duty personnel needed to be available. The country’s scrambling, really trying to figure out exactly what’s going on,” Sollberger says.
At the time of the attacks on New York City, Washington, D.C., and Flight 93 going down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, we didn’t know if there would be more attacks.
Sollberger says first responders nationwide were on high alert. 441 firefighters, police and emergency personnel died in the line of duty responding to the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Many more have died over the years since then, due to poisons they inhaled while saving thousands of lives that day.
