Flight 93 Fund Gets Money, Land For Memorial

PITTSBURGH -- Relatives of Flight 93 victims have formed an organization to help efforts to build a memorial honoring the passengers and crew aboard the plane that crashed in rural Somerset County during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

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A primary concern for Families of Flight 93 Inc. will be preserving land around the impact site to protect it from commercialization and to ensure that it will remain much the same as it was before the crash.

To that end, Somerset County officials have asked The Conservation Fund, a land preservation group, to help coordinate land acquisition to create a buffer zone around the Shanksville site.

And to further its cause, the Flight 93 group is getting $1 million from state Sen. Jane Orie, R-Allegheny, from the "Hearts of Steel Bracelets Project." Almost 100,000 bracelets have been sold to raise money for the memorial.

"This site is obviously sacred land ... I think the families need a place where they can come and be with their loved ones," said Ann Lund, a spokeswoman for Orie.

Members of the family group were in Pittsburgh Thursday to receive the money and to discuss the group's goals.

Already, one landowner has donated six acres that are considered part of the impact site, and two others also want to see the land protected.

"I just think it's the right thing to do," said Tim Lambert, who donated six of his 164 acres. "I could not imagine putting a price on that land."

The land has been in Lambert's family for decades, but he hadn't visited in more than a decade until the crash. Now, Lambert, 32, visits about once a month.

By being a landowner and radio reporter for WITF-FM in Harrisburg, he has gotten to know many of the victims' families. At an August meeting with them, he pledged to do what he could to preserve the land.

Jack Lynn, a spokesman for The Conservation Fund, called the Flight 93 crash site sacred ground and likened it to the Gettysburg National Military Park, where the group has also helped preserve land.

Lambert, an Aliquippa native who lived for seven years in Gettysburg, said he doesn't want to see the kind of development that's cropped up around the battlefield happen in Shanksville. He's also considering selling most of the rest of his land.

"Anyone who has visited (the crash) site is always taken by the rural quality of that, and I think the families are too," Lambert said.

Mike Svonavec owns about 290 acres, including the actual impact site, and the site on which a temporary memorial has been erected.

"I would like to see it utilized as some appropriate memorial, something the victims and survivors would be pleased with," Svonavec said.

John Weir, land manager for PBS Coals, which owns about 200 acres of surrounding property, said the company was willing to do anything to help the memorial effort. The Conservation Fund is having an appraisal done of its land, he said.

Pamela Tokar-Ickes, a Somerset County commissioner, said seven landowners own parts of the 500 acres that officials want preserved. "Everybody's after the same thing here," she said.

President Bush has signed legislation to create a national memorial at the site, which has attracted thousands of visitors.