Long Beach Fire Chief Mike DuRee is taking heat for allegedly lying about his role in the aftermath of 9/11 and trying to pass off a piece of scrap as a relic from Ground Zero.

The controversy has upset not only Long Beach firefighters but also the New York firefighters union. The New York group is calling on DuRee to apologize, but DuRee said he never made the comments.

DuRee allegedly made the statements during the May 10 Heroes Regatta in Long Beach, in which teams of police and firefighters competed. The fire chief was there to offer a gift, a twisted piece of metal crafted into a trophy emblazoned with “9-11-01” for the winning team.

According to an article about the event and accounts from attendees, DuRee told a crowd the metal had been pulled from the wreckage of the World Trade Center and that he had worked alongside rescuers after the attack.

“After 9/11, we (LBFD) were asked to send a team to help with the search at the World Trade Center. I was part of that team,” DuRee was quoted as saying in an article written by Rick Roberts for the sailing news website sail-world.com and published May 11. Roberts is an employee of the yacht club. “We spent two weeks there going through the rubble. I was allowed to keep this piece of twisted metal as a remembrance.”

DuRee has maintained that he was misquoted and that he doesn’t know where the misinformation came from.

“I made a point of saying that this trophy is meant to symbolize the sacrifice of the men and women who gave their lives” on 9/11, DuRee said. “I did tell people that day, I can’t remember how long after, but it was about 20 to 25 firefighters from Long Beach that went back to New York. We went to Ground Zero and went to funerals.”

Bill Ardizzone, who was the Long Beach Firefighters Union president at the time and is now retired, gave a detailed account of that trip last week.

He said a group of 28 firefighters went to New York to present the union there with money raised to support them in the aftermath of 9/11. That group, which included DuRee, walked around the site of the World Trade Center, visited a firehouse that had been destroyed and attended funerals for three days before flying home.

“Everybody in the world wanted to go back there and help those guys,” Ardizzone said, but New York firefighters declined the help from other departments. “We all would want to take care of our own.”

The regatta’s director, Judy Meyer, corroborated the sail-world.com account. Meyer is a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge but said she was addressing the regatta in her capacity as the director of the race.

In a written statement to the Register, she said DuRee told her the trophy was an actual piece of metal from the twin towers but later changed his story after questions were raised about it. She described DuRee’s actions as “deception.”

“Chief DuRee announced to everyone the origin of the trophy and his participation in 9/11,” Meyer said. “He stood before all the participants and stated he was at 9/11, at the pile (of rubble) and the trophy metal was a piece of metal from 9/11.”

Roberts, the article’s author, declined to comment for this story. As of Thursday morning, his article remained on the Sail-World website with DuRee’s quote.

Accounts of DuRee’s statements in the article, and those by Meyer and other attendees with whom some firefighters had spoken, offended LBFD Firefighter Brogan Healy. He said DuRee was grandstanding.

“I’m still so taken aback that he had the gall to attach himself to this,” Healy said.

Healy’s career as a firefighter began in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and his first memories as a firefighter are of working in the rubble of the twin towers and attending funerals of some of the 343 members of the New York Fire Department who died that day, Healy said.

Several articles were written about Healy’s experience after 9/11, including by The New York Times.

“That’s not going to leave me,” Healy said of the tragedy. “You don’t just throw that around for your own benefit.”

Long Beach Firefighter Kyle Vestermark said he, too, was appalled to hear about DuRee’s alleged statements at the regatta and that many in the department felt the same.

“If you’re the fire chief of a major metropolitan city, you know what’s right and wrong and you know that’s untouchable,” Vestermark said. “People can’t even get their minds around this.”

DuRee said that while his words were mischaracterized, soon after the May regatta he sent a letter to the LBFD staff to apologize to those who may have been offended after talking with former New York Firefighter Rich Brandt, now a deputy chief in Long Beach.

“When this became an issue a day or two later, the first thing I did is reach out to Rich and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry,’” DuRee said. “I said ‘Rich, I don’t want any disrespect to go to you,’ and Rich said, ‘You should put something out to the fire department and say just that.’… I’m sure there are people that are still upset about that, but the reality is I’ve done everything I can to pay respect to people who have a direct connection with New York and 9/11.”

By all accounts, a Long Beach firefighter who is a skilled craftsman made the regatta trophy from local scrap metal.

“It was beautifully done by one of our firefighters,” DuRee said of the trophy.

Rex Pritchard, president of the Long Beach Firefighters Association, said he had heard about the conflict but didn’t know what really happened.

“If it ends up being true that he lied, it’s absolutely egregious and there’s no excuse for it,” he said.

Long Beach Deputy City Manager Tom Modica said Wednesday that DuRee recently brought the issue to the attention of the City Manager’s Office after inquiries by the Register, but that it wasn’t a big concern.

“From our perspective, this is something that happened at a private event on private time,” Modica said. “It looks to us to be a gross miscommunication.”

But that may not be the last city officials hear of it.

A representative of the 10,000-member Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York wrote a letter addressed to Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia, and copied to DuRee and City Manager Pat West, asking that DuRee apologize. That letter, which is in the possession of Long Beach firefighters and was provided to the Register, has yet to be sent to City Hall.

Garcia didn’t return phone calls seeking comment Wednesday.

Vincent Speciale, a trustee of the New York group that wrote the letter, confirmed its authenticity.

“At no time was Chief DuRee, nor any member of the Long Beach Fire Department, allowed access to the World Trade Center site,” Speciale says in the letter. “Mayor Garcia, it is my understanding that Chief DuRee has since recanted these claims, but the damage has been done. It is an affront to the thousands of NYC firefighters who spent hundreds of hours digging for human remains at the World Trade Center site, to have someone misrepresent themselves as having been part of the same search and rescue.

“It is an even greater insult to have this same person, a member of the Fire Department no less, claim he’d been given a piece of metal to commemorate those lost at Ground Zero.”

Contact the writer: 562-243-3419 or lwilliams@lbregister.com