The Pentagon: A History (65 page)

On Friday, September 14, Evey asked Kilsheimer to take charge of the demolition and redesign and to work with AMEC to rebuild the Pentagon. Kilsheimer was reluctant—he did not like the bureaucracy that typically came with government projects. He told Evey he would take the job, but only under these conditions: “I follow no rules but my own rules; I won’t deal with anybody wearing white shirts, except for you; and I won’t deal with any lawyers or any military people, except at my choice.”

Kilsheimer’s part of the bargain, Evey said, was this: “You make it happen at the construction site.”

Only by the grace of God

That Sunday night, they signed a contract. Then they had to wait. The site remained under control of the Arlington County Fire Department while recovery operations continued, and next it would be turned over to the FBI as a crime scene.

After five days at the site, operating on nothing but catnaps, Kilsheimer decided to go to his home in Northwest Washington. He hobbled on his broken toe toward the car he had abandoned on September 11. When he reached Route 110, he found that a chain-link fence had been erected. As he climbed it, an MP challenged him. Kilsheimer looked down at the MP. “So go ahead and kill me,” he said. The soldier helped Kilsheimer over the fence. He made it home, took a shower, and changed his clothes. Then he headed back to the Pentagon to figure out the work that lay ahead.

The first step was to find out if the pile caps in the impact zone were strong enough to rebuild on. Load-bearing tests soon showed the sixty-year-old piles were fantastically strong—three to eight times the thirty tons-per-pile specified in the original drawings. Those footings would support almost anything, and no pile driving was needed, a major relief. However, ground-penetrating radar showed that while the first-floor slab was four inches thick in some places, it was as little as one inch in others. Moreover, the ground had settled in some areas. They would need to pump concrete under the slab in spots to fill the hollows.

Next they had to determine how much of the building would have to be demolished. About fifty concrete columns had been destroyed or seriously damaged, some by the plane’s impact, others by the blast and gases that went ahead of the fireball. Kilsheimer ordered tests on surrounding columns in the fire zone that appeared relatively undamaged. Calibrated devices measuring the strength of the concrete showed many columns had been weakened, and that much more of the building would have to come down than they originally thought.

Core samples were drilled from columns and sent to American Petrography Services in St. Paul, Minnesota, for further analysis. The geologists there were incredulous. The concrete—the sand and gravel that had been dredged from the Potomac River sixty years earlier and mixed with cement and water—had been exposed to the most extreme conditions they had ever seen. The heat of the fire had been so intense it had driven out the water attached to the cement molecules, disintegrating the paste and turning it to mush. Saw-cut cross sections of the concrete showed some of the stones had taken on a reddish, even bright orange tint. The extreme heat had caused tiny amounts of iron in the gravel to oxidize, leaving microfractures in the rock.

It meant many of the columns were no longer capable of bearing a load. On paper, there was no way the columns still standing in the fire zone should be holding up four stories. “They are working only because of the grace of God,” Kilsheimer said after seeing the test results.

Kilsheimer figured they would have to tear down 400,000 square feet, an enormous rectangular-shaped area encompassing all of rings C, D, and E between corridors 4 and 5. It was a far larger area than what had collapsed, but Kilsheimer concluded it would all have to go, right down to the ground slab.

It was surprising that more of the Pentagon had not collapsed. Paul Mlakar, a blast-resistance expert with the Corps of Engineers, was among those intrigued. Mlakar, lead investigator for a team dispatched to the Pentagon by the American Society of Civil Engineers, walked through the rubble a few days after the attack, slipping chunks of concrete and steel into his pocket. Mlakar, who conducted a similar inquiry after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, had found that the damage caused there by the bomb was somewhat small compared to how much of the building actually collapsed. Here was just the opposite: The collapse did not extend beyond the area hit by the airplane. It was clear to Mlakar that the Pentagon had survived an extraordinary event far better than might have been expected. It was certainly worthy of further study.

