News Photo by Julie Riddle Col. Jim Rossi, commander at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, speaks at the CRTC last month.

ALPENA — On Alpena County Undersheriff Erik Smith’s first day as a police officer, the Twin Towers fell.

“What did I get myself into?” Smith wondered as he watched news coverage of the second plane hitting a tower on televisions inside the Alcona County Jail.

That was 9/11, the terrorist attacks in which hijacked commercial airliners brought down both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroyed a portion of the Pentagon in Washington, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, and killed nearly 3,000 people, entangling the U.S. in Middle East wars from which we’ve only recently disengaged.

For police, firemen, and military members in Northeast Michigan, 9/11 instilled fresh resolve to protect those in their care even as police kept a more careful eye on the public and law enforcement branches united efforts to keep such a tragedy from happening again, local public safety leaders said.

In the days after the towers fell, Smith remembers, police responded to fights as frightened residents waited in bumper-to-bumper lines for gas.

The FBI provided local police agencies with watch lists of people considered suspicious. If any of them were stopped, police were not to arrest or detain but only to report the encounter to the federal government, Smith said.

He only had to report someone on the list once, he said.

Federal authorities also instructed local police to keep a close eye on certain buildings and other infrastructure that could be targets to terrorists. A deputy with the Alcona County Sheriff’s Office at the time, Smith watched for suspicious people at the Alcona County Dam.

He began to see Border Patrol and Homeland Security watercraft in Lake Huron near Alpena — something he never saw before 9/11, Smith said.

After the terrorist attack, everyone became more security-conscious, both police and the people they protect, said 1st. Lt. John Grimshaw, commander of the Michigan State Police-Alpena Post.

Grimshaw worked downstate at the time as a member of an FBI fugitive task force. When the first plane hit the tower, the federal building in Detroit locked down completely.

Grimshaw went to the Detroit Michigan State Police post to wait for instructions. His superiors did not ask him to handle any immediate threat.

“Then again,” he said, “no one knew, at the time, what was a threat.”

In following days, police heightened their vigilance at the Mackinac Bridge and increased patrols everywhere — both to help residents feel safe and to look for suspicious activity, Grimshaw said.

Dearborn, with the largest concentration of Muslims outside the Middle East at the time, according to Grimshaw, made Michigan a location of concern for federal authorities, because the 9/11 terrorists belonged to Islamic extremist groups. Residents there were under intense scrutiny, facing threats from people angry about what had happened in New York, and police had to protect the Muslim population from abuse while remaining alert for anything suspicious, Grimshaw said.

Since 9/11, the CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies have stepped up the amount of intelligence shared with local-level law enforcement. Such sharing stems from an understanding, Grimshaw said, that prevention of large scale-attacks includes both watchfulness at the local level and interagency cooperation.

“Everybody started playing together” after 9/11, he said.

A national urgency for agencies to work together changed the makeup of training held at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, according to Col. Jim Rossi, CRTC commander.

Pre-9/11, one military unit at a time would use the base to train, and joint events like CRTC’s annual Northern Strike exercises — in which several American military units train alongside servicemembers from around the globe — didn’t exist.

The tragedy highlighted the need for the U.S. Army, Air Force, Marines, and other military personnel to be ready to respond to a conflict jointly to present the most effective offense possible, Rossi said.

From Northern Strike to military testing of drone aircraft (increasingly important in overseas combat) to events such as the recent first-in-the-nation landing of military aircraft on M-32, the CRTC — and Alpena’s part in its existence — helps the U.S. military be the strongest it can be, and, “that serves as a deterrent to future potential conflicts,” Rossi said. “No doubt about it.”

Images of responders rushing toward the towers in New York as others rushed away increased public appreciation of those sworn to protect them, said Andy Marceau, community risk reduction officer with the Alpena Fire Department.

The fire department will hang a large American flag from its tower truck outside the Alpena Public Safety Facility on Saturday, the 20th anniversary of the attacks, and everyone who works at the building will think about the responders who lost their lives in the tragedy, Marceau said.

New buildings in Northeast Michigan, as around the country, now must meet more rigorous fire codes, such as those that require steel beams able to withstand the heat of burning jet fuel.

Firefighters now consider more carefully how long a building has been burning before rushing in to save property, such as at a 2019 fire at Alpena’s Habitat for Humanity ReStore, when firefighters longing to go into the building had to hang back to keep themselves safe.

The essence of firefighting, however, hasn’t changed that much in 20 years, Marceau said. When a home or other building burns, firefighters, like police, put themselves between people and danger.

“I know what I signed up for,” he said. “At any given time, when I come to work, something could happen. There could be a catastrophic failure and I could not come out.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.