It’s 2001 and 16-year-old Charles Hakopian gets ready for school like any other day. He grabs a donut, picks up his girlfriend and heads to high school.
“I’m standing in the room, got the TV on, it cuts out, I see the footage and I’m just in shock,” Hakopian said. What he saw was the South Tower of the World Trade Center getting hit on the news.
Hakopian, now the Long Beach Fire Department (LBFD) captain for Fire Station 1, shared personal memories with attendees at the city’s first-ever 9/11 memorial stair climb Saturday morning. He reminisced on old photos of him wearing firefighter helmets and mentioned how, as a kid, he always had a curiosity about being a firefighter.
That day, September 11, 2001, he remembers as the driving force for him to become a firefighter.
Hakopian began reading books, seeing footage and watching videos of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) responding to the attacks and became inspired to join the profession.
“I started asking myself the question: ‘Why would they do that?’ And learning about that, that completely threw me into becoming a fireman,” he said. “From 9/11 on, that was just my drive and my passion.”
Hakopian, LBFD firefighter Phil Hanlen, and close to 100 attendees came together Saturday at the Long Beach World Trade Center to honor the 343 firefighters and 2,977 victims who lost their lives to the 9/11 attacks.
Hanlen, Hakopian and a few other firefighters visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York back in June.
“Going to the museum, hearing the stories, seeing the faces … and then some of these stories are coming from family members, from their kids, so it’s really hard, having kids [and] a wife,” Hakopian said as his voice quivered with emotion. He also described going through five New York City firehouses and hearing stories from the first responders who were there on 9/11, as well as family members who lost loved ones that day.
The idea of a stair climb came almost two decades ago when both Hakopian and Hanlen joined the department.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary and educate people who don’t have a living memory of 9/11, Hakopian and Hanlen decided to host the stair climb this year
“We wanted to tell stories; we wanted for it to be a heavy moment. I think that trip really exposed us to raw things about that day. It’s not just kind of brushing over some of the things, but actually watching it again,” Hakopian said.
The open-air event had photo posters plastered on the outer walls, along with memorandums, facts for the audience to read and videos of the 9/11 attacks.
Each attendee who signed up to climb the 22 stories had the name and photo of a firefighter who perished while responding to the attack clipped on their shirt as they pushed through each floor. The cards were supplied by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, one of the event’s two charitable beneficiaries alongside the FDNY Fire Family Transport Foundation.
Hakopian said these photos were meant to honor the fallen first responders, as well as motivate those climbing the flights of stairs should they get tired along the way.
“What you get from that is the motivation [that] they never stopped; they kept going,” Hanlen said. “When you think about these guys climbing up the Twin Towers, the biggest buildings you could possibly climb in the worst conditions, it gives you that boost of energy.”
Hanlen said the resilience the FDNY had as the attack unfolded set the standard for firefighters, due to the impossible nature of the situation.
“It’s like, ‘Well, we might not be able to do anything for them when we get there. But we definitely can’t do anything for them down here, so we climb and so we go.’ And you can hear from the radio traffic that they are starting to get some water [on the fire], those sons of guns made it up there and started fighting the fire,” he said.
The LBFD captain stressed the importance of commemorating 9/11 every year to learn from the past.
“We have to learn from the past to go forward and the future … we have to learn about these things so that [they] can mold us and that could shape us to be better human beings for one another,” Hakopian said.
