The Pentagon: A History (64 page)
Read The Pentagon: A History Online
Authors: Steve Vogel
Peter Murphy, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps, on August 15, 2002, the day he moved back into his rebuilt E Ring office near the point where the plane hit the building. Behind him is the window where Murphy was standing when the plane hit. (Washington Post, Michael Lutzky)
The restored wall of the Pentagon, seen shortly before sunrise in September 2002, nearly one year after the attack. (Washington Post, Bill O’Leary)
Despite the problems, Rumsfeld had another surprise for the fire department. In mid-afternoon, he ordered that the Pentagon open for business the next day. The secretary did not bother to consult with Chief Schwartz or building supervisors before making his decision. “Having it open for business the next day seemed to me to be important,” Rumsfeld later said.
To make the point crystal-clear, Rumsfeld agreed to hold a press conference that evening inside the burning Pentagon. Reporters would be bussed to the press briefing room on the Mall side to hear a defiant statement that the Pentagon was still functioning.
Schwartz was astonished at the news. They were battling a big and dangerous fire, an unknown number of dead were in the rubble, and there was danger of further collapse. Rumsfeld’s decision “placed additional burdens” on the fire department as well as the FBI evidence-recovery team, the federal after-action report concluded, although Schwartz later said it caused few problems.
Steve Carter was likewise flabbergasted. By early afternoon he believed the building was past the worst and was stabilizing; that, however, was a far cry from making tomorrow a regular workday. But as Carter thought about it, he could understand the rationale. The Pentagon had never closed its doors.
Nobody left
Lee Evey had driven back from Tennessee in record time and showed up late in the afternoon with a car trunk filled with forty orders of hamburgers, french fries, and sodas for the renovation team. He was not prepared when he saw the destruction at the Pentagon. The news reports could not convey the smell of the smoke, the way it grabbed his throat when the wind shifted. It was virulent.
In Evey’s absence, the renovation office set up a command center on the heliport landing pad, assuming the role of logistics center by bringing in any supplies requested by the fire department, FBI, and other agencies at the scene. “If they needed it, we wanted it to be there,” Mike Sullivan, Evey’s deputy, recalled. AMEC, the Wedge 1 prime contractor, brought in shoring timber and steel. Facchina Construction, a major subcontractor, sent a fleet of backhoes, front-end loaders, dump trucks, and cranes, escorted to the site by state police. Construction managers brought in large, clean refuse containers the FBI could use to store evidence; they trucked in gravel for a road to support the heavy equipment in front of the building. When the fire worsened, they ordered generators and floodlights, knowing operations would be going around the clock. Sullivan made verbal contracts with construction companies to support the rescue, and within a few hours had assigned $400,000 worth of work. “I sure hoped the money would follow at some point,” he later said.
Jack Kelly and Les Hunkele, two of the most experienced construction hands at the site, recommended a first-rate structural engineer be brought in immediately to assess the building’s condition and advise fire and rescue teams on what areas were safe. They were in agreement: The guy they really needed at the scene was Allyn Kilsheimer.
When the call came from the Pentagon late in the morning, Kilsheimer already had a request from New York asking him to help at the World Trade Center. The calls were not surprising. Kilsheimer, founder and president of KCE Structural Engineers, was often called when disaster struck; he had worked the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He was expert at quickly assessing a damaged building, figuring out what had to be demolished, what could be saved, and how to fix it. Kilsheimer was a maverick, a profane sixty-one-year-old with a reputation for enormous energy. He summed up his management style simply: “I take charge of shit.”
At his office near Dupont Circle in Washington, Kilsheimer debated briefly whether he should go to New York or to the Pentagon. The latter was practically his back yard, so he had his office call New York to say he would help as he could but was on his way to the Pentagon.
Kilsheimer drove as close as he could to the building, but with the security and confusion, it took him two more hours on foot to work his way to the security barriers. Hunkele retrieved him—Kilsheimer was easy to spot, with his thick black and white beard and hair in a ponytail.
Evey had never heard of Kilsheimer, but he liked what his construction people told him. The two spoke at the heliport. “What do you want me to do?” Kilsheimer asked.
“Help these emergency people do what has to be done,” Evey replied. That was the extent of the meeting.
