Cape Coral 9/11 Ceremony and the Civic Fall That Follows

There are 2,977 small American flags going into the lawn in front of Cape Coral City Hall on Friday morning. One for each person killed on September 11, 2001. Twenty-five years.

The City of Cape Coral, the Cape Coral Fire Department, and the Cape Coral Police Department are hosting the remembrance ceremony together in the parking lot at 1015 Cultural Park Boulevard, starting at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, September 11. Presentation of colors by the Fire and Police Honor Guards, a moment of silence, an invocation, a poetry reading, brief remarks from city leaders. Then attendees are invited to help stake the flags. It is free and open to anyone who wants to come.

One practical note, because people get turned around on this every year at City Hall events: the front parking lot is closed to cars from 5 p.m. Thursday, September 10, until 1 p.m. Friday, September 11. That is not a typo — they close it the night before to set up. Park at the back of the building or across Cultural Park Boulevard. City Hall is open regular business hours the whole time.

I am not going to write a paragraph connecting this to our business, because there is no connection and there should not be one. We do not sell anything into a memorial. I am writing about it because I was born in this city and I think a Cape Coral company that spends the rest of the year telling you where to put a slide can spend one post telling you where to stand on Friday morning.

The rest of the weekend

The Tunnel to Towers 5K Run and Walk is Saturday, September 12, at 7:45 a.m. at Florida SouthWestern State College, 8099 College Parkway in Fort Myers. Bagpipers before the start. Over 650 people are expected. The foundation it benefits was founded for Stephen Siller, the New York City firefighter who ran the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel in gear that morning. Nationally the New York race is the last Sunday in September; Fort Myers runs its version on the second Saturday.

Separately, 92.5 FOX News expanded its Field of Flags tribute to three sites this year. Volunteers planted 2,977 flags on September 7 at Bernice Braden Park here in Cape Coral, at Hertz Arena in Estero, and at Artis—Naples, all starting at 9 a.m. If you drove past Bernice Braden this week and wondered, that is what you were looking at.

Gabe wrote up the other half of Saturday — ROAR Offshore and the FGCU event on the 12th — earlier this week, so I will leave that to him.

Then the civic year restarts

Here is the thing about the Cape Coral calendar that people who moved here five years ago have not fully absorbed yet: almost nothing civic happens between June and Labor Day, and then everything happens at once.

From roughly the second week of September through the first week of December, this city runs its entire year of organized community life. Church festivals. School carnivals. HOA and civic association picnics. Chamber events. Veterans ceremonies. Charity 5Ks. Club fundraisers. The Kiwanis KidsFest at Cultural Park on October 17. Then Thanksgiving lands, snowbird traffic gets serious, and December belongs to parades and boat lights.

I survey property for a living, which means my fall is a lot of phone calls from board members and volunteer chairs asking a version of the same question: we found a spot, can you fit something on it? The honest answer usually depends on details nobody thought to measure. So here is the version I would give a committee in September rather than in October.

The Fire Department open house is the model

If you want to see how a Cape Coral community event is supposed to be run, go to the Cape Coral Fire Department open house. The department opens all 13 of its stations at once, 9 a.m. to noon, and each station gets a different theme instead of thirteen identical hot dog tables. The 2026 date has not been posted on capecoralfire.com yet as of this writing, so watch the department's page and its Facebook feed.

What they do with the station assignments is genuinely smart:

• Station 1, 4610 Coronado Pkwy — hands-only CPR practice, a OneBlood drive, American Red Cross information, and adoptable dogs from the Cape Coral Animal Shelter.
• Station 5, 1029 Diplomat Pkwy — the CCFD brush truck alongside Florida Fish and Wildlife off-road vehicles and a Florida Forest Service bulldozer. Smokey Bear shows up.
• Station 6, 4540 Chiquita Blvd — vehicle extrication demonstrations at 9:30, 10:15, 11:00, and 11:45, plus car seat checks and free bicycle helmet fittings.
• Station 8, 707 SW 1st St — sit in a Lee County Mosquito Control District helicopter and look at the hyacinth control airboat.
• Station 9, 4107 Pelican Blvd — a junior firefighter obstacle course where kids put on gear, drag a hose, spray a virtual fire, climb through a window, and pull a stuffed animal out of a smoke tunnel.
• Station 13, 2025 NE 6th St — face painting, fingerprinting, 9-1-1 education from Cape Coral dispatchers, and an inflatable fire safety smoke house.

Two of those are worth pointing at if you sit on a board. Station 9 built an obstacle course out of the job itself — gear, hose, window, victim — and it is the most popular thing at the open house every year. Station 13 runs an inflatable, because an inflatable is how you get a six-year-old to walk through a smoke-filled room voluntarily and remember it in March. The fire department is not sentimental about equipment. They use what works on kids.

What a committee should nail down in September, not October

Every fall we get calls in the first week of October for events on the third Saturday of October, and by then the good Saturdays are gone. October and early November Saturdays are the busiest days of our year in Southwest Florida, because the heat has broken, the rain odds have dropped, and every organization in Lee County scheduled into the same four weekends.

Beyond the date, three things decide whether a layout works, and a committee can settle all three in an afternoon:

Surface. Grass takes stakes. Asphalt does not. A lot of Cape Coral civic and church properties are mostly parking lot, which means ballast instead of stakes and a real conversation about where the drains, the light pole bases, and the drive aisles sit. We wrote that up in detail in our notes on church parking lot placement, and the same logic applies to a fire station apron, a plaza lot, or an HOA clubhouse pad. On any property where emergency vehicles operate, the apparatus lane stays clear, full stop — that is a non-negotiable before anything else gets discussed.

Power. One blower per unit, and older Cape Coral properties frequently have fewer usable exterior circuits than the number of outlets suggests. Count circuits, not outlets. If the answer is one, the answer is one unit or a generator.

Footprint plus clearance. Committees measure the ground and forget the sky. Overhead is where the surprises live — service drops, canopy oaks, awnings, sign structures.

What it actually costs a nonprofit

Since somebody on the committee is going to ask, here are real numbers from our own inventory. All-day rentals, delivery, setup, and teardown included inside Cape Coral.

• The classic castle is $199. Fourteen by fourteen, six to eight kids at a time, the safest choice for a first-year event.
• The straight obstacle course is $449. If Station 9's junior firefighter run gave you ideas, this is the civilian version of it, and it moves a line of kids continuously rather than in shifts.
• The foam machine is $150, with extra foam packs at $40 each.

A castle and a foam machine is $349 and it will carry a two-hour church picnic. Most boards guess high on this and talk themselves out of it before they ask.

Friday first

All of the above can wait until next week. On Friday morning, City Hall, 8:30. Park in the back. If you have never watched 2,977 flags go into a lawn one at a time, it takes longer than you expect, which is the point.

If your board, congregation, or civic association is laying out a fall event on a property you are not sure about, call me at (239) 212-0011 and I will look at the space with you before you commit to a layout. I measure things for a living, and I would rather do it in September than argue about it on setup morning.

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