The remains

At 8:45 in the morning on September 21, all activity outside the Pentagon halted. After ten days, search-and-rescue operations were ceasing. Hundreds of firefighters, FBI agents, and Old Guard soldiers gathered at the crash site for a moment of silence. The Arlington County Fire Department turned command of the scene over to the FBI. It was a sad moment, reflecting official recognition that there was no hope for the 125 people from the building assumed dead.

The Army had lost the most, seventy-four people, twenty-one of them military. One office alone—Resource Services Washington, located directly in the plane’s path on the first floor—had thirty-four killed, more than half its workforce. Most of the office’s victims were budget analysts and accountants, not soldiers, yet they suffered a casualty rate rarely seen by American combat forces, one comparable to that suffered by a few companies landing on D-Day at Omaha Beach. Despite the devastating losses, the survivors had banded together with volunteers and were working eighteen-hour days in the Pentagon to close out the fiscal 2002 budget by September 30 and keep cash flowing for Army agencies around the world—critical for a nation facing a new war.

The Navy lost forty-two workers, thirty-three of them in the service; most of the dead had been in the command center. The survivors had likewise reconstituted and were now temporarily working in the Marine Corps command center in the nearby Navy Annex, where they were tracking the movement of aircraft carrier groups to the Indian Ocean in preparation for possible strikes against al Qaeda and its Taliban regime protectors in Afghanistan. Nine others in the building were killed, including seven from the Defense Intelligence Agency. All sixty-four people on the plane died, including five crew members and five hijackers. In all, 189 people had died at the Pentagon, though only 116 had thus far been identified.

The search for remains was now focused on a large pile at the far end of the North parking lot, behind a fence patrolled by military police and marked with signs warning against photography. Tons of debris from the crash site had been loaded into dump trucks and carried to the parking lot. Front-end loaders spread it out as flatly as possible. Police cadaver dogs sniffed through the pile first, and searchers painstakingly raked through the debris, looking for remains, personal items, or evidence. The work continued around the clock, with bright lights trained on the debris at night. There were two hundred or more people on each shift—federal agents, police officers, firefighters, and soldiers, most of them volunteers. It was gruesome work—veteran homicide detectives described it as the grimmest of their lives. In their white protective suits and respirators, the searchers looked like astronauts exploring an otherworldly terrain. In these dreadful piles, 70 percent of all the body parts recovered would be found.

I would certainly be dead now

The same day the FBI took control, Lee Evey walked through the damaged areas of the building, cataloguing the work that lay ahead. Blackened cables dangled from ceilings. Windows were shattered, and walls were greasy with soot and covered with markings left by rescue workers and FBI agents. “19 at the least D.O.A.s,” was painted in fluorescent orange on the wall by one doorway. Nothing had been done to dry out the soggy building and toxic, psychedelic-colored mold was growing on walls, computers—almost everything. “Doggone,” said Evey. “It’s all shot now.”

The damage caused by smoke and water extended far beyond the 400,000 square feet that would be demolished. Roughly one-third of the building had been affected, and 4,600 Pentagon employees displaced. Industrial fans hummed in hallways, trying to blow out the smell of smoke hanging in the air. Workers wearing hard hats and surgical masks moved down corridors, visible only by the flashlights they held. It was as if time had stopped in some rooms. A soot-covered newspaper from Tuesday, September 11, was neatly arranged on the coffee table in one Navy office.

It was a mess, but Evey kept finding bright spots. He walked into a cafeteria, so new it had not even opened, his feet crunching on shattered glass. Someone had written in the soot in the salad bar: “We will build anew.” Evey looked at the skylight overhead. “Isn’t that amazing?” he said. “It’s not even cracked.”

Two days earlier, on September 19, Evey had received an e-mail from Peter M. Murphy, counsel for the commandant of the Marine Corps, whose office in Room 4E468 was in the renovated fourth-floor E Ring overlooking the heliport. On September 11, Murphy had been standing less than a foot from the window watching television when the plane hit. The fireball flashed across the window, the ceiling fell, and the floor buckled. But the blast-resistant windows held. Murphy and the others in the office fought smoke and jammed doors to escape. After they got out, the building collapsed directly behind Murphy’s office, leaving the scarlet-and-gold Marine Corps flag in his office exposed to the world but still standing.

