The Pentagon: One Year Later

RAY SUAREZ:

In recent days, they've been preparing for a memorial ceremony at the Pentagon. (Sirens) Could anyone who saw this scene-- a charred, burning wreck-- have imagined this scene less than a year later? Last summer, Lee Evey was supervising the completion of the first phase of a 20 year, $4 billion renovation at the Pentagon.

LEE EVEY, Pentagon Renovation Program Manager:

Our expectation, at the time, was that we would march around the building renovating one million square feet at a time and kind of moving people back as we went around. And suddenly on September 11, it was hit by an aircraft traveling about 350 miles per hour with about 10,000 gallons of jet fuel on it.

RAY SUAREZ:

The plane plowed diagonally through parts of the new renovation and the original building. Over the next few days the fire, water, and smoke damaged about two million square feet, almost a third of the Pentagon. In an interview last December, Evey described their first act in what has become known as the Phoenix Project.

LEE EVEY:

We went out and we hired very, very quickly, overnight some people who are experts in blast recovery. They had worked Mexico City, they had worked Oklahoma City, they had worked the earlier blast at the twin towers in New York, and got them on site as quickly as possible.

RAY SUAREZ:

Chief among those hires was Allyn Kilsheimer, a structural engineer with years of experience in blast recovery.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER, Chief Structural Engineer:

They asked me to, a) design it, b) be responsible to make sure it's built the way we want it built. I told them we had three rules. One is there are no rules except for my rules, and that they had to keep all the people with paper and all the bureaucrats out of my face, and they did that. I've never seen anything like it. I couldn't get away with this in downtown Washington on a private job.

RAY SUAREZ:

Kilsheimer's motto was simple: "Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way." Sometime during the early planning of the Phoenix Project, a decision was made to have offices up and running, workers at their desks in the outer section of the Pentagon-- its public face-- on September 11, 2002. Just under 11 months ago, demolition crews working around the clock, flattened 400,000 square feet of the damaged building. Then they immediately began pouring concrete and they haven't stopped since. Instead of the usual six months, the demolition phase took a month and a day then:

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

The next guy tried to beat his own schedule by more than that guy beat his schedule, and that's how it happened. Every person is showing what can be done.

RAY SUAREZ:

When we visited the site last December, the pace was so hectic, it was difficult to get anybody to stop and talk.

KEVIN REED:

We come in early and work late, and there's no questions. We're trying to get this thing put back together as fast as possible. It's like bin Laden can't come over here and hurt this country, because we can put it back together.

RAY SUAREZ:

Back together as fast as possible has taken ingenuity and short cuts. For example, after a concrete floor is poured, it normally takes a month to cure or dry before carpet or flooring can be laid. There was no way they could wait that long.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

There was some good old boy from West Virginia out here and we are talking about "holy shit, how are we going to deal with this?" And he goes, "why don't we use vinegar and water?" And we washed all the floors with vinegar and water and essentially it took the moisture out and then we put a special sealer down on top of that to keep it out. So that was like 24 hours. We put the windows up two days after we poured a floor below it.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

All this is new...

RAY SUAREZ:

In early August, Kilsheimer gave us a tour of the work in progress-- the result of thousands of creative, unorthodox decisions, like the vinegar and water dried floor. Another simple example: Men on stilts.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

That's how they do their work. It saves them a lot of time and a lot of bad backs.

RAY SUAREZ:

The rebuilt section of the Pentagon is tougher with safety features everywhere.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

Like this is a firewall, so any penetration through this wall is sealed so that you won't get fire or smoke through the wall. And the walls are also affixed at the top, so that in case there's an explosion of some type, the walls won't cave in on the people that are trying to get out. This area, I happen to remember vividly. This was just gone. The floors were blown upwards, the slabs were upward. Somewhere around here is where I found a coffee cup sitting on top of a cabinet that still had coffee in it, and everything around it was like blown apart.

RAY SUAREZ:

Survivors told of the difficulty of groping their way out of a dark and smoke-filled building. Solution?

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

Here's some of the luminescent strip, okay, that shows people where out is, and it glows, I want to say, from four to six hours. New. Everything you see here is brand new.

RAY SUAREZ:

On Thursday August 15, running way ahead of even their sped-up schedule, Pentagon employees began returning to their rebuilt offices. One of the first to move back in was Peter Murphy, counsel to the Marine Corps commandant.

PETER MURPHY, Marine Corps General Counsel:

When the plane hit, I was standing right by the window. Thank God there were blast proof windows, otherwise I'm sure I would have been killed. I was watching the television and the World Trade Center, and all of the sudden the plane hit. And the wall moved in and I got tossed across the room, as did two lawyers who were in here with me, and the ceiling fell down and the floor started to buckle and we, after the initial shock, we headed toward the exit.

RAY SUAREZ:

Murphy's office was just to the left of the area totally destroyed by the plane. The blast-resistant windows he credits with saving his life were installed just before September 11, as part of the Pentagon's long-term renovation. The replacements are even stronger, with two-inch thick glass encased in interlocking steel-beam supports, interspersed with an experimental bullet-proof type cloth.

LEE EVEY:

Boy Scouts all over town are getting lost, because when they take out their compass, there's so much steel in that wall, all the needles point toward that wall.

RAY SUAREZ:

A charred sandstone block saved from the rubble is one of the few reminders of that terrible day in this brand spanking new office building. Kilsheimer and his workers also signed a defiant memorial inside the building.

ALLYN KILSHEIMER:

This is the single most incredible construction thing that's happened in this country that any of us know about, as far as what has been done by these 2,900 people and how they put it together. And I don't know, hopefully would never have to be done again, but I don't know that it could ever be done again.

RAY SUAREZ:

Kilsheimer and Evey admit they and their crews will probably go through a big deflation on September 12. Lee Evey is retiring on September 16, with the realization he will probably never supervise a job like the Phoenix Project again.