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Coatesville remembers its 9/11 connection

Peter Miller had just finished his morning cup of coffee on Sept. 11, 2001, and was reading e-mail when he heard a sound like a plane taking off outside his north-facing office on the 65th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Coatesville Remembers, a ceremony held at The National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum honoring the 13th anniversary of 9/11, gets underway Sept. 11, 2014 with two tridents, or "trees" as they were termed when they were made at the old Lukens Steel plant back in the 1960s, flanking the participants.  ( CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer )
Coatesville Remembers, a ceremony held at The National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum honoring the 13th anniversary of 9/11, gets underway Sept. 11, 2014 with two tridents, or "trees" as they were termed when they were made at the old Lukens Steel plant back in the 1960s, flanking the participants. ( CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer )Read more

Peter Miller had just finished his morning cup of coffee on Sept. 11, 2001, and was reading e-mail when he heard a sound like a plane taking off outside his north-facing office on the 65th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

"I felt the floor drop, and I froze," said Miller, who worked for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, to a crowd of about 150 people Thursday morning. "I'm primarily here because I survived 13 years ago."

Miller was the keynote speaker at the fifth annual "Coatesville Remembers 9/11" ceremony that was held outside the buildings of the former Lukens Steel Company. It was there in the late 1960s that workers made the steel for 152 of the tridents used to build the World Trade Center.

The tridents, which framed the outside of the lobby and first nine floors of the buildings, were still standing when the smoke cleared at the site of the two towers, a powerful symbol in the aftermath of the attacks.

Miller called them "the survivors of the collapses" and a "wonderful symbol."

As a former senior manager of the World Trade Center Archives, Miller was instrumental in transferring 10 steel tridents from a hangar full of 2,000 artifacts at John F. Kennedy International Airport back to Coatesville in 2010.

The tridents are in the care of the nonprofit Graystone Society's National Iron and Steel Heritage Museum, which is in the old Lukens Steel executive office building and hosts the yearly remembrance ceremony. The museum is the trustee of the largest collection of World Trade Center steel artifacts.

Miller and the ceremony's other speakers stood next to a trident that has been erected as part of a memorial to honor workers killed in the steel industry in Coatesville. It was part of the northeast corner of Miller's former office building.

On that Sept. 11, when the north tower stopped vibrating, Miller and some of his coworkers trekked down flight after flight of stairs, passing firefighters who were on their way up.

"It just seemed incredibly -," Miller said, pausing as he struggled to find the words. "Brave and hopeless, what they had ahead of them."

Six of Miller's coworkers on the floor below his decided to stay to communicate with the rest of the Port Authority. They and 80 other Port Authority employees died that day, Miller said.

Miller helped develop the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York, which opened to the general public in May. He also helped start the World Trade Center Survivors' Network.

"We tried to get our lives back together after a traumatic experience," said Miller, who still lives in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Under mostly cloudy skies at Thursday's event, Miller and other speakers, including State Sen. Andy Dinniman (D., Chester) and State Rep. Tim Hennessey (R., Chester), recalled where they were at the time of the attacks and the beautiful sunshine of that day.

Throughout the 21/2-hour ceremony, members of the Coatesville Girl Scouts rang bells and asked for a moment of silence to mark significant events of that day - the plane crashes into the towers, the Pentagon and onto a field in Shanksville, Pa., and the collapse of the buildings.

Members of the Lukens Band and the Coatesville High School choir provided music for the ceremony.

Students from South Brandywine Middle School in the Coatesville school district created essays and artwork with the theme: "Making the World a More Tolerant Place."

Out of the three grades in the middle school, only one-third of the eighth graders had been born as of Sept. 11, 2001.

"If everyone had more tolerance, things like 9/11 wouldn't happen," said 11-year-old Mariska Perdick, as she showed off the picture she drew of the towers to the crowd.

Scott Huston, president of the National Iron and Steel Heritage Museum, read the names of five men who lived or went to school in Chester County who died on Sept. 11: Christopher Clarke, Michael R. Horrocks, Kevin D. Marlo, George Eric Smith, and Richard Stewart.

Ryan Costello, one of Chester County's three commissioners, said he wanted to share one main message from the tragedy of that day.

"As much as we may disagree about things in this country," he said, "there is a lot more that unites us than divides us as Americans."