Bill Ward has described going to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan for the first time, and what he found there.
The Black Sabbath drummer talked about the visit during his September show on “LA Radio Sessions” with Mike Stark, days before the 25th anniversary of the attacks falls on Friday.
“Well, we went there. And the reason why I wanted to go there was to see — because I hadn’t been to the museum, which is fantastic, the way that they have put things together so that we will never forget. It’s marvelous. I felt very sad, obviously, going through there, and it had very dark moments in there. I was with family members who — that helped a lot, passing through there,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
For Ward, the part of the site that settled something was the water.
“The biggest thing that I felt brought me peace of mind was seeing how they’ve built the waterfalls that fall into infinity,” he explained. “They fall into infinity. And I think that’s such a wonderful grace because if they didn’t look like they fell into infinity or they landed somewhere else, there wouldn’t have been a stopping point for me. But whoever designed that designed these small waterfalls, these small waterfalls, and then the large waterfall that just goes into infinity. And they did that exactly for the first and second tower.”
He stayed at the pools for a while.
“To be honest with you, I stayed there for some time and I said prayers and I cried,” Ward added. “It’s hard not to cry. But I came back from New York with some peace of mind because I had no idea how they would resolve that. How can you resolve something like that? And I know it can’t be fully resolved, but at least I think, as New Yorkers always do, they do their best. They really come through, there’s no doubt about it. And so what gave me some solace finally was seeing the two Twin Towers grave sites with the waterfalls falling into infinity. And I felt like I’d accomplished my journey finally to go there and see what actually happened.”
The effect Ward kept returning to is the one the architect built the memorial around.
The site occupies eight acres of the 16-acre World Trade Center complex. Its two pools, each close to an acre, sit in the exact footprints of the North and South Towers. Water falls 30 feet down all four sides into a square basin, the largest manmade waterfalls in North America, then drops another 20 feet into a smaller central void at the centre of each pool. That second drop is what Ward describes as falling into infinity.
Michael Arad, whose design Reflecting Absence was selected in January 2004 from more than 5,000 submissions worldwide and developed with landscape architect Peter Walker, has said the pools represent “absence made visible”. Water pours into the voids without ever filling them. The memorial opened on September 11, 2011, ten years to the day after the attacks. The museum Ward walked through opened in May 2014.
Inscribed on the bronze parapets around the two pools are the names of the 2,983 people killed in the 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
They are not listed alphabetically. Names are grouped by where people were and what they were doing that day. The North Pool carries those killed in the North Tower, aboard Flight 11 and in the 1993 bombing. The South Pool carries first responders along with those killed in the South Tower, on Flight 175, at the Pentagon, on Flight 77 and on Flight 93.
Inside those groupings the arrangement follows what the memorial calls meaningful adjacencies. Colleagues stand next to colleagues, flight crews together, first responder units together. Families were invited during the design process to ask that a relative’s name be placed beside a specific other person. People who were connected in life are inscribed side by side.
Roughly 400 swamp white oaks fill the plaza around the pools, a species native to all three crash sites: New York City, Arlington in Virginia, and Somerset County in Pennsylvania. One other tree stands among them, a Callery pear recovered from the rubble in October 2001, nursed back to health by New York City parks staff and replanted on the plaza. It is known as the Survivor Tree.
Ward rejoined Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler on stage at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, 2025 for “Back To The Beginning“, the first performance by the original Black Sabbath lineup since 2005 and the last. Osbourne died on July 22, 2025.
At 78, Ward continues to present his monthly show on “99.1 KLBP-FM” in Long Beach, California, which he relaunched with Stark in 2025 after a break of seven years. He also has a run of solo material finished, with one album at the mastering stage and three more behind it.