“If you had allowed lesser quality windows, I would certainly be dead now, as would other members of my staff,” Murphy wrote to Evey. Many had similar stories—the windows and other improvements had saved their lives. Blast-resistant windows as close as ten feet from where the plane hit were not cracked, while many windows farther away in non-renovated sections had shattered. Almost everyone on the third, fourth, or fifth floors escaped—even those directly above where the aircraft hit. Of 2,600 people in the impact area, 125 had died, and all but two of the victims were from the first or second floor.

The sprinklers in the renovated wedge had clearly made a difference. The fire damage in Wedge 1 was markedly less than in Wedge 2, where the fire spread after the impact. Though the sprinklers were useless in extinguishing the hottest areas of fire, the water cooled and wetted those trying to escape.

But there were other stories, disturbing ones, about what had gone wrong. Georgine Glatz, the renovation program chief engineer, assembled a task force of engineering and fire experts to interview survivors and make quick recommendations on how to improve safety. Many survivors, still raw from the experience, simulated their escapes from the building, showing how chaotic and difficult it had been to get out. Exit signs above the doors had proven largely useless. The smoke had descended so rapidly that workers in office bays were unable to see any signs and had been completely disoriented.

The blast-resistant windows, for all the lives they saved, were not entirely a blessing. When the plane and fuel exploded into the Pentagon, the rigid windows and structure helped contain the force of the blast within the building. The blast was channeled with tremendous energy through the D and C rings before exiting through stairwells and elevator shafts and out the C-Ring windows—which were not blast-resistant—into AE Drive, where it dissipated in the open air.

The big open-bay Pentagon offices—in particular the one housing McNair and the Army personnel office—had proven to be terribly difficult to escape. Structurally, the Army office was one room, making it easy for the blast and fire to spread. The wallboard partitions that divided conference rooms and offices went up only to the suspended ceiling. The space above served as a superhighway for the blast, dispersing fire and fuel over a vast area.

Most disturbing were complaints about fire-suppression doors. The smoke doors, as they were commonly known, had been installed in Wedge 1 corridors as part of the renovation. The heavy, accordion-type doors, hidden in pockets and driven by electric motors, had worked the way they were supposed to. As soon as smoke alarms detected the fire, the doors slid shut, blocking off corridors to stop the spread of smoke.

Few of the Wedge 1 occupants had known anything about the doors. There had been no fire drills yet. People trying to evacuate found their paths blocked by doors they did not know existed. There were handles to open the doors, but they kept forcing themselves shut. Building workers finally managed to jam the doors open. Had they not, Glatz later said, “many more would have died.” People were supposed to use stairwells to get around the doors and leave through designated exits. But the blast, drawn toward the path of least resistance, had blown through all the staircases, and they were smoking like chimneys.

The main problem was on the second floor at the foot of Corridor 4, where people trying to escape the smoke and reach the inner courtyard found their path blocked at the A Ring. The fire door had closed and people were trapped behind it, caught by the smoke. “All the stairways were compromised and there was no way out,” Glatz said. Two Army officers used their electronic keys to open B-Ring doors and create an escape route out a rear door, and then led a chain of their trapped colleagues to safety. Others, including McNair and his group, jumped out windows. But some workers turned back toward the fire into danger. Glatz’s study was unable to establish that any of the dead included people whose path was blocked by the fire-suppression doors. “Some people went back, and I cannot today tell you if these were the people who died,” she later said.

The task force study—and another one by the Corps of Engineers—exposed underlying safety flaws that had to be addressed. The hard truth was that, just as some aspects of the renovation had saved lives, other aspects had made it harder to escape. The renovation had not been designed to protect the building against a hijacked airliner, nor could it be expected to have done so. Now Evey and his team knew differently. Lives might depend on how well and how quickly they could rebuild.