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Before we get into today's episode, I need to acknowledge that today marks twenty-five years since the attacks of September eleventh.
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That morning, nineteen Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners.
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They took planes filled with innocent people and turned them into weapons against civilians.
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It was calculated mass murder carried out by cowards.
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They murdered 2,977 people, firefighters, police officers, paramedics, military personnel, office workers, airline crews, travelers, and ordinary Americans who started an ordinary Tuesday believing that they'd make it home.
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But those murderers do not get the final word.
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We remember the passengers and crews who fought back.
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We remember the first responders who ran toward collapsing buildings while everyone else was trying to escape.
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We remember the strangers who carried one another, the families who endured the unimaginable, and a country that refused to stay on its knees.
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As a veteran and the Long Islander, September eleventh will never be just another gate on the calendar.
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We remember those who were murdered, we honor those who faced the danger, and we remember the first responders, recovery workers, the survivors who made it home but carried the injuries and illnesses of that day with them.
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No joke, no clever transition.
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We remember.
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Each of us was reminded that we are here only for a time.
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And these counted days should be filled with things that last and matter.
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Love for our families, love for our neighbors, and for our country.
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These are not swimming pools.
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Nobody's confusing them with swimming pools, and I would never reduce their meaning to just pumps, filters, hydraulics, and chemical treatment.
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But you know what happens when you spend your life in this industry?
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You can stand in front of the most powerful water feature in the country, feel everything it was designed to make you feel, and part of your brain still starts tracing the water.
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Where's it going?
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How is it being collected?
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What kind of surge capacity are they dealing with?
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How are they keeping the edge that even?
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The public sees two enormous voids and hears water falling into absence.
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We see that too.
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We also see catch basins, pumps, filtration, treatment, sensors, controls, stainless steel, stone, waterproofing, debris removal, and a maintenance crew that cannot hide a bad day under a solar cover.
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This is sacred ground.
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And beneath it, some serious engineering.
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The design is called Reflecting Absence.
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Architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker created the winning concept.
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It was selected in January 2004 from over 5,200 submissions representing 63 countries.
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The memorial opened on September 11, 2011, ten years after the attacks, and opened to the public the very next day.
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The two pools sit in the footprints of the North and South Towers, each one covering nearly an acre.
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The bronze parapets surrounding them carry 2,983 names, 2,977 people murdered on September 11, 2001, and the six people killed in the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993.
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The names are not alphabetical.
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They are arranged through what the memorial calls meaningful adjacencies.
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Water drops about 30 feet into each square basin.
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From there it moves toward a smaller opening in the center and it falls another twenty feet, disappearing completely from view.
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Michael Arad described the idea as making absence visible.
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Water keeps entering the void, but the void can never be filled.
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Let's talk about what it takes to make that experience work.
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Start with the edge.
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If you've ever fought a vanishing edge, you already know water is the most honest level on the job site.
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The concrete can look perfect, the tile can look dead on.
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Then you fire up the pump, and the water points out every high spot and every low spot, like it's been waiting all week just to embarrass somebody.
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Now, stretch that edge around a vessel nearly an acre in size.
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Each memorial waterfall weir is just under 700 feet long.
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Across both pools, you're looking at roughly 1,400 linear feet of weir.
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Delta Fountains, out of Jacksonville, helped engineer and build the stainless steel fabrications and redesigned the weir structure.
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According to Delta, the early mock-ups called for about an inch of water over the weir.
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Once they tested it, however, they brought it down to roughly half an inch.
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It just performed better that way.
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And think about that from our side of the business, half an inch of water flowing evenly across almost 700 feet per pool.
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That's insane.
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That is not close enough.
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They installed stainless steel sill plates on the concrete walls.
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The rails held brackets supporting small one ton industrial jacks placed every five feet.
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Those jacks allowed vertical adjustment of as much as two inches, while the rails allowed lateral movement for expansion and contraction.
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Delta says the finished run was adjusted to within one sixteenth of an inch.
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We've all seen six foot tile lines that could not hold one sixteenth without wandering off.
