A portion of the main antenna mast recovered from the rubble of the North Tower of the World Trade Center will go on display next year in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum to honor broadcast engineers killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. WNET was on the tower, and the station lost engineer Gerard “Rod” Copolla on that day.
After the 9/11 attacks, the charitable arm of the Society of Broadcast Engineers created the Broadcast Engineer Relief Fund to help the families of the six engineers who died. “With donations from many members of SBE, and vendors and industry foundations, we were pleased to send checks of $42,500 each to every family… without any strings attached,” SBE President Vinny Lopez told Radio World. “Every penny [raised] went directly to the families.”