A Defiant Recovery

Thumbing its nose at terrorists, the Pentagon Renovation Program forges ahead. Contributing editor Tom Philpott chronicles its progress.
by Tom Philpott

Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program, left his office trailer near the Pentagon's south parking lot at 9:36 a.m. Sept. 11. Walking north beside Route 27, he suddenly saw a commercial airliner crest the hilltop Navy Annex. American Airlines Flight 77 reached him so fast and flew so low that Probst dropped to the ground, fearing he'd lose his head to its right engine.

The hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon's western face, penetrating the two lower floors between corridors four and five at a 45-degree angle. The disintegrating aircraft sheared through concrete columns and interior walls. Debris penetrated the building's three outermost rings—E, D, and C. Burning jet fuel exploded through offices.

Lee Evey, manager of the Pentagon Renovation Program since November 1997, had planned to retire in January 2002. His plans, like his nation, changed Sept. 11. Because of a death in his family, Evey was driving to Tennessee that morning. When he stopped for lunch in North Carolina, the waitress apologized for the slow service. The kitchen staff, she said, was watching television, gripped by the terror in New York and Washington, D.C.

Evey jumped in his car and headed north. By cell phone, he directed his staff to give rescue teams whatever they needed, from heavy equipment to shoring materials. He arrived at the scene by seven that evening, his backseat filled with bags of fast food for staff and rescuers.

The murderous attack on the Pentagon, symbol of U.S. military might, killed 64 passengers and crew and 125 building employees, both military and civilian. One hundred and fourteen were injured.

Four days after the tragedy, a day after the last flames were extinguished, the Renovation Program office effectively thumbed its nose at the terrorists. It announced two contract awards to repair the damage and resume the renovation. And the project would be completed not by 2014, as previously announced, but by December 2012. Evey, a 55-year-old Vietnam veteran and career civil servant, vows to stay on "at least until we're back on an even keel."

Work in progress

The massive renovation effort began in 1994, with an estimated cost at the time of $1.2 billion and a two-decade deadline. The newest renovation estimate exceeds $2 billion, excluding relocation costs, extra rental space, and growing information technology requirements. Any doubts about the project's worth, however, disappeared the day that aircraft became a missile. Fortunately, Evey says, it struck the only aboveground section of the Pentagon that had been renovated, and the renovation prevented many more deaths, by both happenstance and design.

The lifesaving design involved the E-ring wall. The renovation team had help from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers' Blast Center in Omaha, Neb., to incorporate lessons learned from bomb blasts that destroyed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Six-inch steel beams were installed, vertically and horizontally, through all five floors. New blast-resistant windows, almost two inches thick, were mounted inside steel frames.

Between these one-ton window units, ballistic cloth had been stretched and bolted to the steel frames to reduce deadly shrapnel. This Kevlar cloth proved to be so strong that a crew removing debris after the attack found a single sheet of cloth holding up a 4,000-pound piece of limestone. "It absorbed fragmentation that might otherwise have come through these spaces between the windows and steel," Evey says. "Stuff just fell to the floor."

Though the aircraft ripped through support columns, the web of steel beams and window frames prevented collapse of the E-ring for 35 minutes, Evey says, giving many employees, including those in offices above the impact point, time to escape.

Lives also were spared because many offices in the impact area were vacant, thanks again to the renovation. The two damaged "wedges" of the Pentagon contained office space for 10,000, but only 4,600 employees occupied them on Sept. 11.

The renovation is proceeding in the same sequence the Pentagon was built, one wedge at a time. Wedge numbers run counterclockwise, and the area of a wedge does not run, as logic might suggest, between corners of the building. Rather, a wedge is chevron-shaped, with one corner of the building serving as its center apex. The area of a wedge runs halfway down the two adjacent sides, to the left and the right. Wedge 1, for example, includes the area from the center of the heliport side of the building, around the southwest corner and halfway along the building's south terrace side. The wedge shape allowed a more exact duplication of sections and avoided a difficult merger of space along angled corners.

Each wedge, with a million square feet of space, was built essentially as a stand-alone building, says Evey. The Pentagon was built in 16 months, from September 1941 to January 1943, by 15,000 laborers working around the clock. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Evey explains, wanted a "working building without ornamentation or ostentation. … It's just a straightforward, effective place to do business."

The building design—five concentric rings linked to 10 primary radial corridors that shoot like wheel spokes off a five-sided courtyard—is pleasing, but the size is what's remarkable. The Pentagon has the volume of three Empire State buildings. It can accommodate 25,000 workers but had 40,000 at its peak in World War II. Yet the building's profile at ground level is deceptively modest. Each of the World Trade Center towers held as many workers as the Pentagon. But two plane strikes in New York killed almost 4,000; one plane strike at the Pentagon took 125 lives.

The down side

Behind its limestone cladding, the basic structure of the Pentagon is reinforced concrete because steel in 1942 was reserved for the war effort. Except for a few areas where rebar is exposed, concrete floors and support columns have held up well.

