by Steve Vogel
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.
Somebody could fly into the doughnut hole
Evey’s initial reaction was to do away with the fire-suppression doors, the cause of so much grief and confusion. But fire-safety experts persuaded him that the doors were needed. They had prevented the fast-moving smoke from reaching areas where it could have endangered more lives. The answer was to mark the doors with luminescent signs and instructions and, most important, to drill occupants on how to use them.
Some of the fixes were easy. Luminescent exit signs would be installed low to the ground, where they would be visible even if smoke were filling up a room. More exits would be added. The sprinkler system would get a backup feed, ensuring two sources of water in case pipes were severed. More fire escapes would be added, especially for the fifth floor; many stairwells went up only four floors because of the last-minute decision in the summer of 1942 to build out the fifth floor.
Corridors that had been blocked off over the years would be reopened, giving workers in the cubicle farms a quicker route out. The building’s interior would be hardened with concrete masonry unit walls—cinderblocks filled with concrete and steel rebar. Fire-resistant wallboard would go up in the corridors. Partitions would be put up in big office bays to prevent fire and blast traveling across large areas so easily.
Ironically, though no one realized it, the safety upgrades were similar in some ways to the recommendations—ultimately rejected because they would slow construction—to protect the building after Pearl Harbor by crisscrossing the big office bays with walls.
As was the case after Pearl Harbor, the terrorist attack opened up the cash coffers. The renovation was not scheduled to be finished until 2014 because of congressional funding restraints, but money was no longer a problem. Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, toured the building in October and declared thirteen years was too long to leave major portions of the building unprotected. Congress soon appropriated $300 million to accelerate the renovation to 2010; offices for senior officials would be completed by 2007. Even as the renovation program geared up to rebuild the destroyed portion of the building, work raced along in Wedge 2.
Security officials decided the time was ripe to fix a threat long posed by the triangle of major roads surrounding the Pentagon. One of the roads, Route 110, ran directly in front of the River entrance, passing within about forty yards of some of the most sensitive places in the building. The idea of moving the road had been dismissed in the past as too expensive, but $40 million was soon found to cover that and other road-security im
provements.
The original renovation plan to move all command centers to the basement—scrapped after the disastrous cost overruns—was revisited. Some security officials wanted all the command centers in the basement; others argued they should be dispersed throughout the building. As debate continued, Evey ordered his top staff to design plans for basement command centers, correctly guessing that this would be the ultimate decision.
In October, Wolfowitz approved a $15 million package of chemical, biological, and radiological protection for the most critical parts of the building, including the offices of senior leaders and all command centers. The plan called for filtered air systems, biological, chemical, and radiological detectors, and a quick reaction team to respond to attacks.
To Evey’s astonishment, there was even a willingness to reconsider moving the top command out of the E Ring and into more protected positions on the A and B rings. “Recent events have shaken up complacency and there is unprecedented willingness” among the services to do whatever Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted, Evey wrote in an e-mail on October 1. There was a window of opportunity after September 11 to make changes. “That window will not last long,” Evey predicted.
Evey asked to brief Wolfowitz about the security proposals. Brigadier General John Batiste, the deputy secretary’s senior military adviser, wanted the recommendations “fully coordinated” among all parties before he would set up an appointment with Wolfowitz. Evey exploded with frustration. “I can easily get consensus by not changing anything that high ranking people already want to do,” he wrote Batiste October 2.
Three years ago I could have made everyone in this building lots happier if I had agreed to take the money I spent on blast resistant windows and steel reinforcement in the walls and spent it instead on walnut paneling and private bathrooms. Believe me, there WERE such discussions.
Batiste scheduled the meeting, but the proposal did not get far. The “magnetism of the E ring was a little too powerful,” Wolfowitz later observed. Rumsfeld was later dismissive of the idea, saying the A Ring was no safer than the E Ring: “You don’t think somebody could fly into the doughnut hole?”
Are you nuts?
The crash scene was turned over to Evey and the renovation program on October 2. Evey had intended to begin demolition the moment he gained control, but he had second thoughts. A memorial service was to be held on the opposite side of the building on the River terrace on October 11, the one-month anniversary of the attack. Evey talked it over with team leaders. “What’s it going to be like for the families to be on that side of the building, and we’re over on this side of the building just ripping the hell out of it?” Evey asked.
They delayed demolition, but crews kept working inside the building, cleaning out water- and smoke-damaged areas. It was miserable wearing protective suits in the unseasonably warm autumn weather, but the workers moved quickly. Thousands of displaced employees were soon moving back into the periphery of the demolition zone.
Kilsheimer was worried about getting limestone for the exterior wall; the quarries in Indiana, where the original Pentagon limestone had come from, would be closing for the winter. His initial plans called for substituting concrete for the hundred yards of limestone wall that would have to be replaced. But the Bybee Stone Co. in Indiana immediately sent an estimator to the Pentagon to determine the proper finish and color of the existing limestone, then made sure enough of the right blocks were quarried before operations shut down.
