Campaign bus fire destroyed 9/11 history
December 01, 2009
Allen Weh graphics on the Freedom1 RV.
The charred remains of Freedom1.
The Allen Weh for Governor campaign bus, which was destroyed in a storage facility fire in Rio Communities on Friday night, didn’t just destroy a local man’s RV, but also claimed miles of 9/11 memories and more than 30 hours of another local’s artwork.
“The history of this bus and it’s 40,000 miles on the road doing outreach about America and the principles the founders built this country on are lost — all of the memorabilia from 9/11, all the photographs, all the books with people’s signatures and comments in them showing what moved them about 9/11,” said Tom Greer, a Rio Communities resident who owned Freedom1, the charred RV he used to memorialize September 11, 2001, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.
Sometime after 10:30pm on Friday, Freedom1 caught fire while parked in a storage facility in Rio Communities. With a loud explosion that startled neighbors, the fire quickly overtook much of the facility.
“We heard an explosion and the whole place was engulfed,” said Anthony Baca, who lives nearby.
Twisted, blackened metal was all that remained after the flames were doused by fire crews.
Freedom1 was built in the summer of 2002 to lead that summer’s “Ride to Remember,” when 450 firefighters on Harley Davidson motorcycles rode across the country to the World Trade Center site in New York City, where the participants honored their fallen brethren. Since then it’s been a fixture at events.
“Cyndi and I,” Greer said of his wife, “always think of the Freedom1 as belonging to the American people.”
At the time of the fire, the RV had been newly christened as an extension of the Allen Weh gubernatorial campaign. Greer, who works for Weh as the campaign’s coalitions director, allowed Weh to use Freedom1 as a mobile campaign headquarters. In recent weeks it’s been spotted all around the state and often in Belen.
While the bus had been decorated with the Stars and Stripes for years in honor of those who died on 9/11, Greer recently had Belen graphic designer Bruce Prater add Weh’s campaign insignia, including Weh’s name and photograph, to the patriotic RV.
The Allen Weh campaign's bus design conceptualization.
The intricate work took Prater, who owns Graphic Arts Station in Belen, more than 30 hours to complete, as he designed, laid out, printed and applied an adhesive vinyl wrap to the campaign bus. It’s the largest vehicle he’s ever wrapped with his design work.
The project had been exciting for his business, until Baca left him a voicemail message late Friday night: “Bruce, that RV you did is burning up!”
“I didn’t listen to the message till the next morning,” Prater said. “I was listening to it over and over and over. I must have listened to it 10 times before it sunk in.”
While he acknowledged that any mass-production graphic arts business loses time and material to errors every once in a while, it’s not often they lose it to a fire.
For Prater, the loss was also his artwork. He calls everything he does artwork, especially a vehicle vinyl wrap, because it takes an artistic eye, the mastering of technique and a lot of patience to get it right.
“It’s disappointing,” he said. “Can you imagine Michelangelo watching the Sistine Chapel burn up? He’d be throwing buckets of water on it. All of the stuff I do is artwork, to me.”
Prater also wrapped a Jeep for Weh, which the gubernatorial candidate is still using.