As the plane passed overhead at high speed, Linda saw the jet was intact, with neither smoke nor flame coming from either engine. Linda made no connection between the plane’s strange behavior and the news she’d watched minutes earlier about hijacked airliners crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Instead, she suspected that a mechanical problem had forced the plane low and wobbly, on a flight path over her house that she’d never before witnessed. Maybe, Linda thought, the pilot was signaling distress and searching for someplace to make an emergency landing. Linda worried that their local airstrip, Somerset County Airport, was far too small to handle such a big plane. And if that was the pilot’s destination, she thought, he or she was heading the wrong way.
Linda didn’t know the plane was United Flight 93, and she couldn’t imagine that minutes earlier the passengers and crew had taken a vote to fight back. Or that CeeCee Lyles, Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer, Sandy Bradshaw, and others on board had shared that decision during emotional phone calls, or that the revolt was reaching its peak, or that the four hijackers had resolved to crash the plane short of their target to prevent the hostages from retaking control.
Linda tracked the jet as sunlight glinted off its metal skin. Its erratic flight pattern continued. The right wing dipped farther and farther. The left wing rose higher, until the plane was almost perpendicular with the earth, like a catamaran in high winds. Linda saw it start to turn and roll, flipping nearly upside down. Then the plane plunged, nosediving beyond a stand of hemlocks two miles from where Linda stood. As quickly as the jet disappeared, an orange fireball blossomed, accompanied by a thick mushroom cloud of dark smoke.
“Jim!” Linda screamed. “Call 9-1-1!”
Her husband burst outside, fearing that their neighbor’s Rottweiler mix had broken loose from its chain and attacked her.
“A big plane just crashed!” Linda yelled.
“A small plane,” Jim said skeptically, as he regained his bearings.
“No, no, no, no.3 It was a big one. It was a big one! I saw the engines on the wings.”
Jim rushed inside and grabbed a phone.
Heartsick, still clutching the wet T-shirt, Linda stared toward the rising smoke. Soon she’d wonder whether, in the last seconds before the crash, any of the men and women on board saw her hanging laundry on this glorious late-summer day.
The first 9-1-1 call about United Flight 93 came from inside the plane, when computer engineer Ed Felt used his cellphone from a rear restroom to report “Hijacking in progress.” Felt’s call reached dispatchers in Westmoreland County, adjacent to Somerset County, where the crash occurred. Jim Shepley got a busy signal on his first several tries, as other witnesses around Shanksville, Stoystown, and the nearby villages of Lambertsville and Buckstown jammed emergency lines.
The first 9-1-1 call4 from the ground that connected came from hairdresser Paula Pluta, who’d heard nothing about the first three hijackings and crashes. Having taken the day off from work, Paula was lost in a simpler time, watching a rerun of the old television show Little House on the Prairie, when the low-flying plane rattled her house and everything in it. She ran onto her porch, which overlooked the grounds of the old Diamond T coal mine, where men and machines had spent three decades extracting the soft black wealth buried there. Paula spotted the plane racing downward at a sharp angle. It disappeared from her sight behind fifty-foot-tall trees a fraction of a second before it exploded, roughly a half mile from her home.
“Oh my God!”5 she told Somerset County 9-1-1 dispatcher Jeremy Coughenour. “There was an airplane crash here by Shanksville-Stonycreek School.” Although Paula had lived in the county her whole life, the school with five hundred children was in fact four miles in a different direction. The error could be explained as a product of distress, or as the distance between what her eyes saw and her heart feared. Paula Pluta’s son and daughter were in school that morning.
Moments later, another 9-1-1 caller provided a more accurate location. Bulldozer driver Daniel Meyers was part of an excavation crew that had spent several years returning soil and grass to the grounds of the old strip mine, restoring it to rolling fields of green. Breathing hard, Meyers told the dispatcher, “There was an airplane6 just went down over by Diamond T!”