Evey and his team found that attitude almost everywhere. All they had to say was, “I’m calling from the Pentagon reconstruction,” and people instantly wanted to help. Home Depot sent truckloads of material, never charging a cent. Small companies that could afford it less were doing the same.
All around the site, there was an undercurrent among the construction workers, an eagerness to respond to the terrorist attack by quickly rebuilding the Pentagon. In early October, Evey was walking through the damaged area when a group of construction workers stopped him and said they wanted a goal established for the program. “We’ve all been talking about it, and we think the goal ought to be that you move people back within a year,” one of the workers said.
Evey considered the idea. The worst thing he could do was set an unachievable goal. He wanted a target that was a stretch but at least possible. The early estimates had been that it would take two years to rebuild. The physical shell alone—the reconstruction of columns, floors, outer wall, roof—was expected to take eighteen months. But Kilsheimer said it could be done quicker.
On October 5, Evey publicly declared the goal: By September 11, 2002, the outer ring of the Pentagon now lying in ruins would be rebuilt and inhabited by office workers. “Not a made-for-TV sham where people sit there with little plastic computer simulations that aren’t hooked up to anything and a phone that doesn’t work,” Evey later said. “Real computers hooked up to real networks doing real work with real phones, everything functional.”
As Evey walked around the building in subsequent days, more construction workers came up to him.
“Are you nuts?” one asked.
The view from Arlington
Demolition began first thing Thursday morning, October 18. Heavy-equipment operators climbed into the cabs of their front-end loaders and worked their way into the debris. Bucket cranes carried rubble to waiting dump trucks, while workers riding high in baskets sprayed water from hoses to cut down the dust. An acrid odor—the same one present in the days after the attack—arose from the pile.
Employees inside the Pentagon could hear the thunderous collapse of concrete as the huge yellow excavators ate away at the building. The demolition went on twenty-four hours a day, with 450 workers at the site six days a week and a smaller crew on Sundays, and it continued at night under the glare of generator-powered stadium lighting. Dump trucks streamed in and out of the site, carrying 56,000 tons of debris to landfills.
Early on, the stoneworkers taking limestone off the building were not moving fast enough for Kilsheimer. He ordered the T-Rex operator to start biting into the concrete near them to give them a nudge. Then he did the same thing to encourage the teams removing hazardous material. “All of a sudden they started moving much faster,” he said. It had a ripple effect.
Most estimates of how long demolition would take varied from three to eight months. Kilsheimer was the most optimistic, predicting it could be done in six to eight weeks. Whatever the prediction, it was soon apparent that the work was moving fast. In two weeks, workers had cleared half the area.
From the gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery, Colonel McNair could see the work progressing. The funerals for his Army personnel office were in full swing by mid-October. Most of his people were being buried in the same section at Arlington, almost in a line, directly across the road from the devastated section of the Pentagon. The funerals—there were twenty-four of them—continued into December, and the survivors each went to as many as they could handle emotionally.
Seeing his friends and colleagues buried within sight of the place they died was depressing for McNair. During the first funerals, the building looked so stark, with its charred wall and the black gash. As autumn progressed and the leaves fell from the trees, McNair could see more clearly. Cranes and tents were set up, and bustling crews were scraping out the collapsed area. McNair felt something. It was a sense of urgency.
I’m not leaving until this damn place is rebuilt
Kilsheimer felt it too. The one-year goal—“Butts in chairs by September 11, 2002,” as he called it—had taken on a life of its own. The more people bought into it, the fewer obstacles there were. “In the beginning everybody thought that I was a crazy son-of-a-bitch and that there was no way that we could pull this off,” he boasted at the end of October. “Now they know that I am crazier than they thought I was, but it can be pulled off.”
Demolition was completed on November 19, one month and a day after it began. All that remained of the area was the origina
l concrete slab, swept clean. From the air, it looked as if a huge rectangular slice had been neatly cut from the Pentagon.
The quick demolition did more than save time, Kilsheimer thought. The fact that it was so fast meant that the workers for each subsequent phase would try to beat the schedule. Indeed, reconstruction had already begun on the far right corner of the slab. Workers drilled one-and-one-quarter-inch thick, high-strength stainless-steel dowel rods into the old pile caps. Spiral steel rebar was set around the dowels, and then prefabricated formwork assembled around the steel. The initial concrete pour was on November 7, and the first columns were rising.
It was time that the reconstruction got a name. Les Hunkele, one of the project managers, sent a note to Evey. There had been a terrible fire, and now the Pentagon would rise from the ashes. They should call it the Phoenix Project. Not everyone liked the name; some feared people would associate it with the Phoenix Program, the notorious covert U.S. operation during the Vietnam War to assassinate Viet Cong cadres. But Hunkele persisted, and the name started to catch. As demolition finished, Evey signed off on the name.
Thousands of Phoenix Project stickers and patches were given to workers, all emblazoned with a drawing showing the mythical bird rising from a smoking Pentagon. Below it was the slogan the project had adopted, “Let’s Roll”—words attributed to one of the passengers who had revolted against the hijackers aboard United 93. Kilsheimer ordered four thousand Phoenix Project jackets for workers, these bearing his own favorite saying: “Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.”