Greensburg and the National 9-11 Flag

I have been watching a repeat of Dan Rather's ten year anniversary of 9-11 special which ran from 7-8pm CDT on AXS.tv. It will be repeated at 10:30pm this evening. The entire one hour program is well worth viewing. 

At about the mid-point in the one hour show, I learned of something extraordinary: The National 9-11 Flag movement started in Greensburg, Kansas.

Screen capture from AXS.tv

Dan's segment on the flag begins by explaining the flag was attached to a building being reconstructed adjacent to the World Trade Center when the towers fell. The flag was torn and coated by debris by the events of that day. The flag was taken down from the building in October, 2011, missing many of its stars and stripes.

It sat in a storage shed for seven years. In 2008, it was brought to Greensburg, Kansas, the site of the May, 2007, tornado that destroyed 95% of the buildings in the town and damaged the other 5%. Members of the Greensburg community began stitching the flag back together using pieces of flags that had been damaged in the tornado.  

The extraordinary people of Greensburg lovingly started repairing the New York flag.

In 2011, the flag toured all fifty states. At each stop patches from flags being retired in each of the states were added. In May, the flag returned to Greensburg where they sewed in pieces of the original flag that had been found in NYC. Those pieces were sewn in while it was in town.

The flag ended its 50-state tour on September 11, 2011 in Joplin, Missouri, where the last two stitches were made at the time corresponding to the time the towers fell.

You can learn more about the flag here.