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These people had to hold it across nearly seven hundred feet while stainless steel expanded, contracted, and took everything New York weather could throw at it.
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And the water will tell on you.
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A dry section breaks the effect.
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Too much water in another section changes both the appearance and the sound.
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On this project, the weir is not just a piece of the hydraulic system.
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It is part of the entire message.
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Then we get to pump numbers.
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And this is where you and I need to be careful.
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The published figures do not agree.
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During construction, the memorial reported ten large pumps operating at roughly 40 pounds of pressure and circulating about 52,000 gallons per minute across the two pools.
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A Siemens engineering account later described each pool as holding about 600,000 gallons, moving as much as 30,000 gallons per minute and filtering roughly 6,000 gallons per minute.
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Pool magazine, our friends Joe Trustee and Marion Trusty, both fantastic people, they reported 16 pumps, eight per pool, moving approximately 26,000 gallons per minute.
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Delta Fountain's current project page says the two recirculating systems together move as much as 18,000 gallons per minute at peak performance.
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Those numbers conflict.
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I'm not going to pretend they don't.
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They may come from different stages of the project.
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They may describe different pump groups, different operating modes, waterfall flow versus treatment flow, or design capacity versus actual operation without the current mechanical schedules and piping diagrams.
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There is no honest way to mash them together and declare one magic number.
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What we can say responsibly, each pool has been reported at about 600,000 gallons, depending on the source and which part of the system is being described.
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Published water effect flow ranges from 18,000 gallons per minute combined to 30,000 gallons per minute per pool.
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Siemens separately reported filtration at approximately 6,000 gallons per minute per pool.
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You already know why that distinction matters.
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Water moving over a waterfall is not automatically water moving through filtration and treatment.
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We cannot grab the biggest flow number, divide it into the vessel volume, and announce a turnover rate without knowing the plumbing configuration.
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Some of that water may exist strictly to create that visual effect.
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Some may be moving through the treatment loop.
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Different parts of the system may run at different rates under different conditions.
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A giant gallons per minute number looks great in an article.
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Give me the hydraulic schematic, and then we can talk turnover.
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What has been confirmed is that the water is collected in catch basins and recirculated.
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Delta says the system includes chemical feed that can respond to weather conditions along with a networked control system monitoring more than 1,000 operating points.
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More than 1,000 points for two water features that are supposed to look effortless.
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And that is the point of those controls.
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They let the operators see what the public should never have to see.
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Changing conditions, equipment status, flow problems, and any small warning before it becomes visible across an acre of dark granite.
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Reporting from the time described the water as being chemically treated in a way that's comparable to swimming pool water and heated for winter operation.
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In a piece I wrote in 2019, I identified bromine as the sanitizer, UV as the secondary oxidation system, and eight pumps per pool.
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But I have not seen a more current public operating specification from the memorial or from Delta confirming today's sanitizer, residual targets, UV equipment, filter type, controller, or water balance parameters.
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So I'm not going to hand you seven-year-old information and call it a current specification.
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You know better, and so do I.
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Equipment changes, treatment strategies change, operating requirements change.
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I read it somewhere, is not a spec sheet.
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Now look at the surface they have to maintain.
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The visible basins are lined with dark granite.
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During construction, the memorial reported the installation of nearly 4,000 smooth granite panels, each weighing about 420 pounds.
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That dark surface gives the water its reflection and depth.
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But from a maintenance standpoint, it is absolutely unforgiving.
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Scale, staining, debris, even flow, none of it has anywhere to hide.
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Then look at the environment.
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The plaza contains roughly 400 swamp white oak trees.
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They belong there, they are part of the design, but you and I both know what 400 trees beside open water means.
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Leaves do not pause out of respect.
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In 2021, filmmaker Joshua Charo documente James Maroon and the crew cleaning the pools at night.
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Time reported that most of what they remove is leaves, although plenty of personal belongings end up down there too.
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Chief Engineer Anthony Lacosto has also been identified in reporting about the operation.
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Pool magazine reported that a three-person crew cleaned the pools five nights a week and that vacuuming and brushing each pool took about eight hours.
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The waterfalls have to be shut down.
