09/11/2026
9/11/2001. We will never forget those lives lost, and all who were impacted.
Twenty-five years ago today, Road Runner Wrecker Service, one of our partners, was called to Washington Dulles International Airport minutes after the second plane struck the World Trade Center. Three light duty wreckers and one heavy duty wrecker rolled out that morning. The crews stayed at that airport 24 hours a day for nearly four weeks.
The news video shows one of our heavy wreckers on the scene. Behind the wheel that day was Dave, now CEO of Valor Fleet Services. Here is his story.
The Road Runner shop didn't have a television. That's the detail Dave comes back to first.
The first plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. The second hit the South Tower at 9:03. At Road Runner Wrecker Service, the crews were working a normal morning.
"Somebody said we needed to watch the news," Dave recalls. The shop had no TV, so they all walked next door to the body shop and stood in front of one there. They had been watching only a few moments when their dispatch started going off, calling Dave repeatedly.
"They were saying, you need to be here immediately, within ten minutes."
Four trucks were sent to Washington Dulles International Airport — three light duty wreckers and one heavy duty. Dave jumped into the heavy. Drivers were putting down cars on the side of the road so that they could get to the airport. As incredible as it was, they were on scene within ten minutes of the call.
Police officers were waiting for them at the terminal. "When you get in, the officers are waiting to go into the wreckers with the operators, sitting next to them," Dave says. An officer rode with each truck. The assignment was to clear every unattended vehicle off all three levels of the terminal roadway — one light duty truck posted on each level, working continuously.
"Any vehicle that was left unattended was towed. Even if it was a person just walking in for a moment into the airport. They would tell us to hook it and tow it away, no matter what." Everything went to the impound lot on airport property.
Overhead, the national airspace was being shut down. Every aircraft in the country was being ordered to the ground, and inside the terminal a recorded message repeated on a loop: the airport is closed, all persons must leave the premises.
What Dave remembers is what happened next, on the ground, around his truck.
People began arriving from every direction — passengers, drivers, people who had been routed to Dulles whether or not it was where they were headed. Phone traffic across the region had overwhelmed the networks, and cell service was effectively gone. Nobody could reach anyone. And so they walked toward the only thing that looked official and stationary: a heavy wrecker with its lights on.
"People kept asking me what was going on," he says. "So many people stepping on the truck trying to listen to the radio."
At that point, he opened the passenger door, turned the radio up as loud as it would go, and left it that way so everyone standing around could hear.
At 9:37 that morning, American Airlines Flight 77 — which had departed Dulles at 8:20 — struck the Pentagon.
"We had no idea at that point that that flight was one that had left out of Dulles," Dave says.
By then there were roughly 150 people standing outside his tow truck, listening to a radio through an open door.
Here, twenty-five years on, Dave stops. It takes him a moment before he can go on.
"People were crying. It was just really emotional. It was just crazy."
The operators did not go home that night, or for a long time after. Road Runner worked the airport 24 hours a day for almost four weeks. In the days that followed, as investigators worked the parking lots, Road Runner towed a vehicle left behind by one of the hijackers of the aircraft that struck the Pentagon.
Today Dave is CEO of Valor Fleet Services, the parent company of Road Runner Wrecker Service and nine other towing and recovery brands across the region. He does not tell this story often.
"We will never forget," he says. "None of us who were there will."
We will never forget the impact, and we will never forget the lives lost on this day.
More photos in comments.
