by Steve Vogel
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The chaos of the first hours had been replaced by order, and a tent city supporting recovery operations had sprung up in front of the crash site.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 wo
rking 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.
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 m
ore 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.