Pentagon Rises From the Ashes of Sept. 11

WASHINGTON â€”  The offices behind the nearly white limestone of the Pentagon’s newly renovated southwestern facade look, eerily, as they did in the early morning hours of Sept. 11.

But eight inches of standing water from the sprinkler system, plus the resulting mold, and the stench of the exploding diesel from full jet fuel tanks left construction crews with little choice but to replace nearly every visible inch of the scarred slice of the building--from the cement and marble of the poured terrazzo floor to the blast-proof windows and freshly painted drywall on the ceiling.

Nearly everything has been re-crafted with a future attack in mind--and a desire to make it look as if the clock has been set back.

This Sept. 11, as planners are still considering a sweeping transformation of New York’s crumbled World Trade Center, 3,000 of the 4,600 employees who worked on the damaged side of the Pentagon before the terrorist attack will have returned to a military headquarters deliberately remade to erase the devastation wrought by a hijacked airliner that killed 125 workers inside and 64 aboard American Airlines Flight 77. The focus on restoring the Pentagon’s glory is revealed in the name of the reconstruction effort: “The Phoenix Project,� after the mythical bird that was burned and then rose from its own ashes.

Lt. Col. Henry Huntley was one of 130 workers moving into their newly renovated first-floor offices this week. Inside, the Army’s public affairs office remains an unadorned hollow of clean desks and stacked boxes.

“We know what happened here on Sept. 11, and it’s something that we’ll never forget,� Huntley said. “But we haven’t let that stop us. We’re moving forward.... The Pentagon has life.�

Behind the refurbished stone, the same type of fluorescent lights rest in the same-style acoustical ceiling tiles in the coveted outer offices of the Pentagon’s E Ring, illuminating the same plush red carpet and dark-stained desks as those in the Joint Staff offices across the building. The replacement limestone was hauled from the same vein in Indiana as the original stone, lighter than the original rock but destined to darken with time and soot from Route 27 nearby. But there are some differences. The exit signs, for instance, are no longer at eye level. With a glow-in-the-dark life of four hours, they now sit only six inches off the ground, where hundreds of workers dropped to avoid the lung-searing black smoke from the diesel fuel of the jetliner that crashed into the first floor, sending a fireball through the cubicle farms above. Survivors who found the higher exit signs virtually useless suggested the change.

“The jet fuel left a black smoke that was coming down as you moved forward,� said Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, a public affairs officer who interviewed many survivors. “People were yelling, ‘Get down! Get down!’ �

Childress lost 24 of his colleagues in the Army’s second-floor personnel office. He attributes his survival to “divine intervention�: He had been on the job just one week and was at his home a mile away to meet the moving van, a day late for its scheduled Sept. 10 delivery.

To accompany the new exit signs, there are additional exits. Each piece of limestone on the building’s facade has been replaced or cleaned--except one, with “September 11, 2001� etched into the charred stone. Perhaps the most noticeable change for the occupants is a starker blast of air-conditioning, kept cooler inside better-insulated walls.

At the time of the attack, renovations to the 400,000-square-foot section were being completed. Project managers essentially tore everything down and rebuilt.

This time, building to withstand a terrorist assault was “standard operating procedure,� said Jean Barnak, the Pentagon’s deputy project manager for the renovation. Many of the subtle innovations in the refurbished area, such as the lowered exit signs, will likely be included as other parts of the building are renovated, she said.

Then there are the memorials. In the second floor of the outer ring, workers are moving stained glass from the third floor to a new chaplain’s office, already adorned by a stained-glass eagle superimposed over the five-sided building with the script, “United in Memory, Sept. 11, 2001.� In the next room, the wall reads “America’s Heroes,� above a space reserved for the victims’ names.

Outside, John Deere tractors and concrete rollers rush to smooth the ground where a memorial ceremony will be held on the anniversary of the attack. Nearby, workers clear the site for a permanent memorial.

The project is not due to be finished until spring, but the construction has marked a refreshing change for anyone who has waited for contractors to complete a job. With some workers voluntarily spending Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holidays on the site, some portions of the renovation have been as much as a month ahead of schedule.

“There was such a common cause here. Everyone did what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it--or even earlier,� Barnak said as a worker rolled paint on the window sill behind her. “I would have workers come over and say how proud they were to have worked on the project. They’d come over and thank you for being allowed to work on it.