That evening, Kilsheimer spoke with Brigadier General Carl A. Strock, the senior Corps of Engineers officer at the site, to assess the building’s stability. Strock told Kilsheimer a team of structural engineers was on the way, but Kilsheimer did not want to wait. “Let’s just go take a look,” he told the general. The two borrowed firefighters’ uniforms and worked their way deep into the building, trying to gauge the conditions of the columns. Kilsheimer’s fireman pants were too big and he tripped and broke his toe, but kept going. They found terrible devastation, everything blackened and small fires still burning. Some areas were dangerously unstable, the columns destroyed or severely distorted. But it was clear that many areas of the building were holding up well, despite the damage.
Kilsheimer and Strock sloshed through water to reach the Navy Command Center. It was hot and horrible, filled with a terrible acrid smoke. Scalding water cascaded down from the floors above. The bright new renovated space where Lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer had begun his morning had served as a funeral pyre for two dozen people. To Kilsheimer’s right lay the remains of several victims, completely charred by fire. At his feet were two more bodies, oddly untouched by the flames. One victim—his face waxy and mouth bloody—seemed to be looking at Kilsheimer. “I wish we could do something for these people,” the general said.
“I don’t know what you can do, but we can fix it so you have people back here within a year,” Kilsheimer replied.
That night, Evey addressed about sixty renovation program workers gathered around him on the heliport. “Life, as we know it, has changed,” Evey said. “…If any one of you wants out, now is the time to do it. No questions will be asked.”
Nobody left.
Aerial view of the Phoenix Project, March 2002.
The Pentagon had held
The orange glow on the horizon grew brighter as Lieutenant Colonel Ted Anderson drew closer. Shortly after 3
A.M.
on September 12, 2001, Anderson was riding up Interstate 395 through Northern Virginia, heading back to the Pentagon. Late the night before, he had made it home to his Alexandria apartment, sleeping for several hours before bolting awake. He tossed aside his soot-and-blood-covered suspenders and tie and put on his green Army battle-dress uniform. Another Army officer picked him up and they drove to the Pentagon, carrying flashlights, water, and breathing masks. At first they could not see the building—the low ground of Hell’s Bottom was shielded from sight until they crested the hill at Arlington Ridge. Then the Pentagon burst into view. Flames were shooting from the roof, and the enormous building glowed like a harvest moon. Firefighters in front of the gash pumped long streams of water into the blaze.
At 3:30
A.M.,
Anderson walked into the building to report to duty. He was not alone. Some ten thousand colleagues showed up for work that morning at the Pentagon. The building was burning and the hallways were dark with a smoky haze. An unknown number of their colleagues lay dead in the rubble. Anderson was distraught, but the defiant scene in the Pentagon that morning revitalized him. He now understood what it must have been like to be in Washington on December 8, 1941. “The thing I’m most proud of is that I was part of ten thousand people who reported to work in a blazing building,” he later said. “Ten thousand people instinctively knew we were at war now and knew their place of duty was here, regardless of the fact that we had no electricity, we had no water, we had no communications.”
Donald Rumsfeld, back in his office at 5:30
A.M.,
went to a Pentagon studio to tape a message that was broadcast during the day to U.S. troops and Defense Department employees around the world. “This building is a place dedicated to the ethos of heroism,” Rumsfeld told them. “Heroes have gone before us. At the Pentagon yesterday, heroes were here again.”
The building itself proved heroic on September 11, holding up long enough to allow thousands of people to escape. The ones most impressed were those who knew its warts best, among them assistant building manager Steve Carter. “The plane went through three rings, but it stopped it,” he said. “The building held.” Through it all, most of the building had not even lost power. The only reason many areas were dark was because electricity was turned off to protect rescuers from arcing and sparking. To Carter, the Pentagon was like an aging battleship, an old bucket of bolts, hit by a kamikaze attack but refusing to go down.
It was hardly business as usual. Half the building was closed off; many corridors were blocked by yellow crime-scene tape and guarded by soldiers with M-16 rifles. Employees stood at windows looking onto the center courtyard, watching firefighters on the roof struggle with the blaze; the fire underneath the slate had grown during the night. Inside the crash zone, pools of fuel from the jet had ignited and firefighters were attacking the fire with foam.
Military officers walked down hallways filled with the stench of smoke, greeting one another with relieved handshakes or commiserating over missing colleagues. Down in the Army Operations Center, where Anderson reported, plans were being formed to pursue the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.
