Rick Larsen

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EVERETT — On Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, was at an event a few blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.

He was about nine months into his first term in Congress. The host of the event said there was news of an accident in New York City. When another plane crashed into the second tower and the situation became clearer, everyone evacuated.

Larsen rushed back to his office and organized his staff. Then, Capitol police came through and started banging on everyone’s doors, which was the evacuation plan at the time.

His team went off campus to his chief of staff’s house, and everyone used landlines to get in touch with their families since the cell towers were overloaded. Larsen called his parents and spouse.

“You could describe it as panic, chaos, with the big unknown about what was going on at the time,” Larsen said in an interview on Friday, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

In the days immediately following, Larsen doesn’t remember much. But he does remember taking the Metro back to his house in D.C. and being greeted by his 5-year-old son, who asked “why those bad people crashed the airplanes into the building.”

“Trying to explain terrorism to a 5-year-old is not something I thought I’d be doing,” Larsen said.

Over the next few months, Larsen’s office decided to shift focus to the impacts people were feeling here in Washington. Immediately after the attacks, the U.S.-Canada border was briefly closed, and security heightened, with the National Guard being called in to help.

One day in January, Larsen started his morning in Point Roberts, a small area of Washington that lies on the southern tip of a peninsula that is otherwise part of British Columbia. From there, he rode a school bus with students across the border to Blaine Elementary School. Crossing the border was the only way for those students to get to school, as going from Point Roberts to Blaine requires driving about 25 miles through Canada. According to an article from the time in the Bellingham Herald, students would spend between two and six hours on the bus each day in the months following 9/11.

“I remember them being very fun, very excited that someone new was on the bus, but also very resilient,” Larsen said. “It was fun to be on the bus with them and to hear their stories about what’s going on.”

Once he got across the border, he spent some time working as a border investigator to understand their job and to demonstrate the need for more people at the border. At the time, investigators were regularly working 12-hour shifts to keep up with the increased security.

In 2002, the federal government created programs to support local law enforcement, especially in areas that were thought to be possible targets in the future, including refineries and large private companies such as Boeing, Larsen said.

Another major effect of the attacks Larsen remembers is the creation of the World Trade Center Health Registry to help pay for the health care of people involved in the immediate rescue response, which the country is still paying for today. The 21st Century GI Bill of Rights Act helped people who served in Afghanistan — and later Iraq — receive benefits. With the rise of improvised explosive devices in the Afghanistan War, post-traumatic stress disorder worsened in veterans who returned home.

“The syndromes that women and men would show upon their return really required us to step up, unlike we did after Vietnam, to develop a healthcare response system for our women and men in the military,” Larsen said.

On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, Larsen emphasized his desire for a similar sense of unity.

“Obviously in the environment where we’re not being attacked, but we live in a very hyperpartisan world right now,” he said. “… What makes us great isn’t something static, it’s something dynamic. What makes us great is that we keep trying to be better. And if we stop trying to be better, I don’t think there’s any chance we can get back to that unity that we had.”