Pennsylvania to cover cost for security at 9/11 site
Source: http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6124362
Pennsylvania to cover cost for security at 9/11 site
By Daniel Lovering The Associated Press
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated:06/13/2007 01:17:43 AM MDT
Pittsburgh - Pennsylvania will pay for security at the Flight 93 crash site to end a dispute over a donation box at the memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the governor said Tuesday.
Landowner Mike Svonavec said he installed the box to cover security costs at the site near Shanksville. But the cash box angered victims' families, and the National Park Service covered it with a black plastic bag.
Gov. Ed Rendell announced a $120,000 grant to pay for security at the site for two years, saying the victims' families should not have to raise the money themselves.
"It also eliminates any need for donation boxes, which transformed this hallowed ground into something less dignified," Rendell said in a news release.
The Park Service had sent a letter to Svonavec, who owns 273 acres of the site's 1,300 acres east of Pittsburgh, asking him to remove the box. Svonavec said last week that he had no intention of taking it down and that he has been paying $10,000 per month for security since February. Svonavec did not immediately respond to phone messages Tuesday.
The Park Service's superintendent of the temporary memorial, Joanne Hanley, and the vice president of Families of Flight 93, Patrick White, also did not immediately return calls.
United Airlines Flight 93 was en route from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco on Sept. 11, 2001, when four terrorists hijacked it. The plane crashed in the western Pennsylvania field as passengers apparently tried rushing the cockpit. All 33 passengers, seven crew members and the hijackers died.
A temporary memorial has been erected near the crash site, and a $58 million permanent memorial and national park are planned.
- Mekt_Ranzz's blog
- Login to post comments
I'm sure security guards, surveillance cameras, ID checks,
fences, gates, and floodlights are much "more diginified" things to have at a memorial site than a pathetic little donation box. WTF, so does that mean the donation plate they pass around in church is "undiginified"?
Let us not forget how the Park Service loves to erect gift shops, pave parking lots, build campgrounds, block roads with entrance gates and charge fees for everything from having the privilege to enter a public park to picking your nose on a sunday. Hell, that $58 million has to come somewhere, right?
How about the $40 BILLION that congress gave bush for "9/11 compensation" about two minutes after the buidings came down, before they even had time to take a dump? How about all those Red Cross donations? Maybe the sleazeball who scored the biggest jackpot in human history, Lucky Larry Scrooge McDuck Silverstein, could throw a six-pence from his $4 billion out to the relatives of those he conspired to murder.
No, of course not. The funding can't come from any of those sources. But by God, it can't come from a dinky little donation box, either!
I mean, that's just undigified.
"They took it from the top to the bottom, we're gonna take them from the bottom to the top." - Dan Wallace