An American flag, put on the roof during the night by firefighters, flew over the collapse zone. Major General James T. Jackson, commander of the Army’s Military District of Washington, spotted it and wanted a much larger one put up. “If I can get a flag to drape off the side of the building, can you put it up?” he asked Arlington assistant fire chief Jim Schwartz, the incident commander. The roof was still burning, but Schwartz agreed. Soldiers from Fort Myer arrived in the afternoon with the U.S. Army Band’s twenty-by-thirty-eight-foot garrison flag. With the help of firefighters, the soldiers brought the big flag up an aerial ladder to the roof and moved to a point twenty-five yards south of the collapse zone. Yellow-helmeted firefighters, red suspenders over their blue T-shirts, attached it to the limestone entablature atop the fifth floor. Under a brilliant blue sky, the soldiers stood at attention and saluted as the flag unfurled three stories down the side of the building.
The Pentagon had held, and so had its people.
Hell’s kitchen
By the afternoon of September 12, the fire in the building was largely under control, and the bodies were coming out. By mid-afternoon the next day, seventy bodies had been recovered, but at least a hundred people were missing.
The chaos of the first hours had been replaced by order, and a tent city supporting recovery operations had sprung up in front of the crash site. Arlington police detective Don Fortunato volunteered for a body recovery team and steeled himself for the job. “You know you’re going into hell’s kitchen, and you’re going to get a guided tour,” he recalled. “And you don’t want to see it, but you know you got to do it.”
Fortunato donned a hooded white protective suit along with a helmet and respirator. His four-man team was guided into the building by FBI agents, entering the crash zone through a hole in the wall. The blackness seemed to swallow up the light inside. Fortunato shone his flashlight, but it was still hard to see. Space was tight; in some spots there was room only for one person to get through at a time. Pieces of tangled aircraft metal were scattered about, and wires and ceiling tile frames hung from above. It was like walking through a metal jungle that had sharp edges everywhere.
Fortunato missed the first body they came to, but he was working with an arson investigator with a sharp eye. “I never would have seen it, because it was just char,” Fortunato recalled. “And as soon as you started recovering it, then you saw human flesh. You know, it was that bright pink burn. And he was not intact, to put it nicely.” He was a lieutenant colonel, according to the insignia on his beret. Half his uniform was burned off, and the other half had been burned into his body.
Fortunato combed through the debris with his hands, looking for anything that might have been part of the man, part of his life, anything that might help his family. Even with masks, the odor was powerful. They put him in a body bag, along with the beret, epaulets, and a pair of tennis shoes. When they had found everything they could, they put the bag onto a stretcher and carried him out. The rule was that no body bag ever touched the ground until they made it out.
Rescuers had not officially given up on finding survivors, although as Wednesday turned into Thursday, what little optimism remained was disappearing. Inside the building, Allyn Kilsheimer thought he heard something overhead, but when he reached the spot, it was another body. More than likely, the sound had been in his head. That had happened to him when he was searching for earthquake survivors in Mexico City: “You wanted to hear something, you wanted to hear somebody alive.”
Kilsheimer accompanied Army soldiers using sophisticated listening equipment to search for any sign of life. They heard cell phones ringing, but nobody was calling out. Thousands of square feet on all five floors were piled chest-high with incinerated debris. Someone could be alive, pinned under debris or trapped in a pocket; they would not know until search teams could shore up all the damaged areas.
Shoring had begun around midnight on September 11. Crews first knocked down loose limestone panels hanging on the façade—widowmakers, as they were known. The most critical point in need of support was at the edge of the collapse zone, where the building had broken at the expansion joint, and five stories were standing despite missing first-floor columns. Workers gingerly set the first crib shore in place at 1
A.M.;
by dawn the exterior column line had been supported, and the building was significantly safer.
Rescuers methodically worked their way in from shored areas into danger zones, looking for survivors. They used pneumatic pipes for temporary shoring and painstakingly dug with hands and tools to clear the area. Tons of debris were cut and carried out of the building bucket-brigade–style. Thousands of pieces of shoring timber came in the same way, already cut to specified dimensions at a makeshift lumberyard out front.
Whenever a body was found in the debris, work in that area would stop. An FBI evidence team would photograph the spot, document the location, and gather any evidence. A rescue team would remove or cut away any debris pinning the body. Then a mortuary team—usually soldiers from the Army’s Old Guard regiment at Fort Myer—would reverentially carry out the remains.
A large area near where the plane struck remained too dangerous to shore up and search. The two-foot-thick collapsed roof hung precariously over the area, and engineers were unsure what was even holding it up. Nobody could rule out the possibility that survivors might be trapped below.