Coughenour knew the mine’s location, off Lambertsville Road and Skyline Drive, so he moved to answer another call. Before hanging up, Meyers added another detail: “Well, I don’t know if you have to tell anybody, but it went down nose first, upside down.”
By the time Jim Shepley’s call got through—with Linda in the background whimpering “Oh my God”—fire horns and whistles had sounded. Volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews rushed to their vehicles to race toward the scene from Shanksville, Stoystown, and neighboring communities. Citizen responders poured in from near and far, drawn by the smoke and in some cases by glimpses of the falling plane. Soon they’d be followed by scores of local, state, and federal officials, among them state police troopers, the FBI, and the county coroner, funeral home owner Wally Miller.
At the family medical practice7 where Kathie Shaffer worked as a registered nurse, word spread that Somerset County Hospital had sounded an emergency code for disaster. Doctors would remain at the hospital, regular appointments would be canceled, and Kathie and the rest of the staff would keep the office open to help anyone who wandered in upset or confused.
During the first minutes after the 10:03 a.m. crash, details were scant. The medical office secretary tuned her transistor radio to a staticky news station and told Kathie something had happened involving a plane and the World Trade Center in New York City. Kathie drew a blank, having never been to Manhattan. Her mind formed an image of a generic skyscraper on fire. If she pictured the Twin Towers, the image would have been obsolete—the South Tower had collapsed minutes earlier.
As Kathie pieced together information, her sister, Donna Glessner, called the medical office to say she thought she felt an earthquake. Kathie returned to work, but Donna, who worked at her family’s hardware store and lived a mile outside Shanksville, soon called a second time: it wasn’t an earthquake, it was a plane crash, apparently a few miles away, in little Lambertsville, one of the communities served by the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department.
“You need to call Terry,” Donna insisted.
Kathie found the number of her husband’s costly new cellphone, the contentious device they’d bickered about for weeks. As she dialed the number, Kathie accepted that Terry had been right: the phone wasn’t an indulgence, it would help him as the fire chief.
“Another plane has crashed, and they think it’s near Lambertsville,” Kathie told Terry, raising her voice over the din of machinery at the Pepsi plant where he loaded trucks.
“It’s no time to joke like that—it’s not funny,” said Terry, who’d heard reports about the events in New York from a television in a break room.
“I’m serious,” Kathie said. “This is your plane crash.”
Almost simultaneously, Kathie heard Terry’s name called on the plant loudspeaker: he and all other volunteer emergency responders were released from work. Terry rushed outside, called the county 9-1-1 center for confirmation, then jumped into his minivan. His mind whirled as he sped toward home. “Okay, who’s in town? Is Rick there?” Terry wondered about his assistant chief, Rick King, owner of Ida’s Store, located a hundred yards from the fire station. One question led to another: “How many trucks went? What are they encountering? How are they handling it? Where can we get water if we need it?”
The fire radio on his front seat was nearly useless. So many calls filled the airwaves that Terry heard mostly the garble of responders and dispatchers talking over one another. He tried to envision the scene, to assess the possibility of survivors and determine the size and intensity of the fire, but the images wouldn’t come. Terry had always expected that his rural department’s big test would occur on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, from a truck rollover or a multicar pileup, not from
a passenger plane crashing into an exhausted coal mine.
As Terry broke the speed limit along the winding country roads, an unfamiliar feeling took hold. After two dozen years as a volunteer firefighter, including fourteen as Shanksville’s chief, Terry had honed a professional calm befitting his training, experience, and leadership position. Now, though, he felt frightened, scared by the thought of what he and his fellow responders would encounter at the Diamond T.
Rick King had spent the morning shuttling the two hundred feet back and forth between his house and his country store,8 watching television reports about the New York and Pentagon crashes between paying bills and talking by phone with family members. Compact and affable, a volunteer firefighter for twenty-one years and assistant chief for two, Rick called his sister, Jody King Walsh, who lived in Lambertsville. Her children were watching Barney & Friends on television, and she knew nothing about the hijackings. As they spoke, Jody said: “Rick, I hear a plane.” He dismissed her at first, but Jody was adamant.
