Commemorations were held throughout North America on Friday to honour the lives lost in 9/11. The Windsor-Detroit Tunnel closed Friday morning, alongside the Ambassador Bridge and the Gordie Howe International Bridge, for a short period of time to mark the horrifying events of 25 years ago. 9/11 is a moment many like Hannah Renaud remember like it was yesterday. “I just remember how young I was and how it was kind of my first experience with an event that literally changed the world,” said Renaud who worked in a long-term care home in Michigan and was on her way to work 25 years ago. She remembers sharing the disbelief of what was going on in New York and around the U.S. “A lot of my co-workers were frantically calling trying to get a hold of family members. Some of our residents, same thing.” The border was closed down forcing Renaud to stay in Michigan that night. “I ended up staying actually for a full week with a co-worker.” After returning home, she recalls trying to enter the U.S. for work a few weeks later and standing idle on the Ambassador Bridge for 20 minutes. She proceeded to do a U-Turn and head home. “I took about a month off. It was very anxiety provoking.” Anxiety was high everywhere including with Abe Fehr, owner of UniFab in Leamington. “It caused considerable concern for us. Would we have to shut our company down for a period time or not?” Fehr wondered at the time. He recalls company trucks being stuck on a backed-up Huron Church Road trying to get to the U.S. with the border crossings all but locked down. Fehr says things began to normalize a couple of weeks later, but things have never been the same since. “I remember the days well before 9/11 where you barely needed a driver’s license to cross and all of a sudden everything was a whole lot more concerned and a lot more questions asked after that,” Fehr told CTV News. “It took a lot more time [to cross] because you weren’t sure on traffic flowing and what was going to happen at the border.” Tourism Windsor-Essex Pelee Island CEO Gordon Orr said life in our border city changed instantaneously. In the first year after the attacks, Orr says the Windsor-Essex region lost over 2 million visitors and hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefit. “Back in 1999, we had our highest number of visitors ever. 9.1 million visitors,” Orr pointed out. “That was the first full year of operation for Casino Windsor/Caesars Windsor and since then there’s been a steady erosion of our American visitation.” Orr says TWEPI noticed Americans changed their travel patterns after travel documents and a provincial smoking ban came into affect in the years following 9/11. “We can’t rely on the U.S. market like we once did and we’ve really tried to grow not only our domestic market but also our local market with encouraging staycations.” 25 years ago, the world lost its sense of security. Ceremonies will end Friday, but that moment in history will live on.