Search-and-rescue team leaders decided to break the concrete roof into manageable pieces and lift them off the building. An engineer recalled a particularly awesome piece of heavy machinery that could do this job almost by itself. It was a huge excavator with a long, articulating boom, with a combination concrete pulverizer and shear—like a giant thumb and forefinger—able to cut, crush, and remove concrete slab. The Caterpillar hydraulic excavator, informally known as T-Rex, was quickly located at a construction site in Baltimore. It was owned by Potts & Callahan—the same excavation company that broke ground on the Pentagon on September 11, 1941. The excavator was soon on its way, escorted by state police. By the afternoon of September 13, T-Rex was sitting in front of the Pentagon.
Kilsheimer asked the operator if he had ever done anything like this before. “No,” the man replied. Kilsheimer asked if the man was uncomfortable doing it. “Yes,” the operator replied.
They were honest answers, but the operator proved extraordinarily nimble—the best Kilsheimer had ever seen. On the evening of September 14, T-Rex began dissecting the roof, cutting up the two-foot-thick reinforced concrete slab and bringing each piece to the ground. Layer by layer, the collapse zone was pulled apart. Overhead, a lookout crew in a basket suspended by a two-hundred-foot crane scanned the wreckage for any signs of life. As hoped, rescuers found pockets in the rubble big enough to hold survivors, and search teams checked them with cameras and dogs, or crawled in themselves, if possible.
But all they found were more bodies, now coated with concrete dust. The fire that raged for thirty-six hours had been so intense that no one survived.
You make it happen
Unlike in New York, which was dealing with the total collapse of two towers and death on a far greater scale, there was no debate about what would happen with the destroyed section of the Pentagon. Doc Cooke—his teeth gritted—made it clear within hours of the attack. “We’ll rebuild it,” Cooke declared.
Even as search-and-rescue operations continued, Lee Evey was planning the reconstruction. But the Corps of Engineers wanted the job. They had formally left the renovation in 2000, half pushed, half of their own volition. But the reconstruction of the Pentagon would be a project of national importance, carrying enormous prestige. The Corps, after all, had built the Pentagon, and it asked to be given responsibility for the reconstruction.
Cooke refused. The Pentagon Renovation program had proven itself, as far as he was concerned. “Lee Evey and PENREN have the situation under control,” he told the Corps on September 13. “We will call you if you are needed.” The Corps was asked to analyze ways to improve the building’s structural safety and was put in charge of planning a Pentagon memorial on the building grounds.
Evey quickly selected AMEC—the British conglomerate that had just finished renovating Wedge 1—to demolish and rebuild the destroyed areas. Nobody knew Wedge 1 better, he reasoned. He also signed a contract with Colorado-based Hensel Phelps Construction Company, which right before the attack had won the design-build competition to renovate the rest of the Pentagon, wedges 2 through 5. Hensel Phelps would do the interior work in damaged portions of Wedge 2. Pentagon attorneys concluded that because of the urgent circumstances, they could modify the existing contracts with AMEC and Hensel Phelps without opening the process to outside bids. Evey thus had two major contractors ready to begin work immediately.
The main question was who would lead the effort. The answer was right before his eyes. For three days, Evey had watched Allyn Kilsheimer taking charge and working like a madman.
Anyone going into the impact zone was required to wear white Tyvek suits with respirators for protection from hazardous materials, but Kilsheimer refused to wear the “bunny suits,” as he derisively called them. He also refused to wear a hard hat, even when darting under leaning slabs of concrete to rescue classified computer hard drives for the Navy and Army. Kilsheimer had no patience with formalities and was soon infuriating fire and law enforcement officials by traipsing into the crash zone without permission. More than once, FBI agents threateningly took out their handcuffs. Chief Schwartz wanted him thrown off the site. “You’re not only about to be removed from the scene, you may find yourself being hauled off to jail,” Schwartz warned him.
Kilsheimer was exactly what Evey wanted: someone to propel the reconstruction forward. If it needed to be done, Kilsheimer would get it done—right now. Having a structural engineer in charge of the project’s design and construction was unorthodox—typically, that was a construction contractor’s job. Yet for all his outlandish behavior, Kilsheimer was known as a conservative engineer who would ensure that whatever was built had ample support. It would not fall down after Kilsheimer was through designing it.