Paul Srubas

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Monument mixes up flight numbers%2C airlines in 9/11 tragedy

It%27s developing cracks%2C and lettering is fading after 9 years

Repairs are estimated at %2420%2C000

An embarrassing error is just one reason why some people are clamoring for the replacement of Green Bay's 9/11 memorial.

The 9/11 "Twin Towers" monument outside the Neville Public Museum is also falling apart, because the marble on the base is not the kind that can stand up to outdoor weather conditions.

"It's borderline embarrassing," Mayor Jim Schmitt says. "It was an inferior gift. We made a mistake accepting it."

The monument is there so that we never forget, but unfortunately, it's declaring to all the school children, veterans, firefighters, museum-goers and other visitors that we should remember it wrongly.

The monument correctly identifies American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines 93 as being involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but it also declares that American Airlines 175 and United Airlines 77 were involved, when, in fact, it was United Airlines 175 and American Airlines 77 that were involved. Right flight numbers, wrong airlines.

There it is, etched in stone.

Picking nits or not? I wouldn't have spotted it in a million years, and neither has anyone else.

Not until Mark Powell of Green Bay came along. He recently told me the 9/11 monument has a mistake. I checked it out, looked it up, and sure enough, the makers of the monument got it wrong.

This is a monument that, a year after it was installed, drew Schmitt, then-Gov. Jim Doyle, Navy Cmdr. Calvin Slocumb of the USS Green Bay, and other dignitaries to a gathering of about 200 people for a memorial event in 2006. No one but Powell noticed the blunder then or anytime since.

I told Green Bay firefighter Chad Bronkhorst about it, and this was his reaction: "Wow. Man. I'm floored."

That perhaps reads like he's being sarcastic, but he wasn't. He was floored. The monument in part honors firefighters, and as a firefighter, Bronkhorst wasn't entirely pleased to hear of the error. The reason I bounced it off him was because he's the head of the Green Bay Area Firefighters Local 141, which, a few years ago, adopted the 9/11 monument as a project.

The monument was installed in 2005, and within four years, it already had become a project. The firefighters were going to raise money because the monument is falling apart.

The problem is, the surface marble is the wrong material, Bronkhorst says. It's inside marble, great for kitchen countertops or whatever, but not the kind of stuff that'll stand up to the beating sun, driving rain, subzero weather and ice that Green Bay dishes out. Most of the 3,000-some names of the dead, etched into the sides of the monument, are no longer legible.

Of course, the lettering on the airlines mistake is still clear and easy to read.

The firefighters wanted to replace the whole thing but gave up when people got upset about just the idea of taking it down, Bronkhorst says.

"Maybe we'll look at it again someday when emotions are less heated," he says.

Schmitt doesn't want to wait that long.

"We were sold a bill of goods. The committee that did it, I'm sure their hearts were in the right place, but this is a big deal. Now they don't return our calls. It needs to be completely redone."

OK, in all fairness, WTC 9/11 Pen-T Memorials of Calumet County, which donated and installed the monument, is disbanded, and at least one of its members has died. I could not reach the other two surviving members for comment.

They were just private citizens who managed to procure a chunk of twisted I-beam from the original Twin Towers and planned to use pieces of it in monuments they would install in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The goal must have been overly ambitious, because, after failing to persuade the city of Madison to accept one, the committee donated it instead to Green Bay and then disbanded.

The 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is in 2016, and Schmitt hopes to see the monument rebuilt in time for that.

"We have people who can work on it, and $20,000 would probably repair it, but we should do something more that says our community, that says Green Bay," he says.

Mark Powell and I have an additional hope.

— psrubas@pressgazettemedia.com and follow him on Twitter @PGpaulsrubas