By admin 
SCOTTSDALE, AZ (AZFamily) — A 21-foot steel beam from the World Trade Center’s South Tower will be on display in Scottsdale on Wednesday as part of the Tunnels to Towers Steel Across America Tour.
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The beam weighs nearly 17,000 pounds and will be displayed at the USS Arizona Memorial Gardens at Salt River. The tour honors and remembers the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, which mark 25 years this year.
Brad Blakeman, a board member of Tunnels to Towers and former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, said the foundation’s mission is grounded on remembrance and never forgetting the heroes of 9/11.
“Our board decided that we needed to do something important, especially for those who weren’t even born at this time,” Blakeman said.
The beam will make two stops in Arizona. It will be at the Hall of Flame Museum from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. An evening event will be held on Pima-Maricopa Indian lands from 7 to 9 p.m. The evening event will be the tour’s only Indigenous event and will include a traveling museum. Both events are open to the public.
The beam was given to Tunnels to Towers by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. It came from the same tower where Stephen Siller, a firefighter and the foundation’s namesake, responded and died.
“Some people may never get to New York, but we’re going to go to them,” Blakeman said.
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The tour started at Ground Zero and has visited Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where passengers brought down Flight 93, and the Booker Elementary School in Florida, where President Bush was on Sept. 11, 2001, when he learned of the attacks. After Arizona, the beam will travel to California and Mount Rushmore.
Blakeman said the tour allows people to touch the beam and hear from heroes who were there that day.
The Tunnels to Towers Foundation pays off mortgages, builds smart homes, helps homeless veterans, builds veterans’ villages and pays college tuition for heroes’ children.
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