The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
September 11 was once an innocent enough date, just one of the many squares on the calendar holding no special significance. Now it's hard to imagine ever thinking about this day without recalling the unspeakable horror of September 11, 2001. Today, of course, is the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in the United States, acts of malevolence that stole the lives of close to 3,000 people. Although far removed from the tragic events of that horrible day, a number of local residents were eager to do whatever they could to help the victims and their families in the weeks following the tragedy. In the two days after 9/11/01, about 10 people stopped by the Flin Flon General Hospital hoping to donate blood for the relief efforts. To their disappointment, they had to be turned away because the hospital was not equipped to accept blood. One of the residents who left the hospital disappointed was Shirley Siemens. "I just want to do something to help those poor people," she told The Reminder on the day of the attacks. "Seeing as how we are so far away from the incident, I feel like driving down to the U.S. border and saying, 'Put me where you want me to help out.'" A number of other people in rural areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan were also unable to donate blood at their local hospitals, and some of them traveled to Brandon, Saskatoon or Prince Albert to do so. Local residents also helped by way of faith, as the St. Peter and St. James Anglican Church held regular prayer services in the weeks after the attacks. Meanwhile, local emergency service workers remembered their fallen counterparts with a memorial service attended by hundreds of residents at the R.H. Channing Auditorium. Mayor Dennis Ballard and his Council expressed their condolences to the victims and families at their first meeting after the attacks, held on September 18. Local residents, and indeed the rest of the world, continue to remember the victims of 9/11/01, which so often has been referred to as a day that changed the world. Former Flin Flonner Cheryl Redmond (Stephansson), now a Pittsburgh resident, chose her own special way to honour the men and women who perished. The avid quilter stitched together five memorial quilts honouring the victims. See 'World' P.# Con't from P.# Her first quilt, which spent time on display in Washington's famed Smithsonian Institute, featured the names of all of the known victims of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. The second was dedicated to the memory of the people who died in the hijacked plane that crashed in rural Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. Redmond's third quilt honoured those who lost their lives in the attack on the Pentagon in Washington. The fourth quilt was stitched together in memory of the firefighters who lost their lives that day, while the fifth paid tribute to the deceased police officers. Each quilt features a complete list of victims, as well as photos, of each incident. Redmond transferred the names and images onto the quilts.
