25 years later, I remember

September 11, 2026

by Tania French © Port Lavaca Wave 2026

Twenty-five years.

It seems impossible that so much time has passed.

But I remember.

I remember exactly where I was when the first reports came in on Sept. 11, 2001. I was in the newsroom at the Port Lavaca Wave, and that week’s newspaper was ready to go to press.

Then everything changed.

We turned on the television in the breakroom and gathered around it, trying to understand what we were seeing. We watched in disbelief, with tears in our eyes, as the second tower fell.

There are moments in life when you know, even as they are happening, that the world will never be quite the same again.

That was one of them.

Eventually, the shock gave way to something we knew how to do. We went to work.

The newspaper that had been ready to go to press suddenly wasn’t.

Ironically, we had already been looking back at history that week. Sept. 11, 2001, marked the 40th anniversary of Hurricane Carla, and we had prepared a special section remembering the storm that had forever changed our own community. But before that Tuesday morning was over, we knew we were witnessing another moment that would forever divide time into before and after.

We began tearing the paper apart. Everyone took a piece. We gathered whatever information we could find. We made phone calls — lots of them — including calls to people across the country trying to understand what was happening and what it meant for people here at home.

The front page says Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2001. But that newspaper was printed Tuesday and was in the racks that afternoon. Because of that timing — and because we had our own press — we were among the first newspapers in the country to have the story in print.

Somehow, we got that newspaper to press. Twenty-five years later, I’m still not entirely sure how.

I remember something else from those days, too.

Just the day before, I had driven a friend to the airport in Houston for her first-ever flight. Suddenly, something so ordinary seemed anything but. I wondered how she would get home a week later. I wondered whether she would even be willing to get on another airplane.

For days afterward, the tragedy haunted us. The images played over and over. The stories kept coming. The number of lives lost became almost impossible to comprehend.

And from Port Lavaca, Texas, we felt helpless.

There was nothing we could do to change what had happened in New York, at the Pentagon or aboard Flight 93 in Pennsylvania.

But there was something we could do.

We could remember.

For the past several years, the Port Lavaca Volunteer Fire Department has made sure our community does exactly that by organizing the Calhoun County Memorial Stair Climb.

This Sunday, Sept. 13, our local first responders and members of the community will once again gather at Sandcrab Stadium. Together, they will walk and climb the equivalent of the 110 stories of the World Trade Center in honor of the 343 members of the New York City Fire Department who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001.

The climb begins at 9 a.m. Everyone is welcome.

Twenty-five years means there is now an entire generation that has no memory of that Tuesday morning. They know Sept. 11 from history books, photographs, videos and the stories the rest of us tell.

That makes telling those stories even more important.

I hope I never forget that newsroom.

I hope I never forget all of us standing around that television.

I hope I never forget the feeling of watching something unimaginable unfold and then sitting down at our desks because there was a newspaper to put out and a community that needed to know what had happened.

And I hope we never forget the firefighters, police officers, first responders, ordinary citizens and thousands of others who went to work that morning and never came home.

Twenty-five years later, I remember.

And Calhoun County remembers, too.