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The crew enters the basin and works beneath the walls about 30 feet high.
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They vacuum, they brush the dark granite vessel at night, knowing that families will be there in the morning looking for the name of somebody they lost.
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There's no such thing as good enough.
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At that site, maintenance is not cosmetic.
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It is part of protecting the dignity of the memorial.
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The memorial staff places a white rose at a victim's name on that person's birthday.
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That is huge because 2983 can become a statistic if you let it.
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The roses remind us that every inscription belongs to one person with a family, with a story, with a life that should have continued.
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Every pump, sensor, stone panel, control point, brush stroke, and overnight maintenance shift serves the act of remembering those people.
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That is what separates these pools from every resort, water feature, or record setting fountain we've ever seen.
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The engineering is incredible, but the engineering is supposed to disappear.
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Nobody standing at that parapet should be thinking about the one ton jacks under the weir.
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They should not hear a bad pump bearing, see a dry edge, smell treatment chemicals, or watch a control system struggle with the weather.
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The system succeeds when nobody notices it.
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The machinery disappears, the meaning remains.
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That may be the highest standard any aquatic system can meet.
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There are a few things here that should hit home for anyone in our industry.
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First, mock-ups matter.
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The original weir concept changed after they put water on it and saw how it actually behaved.
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A drawing could not prove what fourteen hundred feet of falling water would do.
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Testing could.
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Second, water does not care what the plans say.
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Tolerances matter most wherever water can expose them.
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You can argue with a tape measure, you cannot argue with a dry section of a wet edge.
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Third, effects flow and treatment flow are not necessarily the same thing.
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Before we talk turnover, we need to know which water is actually going through filtration and treatment.
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Fourth, automation does not eliminate maintenance.
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More than a thousand monitor points will not remove a single leaf.
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It won't vacuum one square foot of granite.
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It won't replace the judgment of the person responsible for the system.
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Controls give trained people information.
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They do not make trained people optional.
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Also, the design has to survive the real world.
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It is not enough for the water effect to look good during a calm mock-up.
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It has to deal with heat, wind, freezing temperatures, rain, contamination, and expansion and contraction.
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Finally, maintenance access is part of the design.
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If the people responsible for the feature cannot safely isolate it, enter it, inspect it, clean it, and adjust it, then the job was not completely designed.
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It was drawn.
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Here, at this memorial, this museum, we come together.
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We stand in the footprints of two mighty towers, embraced by the rush of eternal waters.
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We look into the faces of nearly three thousand innocent souls, men and women and children of every race, every creed, from every corner of the world.
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And we can touch their names and hear their voices.
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Glimpses of the small items that speak to the beauty of their lives.
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A wedding ring, a dusty helmet, a shining badge.
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Here we tell their story.
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So that generations yet I'm born will never forget.
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I visited the memorial in 2019.
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I went there as a New Yorker, I went there as a veteran, and because I've spent most of my life working around water, I could not help but see it as a pool professional too.
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The scale of the system is staggering.
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But when you stand at that edge, the specifications stop being the point.
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You read the names, you hear the water.
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Lower Manhattan keeps moving all around you.
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Traffic, construction, voices, all of it.
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But the sound of the falling water changes the space.
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It separates that ground from everything happening beyond it.
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That did not happen by accident.
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It took architects, landscape architects, structural engineers, mechanical and electrical engineers, fountain specialists, fabricators, control specialists, construction crews, operators, and maintenance professionals.
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The pools make absence visible.
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The people who care for them make remembrance possible every day.
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You and I can appreciate the engineering without ever losing sight of why it exists.
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Two pools, nearly two acres of surface area, more than a million gallons of water, a 30-foot waterfall followed by another 20-foot drop, nearly 1,400 feet of precision weir, thousands of granite panels, more than a thousand monitored operating points, and 2,983 names.
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To the family members of Flight 93, today every heartbeat in America is wedded to yours.
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Your pain and anguish is great.
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The heroes of Flight 93.
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America will always rise up and fight back.
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Today we pay tribute to their sacrifice.
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On September 11th, 2001.
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Today, we remember.