Still holding the phone, Rick went out to his front porch, facing to the northwest of Shanksville. He heard it, too, a screaming jet engine. The porch boards rumbled beneath his feet. Rick couldn’t see the plane, but he heard the crash and saw the fireball.
“Oh my God, Rick! It crashed!” Jody said.
“I know. I’ve got to go.”
Rick threw the phone inside and sprinted back to his store. No one there had heard the explosion. A customer thought he was joking when Rick described what had just happened. He bolted back outside and ran a hundred yards uphill to the fire station to answer the dispatch call from Somerset County’s 9-1-1 center.
“What stations are dispatched?9” Rick asked.
The dispatcher said only Shanksville, Stoystown, and a nearby village called Friedens, then asked: “Do you wish any additional fire units?”
“Affirmative, Somerset,” said Rick, who connected the dots to New York and the Pentagon as quickly as anyone. “This is a large jetliner,” he said, breathing hard, “probably related to what’s going on.” He asked for three more departments. Soon he’d ask for more.
Rick geared up and leapt into the driver’s seat of “Big Mo,” a 1992 fire engine that carried a thousand gallons of water, accompanied by three other Shanksville volunteers: Keith Custer, Merle Flick, and Robert Kelly. As they pulled out of the station, Rick called his wife, Tricia. Fearing that more planes would fall from the sky, he told her: “Go get our kids out of school. . . . I don’t know what’s happening.” Anticipating mass casualties, Rick called the dispatcher again and requested every available emergency unit10 in Somerset and Cambria Counties.
The four Shanksville firefighters barely spoke as the siren wailed and they wondered what they’d find. Keith said his mouth was so dry he couldn’t swallow; Rick realized that he couldn’t swallow either. As they approached the crash site, Keith spoke for them all: “Guys, prepare yourself.11 Because this is something we’ve never seen before.”
Watching the Twin Towers burn on television in the smoking lounge of his Somerset funeral home, Wally Miller turned to his father, Wilbur, who’d preceded Wally as the elected county coroner.
“Hey,” Wally asked, “how’d you like to be the coroner12 in New York City today?”
Wilbur and his wife, Wilma, had founded the Miller Funeral Home in 1953, four years before Wally’s birth. Lanky, six foot four, with a passing resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, Wally joined the family business in 1980, after college and a year of mortuary science school. He took over the funeral home in 1995 and won election as coroner two years later, after his father retired. The county job13 busied him with three or four death certificates a week, mostly for natural causes, plus occasional accidents, drug overdoses, and suicides. Wally determined cause and manner of death, notified next of kin, and shepherded remains to the morgue or a funeral home, his own or a competitor’s. His professional life was the sensitive, orderly business and bureaucracy of death and grief, except in the rare cases when it was anything but orderly.
Three weeks earlier, Wally had met members of the Shanksville Fire Department on a case he felt certain would be among the most memorable of his career. A car had struck a deer,14 sending it airborne and into the path of an oncoming pickup truck. The deer had sailed through the truck’s windshield, passing entirely through the passenger compartment and out the rear window to its death. The pickup driver suffered only minor injuries, but as the deer flew through the cab, one of its hooves nearly decapitated a forty-eight-year-old man in the passenger seat. As Wally sized up the scene, he asked the Shanksville fire crew: “Could you ever think15 of something more bizarre happening than this?”
Wally left his father watching the televised destruction and went into the funeral home’s office to catch up on paperwork. Around 10:30 a.m., he answered a call from a secretary in the coroner’s office in neighboring Cambria County. She told him their office was available to help however he needed with the plane crash that just took place in Somerset County, an event that Wally knew nothing about. Wally did, however, know that most of his elected colleagues were attending an annual conference of the Pennsylvania State Coroner’s Association. He thought the secretary’s call was his fellow coroners’ idea of gallows humor. The secretary insisted it was no joke, so Wally called the county 9-1-1 office.
