Naperville marked the 25th anniversary of September 11 with a September 9 program at Naper Settlement featuring retired firefighter Chuck Wehrli’s recollections of Ground Zero. The program also displayed the Missouri Task Force 1 helmet Wehrli wore during the deployment, according to Naperville.com.
Wehrli’s account adds a personal dimension to a memorial that was designed to represent all three September 11 crash sites. In a report by CBS Chicago, Wehrli recalled being redirected from a planned rescue class and sent to New York as part of Missouri Task Force 1. He described searching the World Trade Center wreckage and recovering the remains of an FDNY firefighter, Joe Angelini Sr., whose son also died in the attacks. CBS Chicago also reported that Angelini had given Wehrli a patch from his helmet.
A memorial built from three sites
Naperville dedicated the Commander Dan Shanower September 11 Memorial on September 11, 2003, near the DuPage River and the Municipal Center, making it one of the earliest American memorials dedicated after the attacks, according to the City of Naperville.
Its central sculpture incorporates 100 pounds of rubble from the damaged Pentagon, a twisted World Trade Center steel beam and granite from the Pennsylvania region where Flight 93 crashed, the city says. The materials give the Naperville site a physical connection to the Pentagon, Lower Manhattan and Shanksville without recreating any one location.
The memorial is named for Commander Dan Shanower, a Naperville native and Navy intelligence officer killed at the Pentagon. That local connection, together with the memorial’s materials, places Wehrli’s Ground Zero memories within a broader civic record of the attacks rather than treating the experience as only a firefighter story.
The rescue system behind the response
Missouri Task Force 1 operated within the national Urban Search and Rescue system coordinated by FEMA. FEMA describes that system as a nationwide network of trained and equipped teams deployed when local emergency resources are overwhelmed. The federal framework helps explain how a firefighter from Naperville could be mobilized through a Missouri-based team for a disaster in New York; it does not, by itself, document every detail of Wehrli’s individual deployment.
That distinction matters because the available reporting documents Wehrli’s recollections, while the city’s memorial records document the sculpture and its materials. The supplied records do not independently establish that Wehrli personally secured the World Trade Center beam used in the memorial, so that claim is not included here.
A long medical legacy
CBS Chicago reported that Wehrli later developed Stage IV tongue cancer and attributed his illness to dust exposure at Ground Zero. That account is presented as Wehrli’s attribution, not as an independently established medical finding about the cause of his cancer.
The broader health record shows why exposure remains part of the September 11 story decades later. A review by CDC-affiliated authors in the World Trade Center Health Program literature describes responders’ and survivors’ exposure to airborne substances including asbestos, silica, heavy metals and volatile organic compounds. The review also says aerodigestive disorders accounted for 54% of certified conditions among program members enrolled through 2020.
The federally mandated World Trade Center Health Program provides medical monitoring and treatment for qualifying conditions among people exposed to the attacks and supports related research, according to the same review. That program context documents the continuing public-health consequences of September 11, but it does not determine whether any individual illness was caused by a particular exposure.
At Naper Settlement, Wehrli’s helmet and testimony preserve one responder’s memory alongside a permanent memorial made from material linked to all three attack sites. The anniversary program therefore served two purposes: remembering what happened in 2001 and showing how local institutions continue to interpret its human and health consequences.
