Bell rings for 9/11 attack victims

The Bell of Hope rings at New York City’s St. Paul’s Chapel at 8:46 a.m., the time American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower 15 years ago. Rough Cut (no reporter narration).

The Bell of Hope rang at St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City on Sunday (September 11) to remember the lives lost in the 2001 attacks. The annual ceremony began the following year in memory of the lives lost.

Americans began commemorating the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on Sunday with the recital of the names of the dead, tolling church bells and a tribute in lights at the site where New York City’s twin towers tumbled.

The names of the 2,983 victims will be read slowly by relatives as music plays during a ceremony at the 9/11 Memorial plaza in Lower Manhattan that will pause for six moments of silence.

Four of those mark the exact times four hijacked planes were crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon near Washington D.C., and a Pennsylvania field. The last two record when the North and South towers of the Trade Center collapsed.

The ceremony will be held by two reflecting pools with waterfalls which now stand in the towers’ former footprints, and watched over by an honor guard of police and firefighters.

More than 340 firefighters and 60 police were killed on the that sunny Tuesday morning in 2001, in the worst attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941.

Many of them died while running up stairs in the hope of reaching victims trapped on the towers’ higher floors.