Posted on 12/29/2008 8:44:28 AM PST by BGHater
It has been more than seven years since 20-year-old Deora Bodley and 39 other passengers and crew died in the fiery crash of United Airlines Flight 93, their hijacked plane disintegrating in a grove of hemlock trees outside Shanksville, Pa.
Most of the remains from the tragedy on Sept. 11, 2001, were never recovered, making the bowl-shaped crash site in the western Pennsylvania countryside an unofficial cemetery and, for surviving relatives, sacred ground.
But efforts to buy property for a national Flight 93 memorial have bogged down in federal red tape and a protracted land dispute, angering family members and risking plans to hold a dedication ceremony on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. The delays have prompted an advocacy group, Families of Flight 93, to ask President Bush to personally intervene during his final weeks in office to allow the federal government to seize the land needed for the memorial and to allocate part of the money for the project.
"He signed the memorial act. He wanted something to be there and to be in place for years and years to come," said Bodley's mother, Deborah Borza, of San Diego. "We have waited so long already. I hold on to being hopeful that between now and January 20, something will happen, something will break free."
Landowner Mike Svonavec of Svonavec Inc. of Somerset, Pa., said the National Park Service and Flight 93 groups are "trying to make my company and myself look like the bad guy in this."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I guess we shouldn’t have graveyards either.
My only curiosity here...everytime that they crash a plane over the next fifty years in America...which you know it will eventually happen again...will we toss out $50 million for each memorial? There is a point where we lose sight of reality, and in this case...we’ve lost that reality.
And we can memorialize them anywhere.
Which is what? That the freedom to own private property is something the victims would've wanted us to have?
No, to honor the passengers who died there. Many on board knowingly gave their lives to spare others.
I have been to the site and it was a very stirring experience.
I had a long talk with one of the volunteers and she said the Red Crescent will not be the final design. For one thing, they have been told that all the trees should not be the same. Too easy for disease to get them.
There will more than likely be a variety of trees. The site is guarded 24 hrs a day to protect the memorials that been placed there by various groups and private citizens.
Passive aggressive much?
Like many federal bureaucracies, the Park Service I believe has been largely taken over by the Left.
So the problem is likely either
- typical bureaucratic bungling (brought about by un-fireable Dim federal hirees)
- or perhaps something more sinister (pun intended) perpetrated by Leftists in the Park Service.
Either way, I don't see this as a bad landowner, but a bad bureaucracy.
I hope President Bush WILL resolve it -but NOT through a "taking." He'd better act soon before Obama steps in and "saves" the day by royally seizing the land.
LOL. Can I just agree to wear rose-colored (aka red) glasses instead?
Arlington National Cemetery contains only 624 acres
and it is the final resting place of more than 290,000 people.
The Flight 93 memorial would be three times that size.
...Svonavec argued that negotiations on the 275 acres at the heart of the proposed memorial, including ground zero where 40 innocent passengers and crew were killed, have not taken place for the past four months.In March, the park service retained Utah-based LECG to independently appraise the property. For reasons that remain unclear, the government’s Appraisal Services Directorate later rejected LECG’s report.
Svonavec officials say that they have been unable to obtain a copy of that appraisal, and The Tribune-Democrat also was denied access.
Three years earlier, another independent appraisal was done and later rejected.
The park service has said its own appraisers established a value of $250,000 for the land, or less than $1,000 an acre....
How stupid can these people be?
We have surely let ourselves be taken in by “hard cases”. In the law, a “hard case” is one in which the victims are so pitiable that bad law gets made in order to do something for the victim. The result is a bad precedent for the wrong reasons. These terrorist memorials, frankly, are becoming somewhat counter-productive because they memorialize not only the victims but the successful terrorists. Even now, probably the most memorable individual of 9/11 is Mohammed Atta and that is a tragedy.
I have the same problem with roadside memorials, those crosses and other markers to show where someone crashed their auto and died. In my hometown a few years ago a kid rammed his BMW at high speed into a light pole, killed his friend and cut off his own legs. When it was decided the pole needed replacing, the family of the dead kid insisted it be preserved in some sort of memorial on the site for their son. They justify it as a way to remind kids not to drive like idiots but in a few years, no one will even remember this kid (it happened in front of the high school) and it will be as meaningless as most of the efforts to get kids to be cautious, in other words, nothing. It seems especially poignant when, as time passes, the roadside memorials fall into decay and, if it were one of my loved one, it would be another hurt to endure.
We need to get away from the idea of dwelling in the past or endlessly rehashing tragedy without gaining something positive from it. Many years ago my family and I were caught up in a hostage situation at a hospital. When it was over, the hospital decided to offer counseling for everyone. The first one was called a debriefing and my husband and I attended it. It was a roundtable recounting of the details of the incident which we appreciated because it filled in some gaps in our knowledge. Mostly, though, everyone sat around and talked about their experiences that long, horrendous day. The next time, they merely sat around discussing their feelings about what happened and it seemed to me they were tacitly competing as to who suffered the most. We stopped going. And thereafter my husband refused to discuss the incident in our home. His thinking, with which I agree, is that evil invaded our lives when our child was a hostage but he did not want the evil to invade our home also. We moved on far quicker than those who continued to go to the counseling sessions. (Now, don’t misunderstand me, counseling is appropriate and needed many times but merely sitting in a group and competing for the hurt prize is not useful)
Agreed. Nicely put, too.
1400 acres ?!?!?!?! This is completely insane. And $56 million, with nearly half to come from taxpayers? And then how much would it cost EVERY year for the Park Service to "manage" this preposterous establishment? I really doubt that the heroes of Flight 93 would support this. They didn't give their lives in order to create another expensive government program.
Use 10-15 acres where the bulk of the remains are believed to be, and build a reasonable memorial. The landowner would probably be happy to just donate that much land.
They want to have over 3 square miles of land (2200 acres).
I just plain don’t understand why a smaller plot would not suffice.
No. That you think that is the issue. You've been polarized like a steel wrench on a magnet. Yeah, that's it: a tool.
seize is an awfully provocatice term.
—>provacative.
What else would you call what they are asking Bush to do?
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