“It’s possibly a hijacked aircraft,16 and it’s possibly a 747, although they don’t have a lot of verifications yet,” the dispatcher told him.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wally replied.
“No, no, Wally. It’s just . . .”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Wally repeated.
“No, Wally.”
The dispatcher handed the phone to Rick Lohr, director of the county’s Emergency Management Agency. “Wally,” Lohr said, “if I were you, I’d find a place to set up a temporary morgue somewhere.”
Dressed in firefighting gear, steeling himself, Terry Shaffer parked his minivan as close as he could to the crash site, near the end of a dirt road formerly used by trucks to haul away coal. He lumbered ahead on foot, searching for Rick King or anyone else from Shanksville who could get him up to speed. Along the way, Terry saw about fifty people, among them state troopers, other emergency responders, and civilians who’d flocked to the catastrophe. The strangers seemed to float by him, almost in slow motion, their faces pale and expressionless. Terry thought they looked like ghosts.
About forty minutes after the crash of Flight 93, Terry reached his destination, a place al-Qaeda certainly never knew existed: a rolling field of grass the color of dried moss, roughly the size of New York City’s Central Park, with a dense grove of hemlock trees at its far edge. On a hilltop in the distance, the field’s most prominent features were two rusting red-and-white machines, one as big as a bungalow, the other the size of a minibus. Both had cranelike booms that extended one hundred feet into the air, with steel cables dangling like jungle vines. Called draglines, the machines had spent decades pulling toothed metal buckets across the ground to strip away rock and soil and expose countless tons of coal. They were left behind when the mine played out, like rotted schooners on a dry seabed. The draglines were vaguely the size of the commercial airliner that Terry had expected to see crumpled before him.
Instead, all Terry initially saw was a smoking crater. Sixty yards beyond it, he saw several acres of burned or smoldering hemlocks. From the ground, Terry couldn’t see that the plane’s wings had left blackened impressions on either side of the crater, evidence that would soon be filmed by a police helicopter hovering over the site.
Firefighters sprayed water into the crater, onto a smoking airplane tire, and onto the trees, as small fires sparked and flared on evergreen branches. Everywhere Terry looked on the ground, spread like dandelions as far as he could see, were ragged bits of honeycomb insulation, twisted metal, torn wire, crumpled paper, and shredded fabric. As his nose absorbed the sickly-sweet stench of burned flesh and jet fuel, Terry understood that if he
looked closely, he’d find more gruesome evidence hidden in the grass.
During his drive, Terry had imagined a mass casualty scene strewn with bodies, limbs, and other large remains. Maybe, just maybe, some survivors. Now, he understood they’d find nothing of the sort. Terry would soon learn that United Flight 93 had struck the ground at a 40-degree angle, nearly upside down, its nose and right wing hitting first. Its fuel-filled wings detonated on impact, sending up the fireball and the plume of smoke. The cockpit and front section blasted forward into the hemlocks. The remaining fuselage burrowed into the soft earth and burst to pieces. The explosion annihilated everything, including the forty men and women who fought to save themselves and the four terrorists who resolved to kill them all. Except for a few large pieces of metal, engine parts, and the burning tire near the crater, all that remained of the Boeing 757 were millions of charred fragments.
Terry walked past the crater, which stretched some thirty feet across and more than fifteen feet deep. There he found Rick, whose four-man Shanksville crew was the first firefighting team to reach the site. Rick had parked Big Mo near the edge of the crater. He and the others had leapt from the engine and took part in the brief, fruitless search for survivors. Initially the ranking fire official on the scene, Rick had felt besieged by people asking “What do you want us to do?”17 Now Rick looked wan. Terry thought he might be in shock. Terry put his hand on Rick’s shoulder: “Are you okay?” Rick wasn’t, at least not yet, but a wave of relief18 crashed over him as he realized that he could hand off control to the chief.
“This is really big,” Rick said.
Fall and Rise Page 42