Some features of the building are terribly inefficient, however. The rings that, seen from above, give the building its distinctive appearance "look suspiciously like a radiator coil," says Evey. "... As an energy dissipater, [the building] does a damn good job."

With a design that maximizes the number of exterior walls, presumably to allow many windows, the building is hard to heat or cool. Replacing the rings with a single roof is unacceptable; the Pentagon was deemed a historic landmark in 1992, so its appearance, by law, must be preserved. The renovation team considered installing huge skylights over the alleys to save on heating bills, but the greenhouse effect in summer would have produced an offsetting spike in air conditioning costs.

The Pentagon's deteriorating infrastructure (plumbing, electrical, heating, and air conditioning systems; asbestos-laden walls and ceilings; and deficient safety systems) was a legacy of decades of budgetary neglect and poor maintenance standards, and this spurred the renovation effort prior to Sept. 11.

Defense officials considered replacing the Pentagon with a new Department of Defense headquarters, which could be built on Fort Belvoir, Va., several miles south. Their study found that building new would be cheaper than renovating. But the cost advantage fell away when the expense of building roads, parking lots, and a commuter rail system for 25,000 new employees at Fort Belvoir was calculated. When the cost of demolishing the Pentagon and disposing of all the hazardous material was added in, renovation became the cheaper option.

"Wedge 1 alone had 2,000 tons of asbestos," Evey explains. "Presumably we have another 8,000 tons to go. You don't just bulldoze that."

Enlisting expertise

The first-ever Pentagon renovation began in 1994 with work on basement areas, found only on the river side of the building. When problems arose in 1997 with cost overruns, work quality, and delays, Evey was appointed program manager. He arrived with an impressive record in negotiation and management of space program contracts for nasa and Air Force Space Command, but he had no background in construction or engineering.

"I'm very fortunate to have a lot of people who are extremely knowledgeable ... and able to explain complex things in such a simple manner that even a dumb guy like me can understand it," Evey says modestly.

The Pentagon's sorry infrastructure argued for reducing each wedge to its concrete shell. The rising terrorism threat argued for strengthening the building against bomb attacks. But alternatives to both were discussed and, thankfully, rejected, Evey says.

One solution to the asbestos problem was to encapsulate rather than remove. "You can just spray stuff on it so it's very unlikely to ever get released into the air. That's less expensive but also less effective," Evey says. So asbestos was removed from Wedge 1, and that decision reduced the danger to rescue personnel on Sept. 11.

On blast protection, some officials argued for making the building "more elegant" and taking a pass on blast-resistant windows and steel, Evey says. "Right now, everybody agrees that steel and the windows were a good idea."

Cost is one reason why the renovation won't be completed until 2012. Building occupancy is another. Each wedge holds 5,000 workers who have to be moved someplace else. Wedge 1 workers had to be moved into a million square feet of commercial office space spread across Northern Virginia. Preparing those spaces required its own renovation. Those workers won't return to the Pentagon until 2012 to preserve "swing space" in the Pentagon for the remainder of the renovation. The strategy ensures that 80 percent of the work force will make only a single move during renovation.

New features

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a forensic analysis of how Wedge 1 held up under attack, examining materials, design, and building operations to determine what worked and what didn't. The need for some changes already is apparent, Evey says, related mostly to fire response and safety.

Exit signs above doors, no matter how bright, aren't enough to help victims in smoke-filled hallways. If the smoke is thick, people are crawling on their bellies, sucking in what breathable air they can find. Installing glow-in-the-dark signs on baseboards, perhaps identifying the hallway up ahead, might save lives.

Smoke walls installed in Wedge 1 also raised some concerns. The first problem was that only the fire safety officers in each work area knew that smoke barriers would deploy from side closets automatically and would retract at a touch to a waist-high handle.

People desperate to get out became confused by these unfamiliar barriers blocking their paths. Not knowing how to retract them, they tore them out of the walls. Even if every employee had been instructed on use of the smoke doors, Evey explains, a handle to retract them probably should be placed near the floor where fire victims struggle to survive. "This stuff sounds so simple it's amazing more attention isn't paid to it," he says.

Some high-tech innovations worked quite well. Near the center of Wedge 1 is a new Building Operations Control Center (bocc) where engineers can monitor all heating and cooling, plumbing, electric, and information technology systems. Weeks before Sept. 11, a clothes dryer caught fire in an older part of the building. From the bocc, technicians were able to increase air pressure in Wedge 1 to prevent smoke from infiltrating.

When Flight 77 hit, the bocc staff worked their control panels again to minimize fire and smoke damage and aid the rescue effort. They kept critical systems operating as long as possible but turned off electrical circuits as fire fighters and rescue personnel tried to enter damaged areas made more dangerous by exposed wires. The bocc itself sustained smoke damage, but its operators worked through it, Evey says.

Surprising Revelation After a few months as Renovation Program director, Evey began giving talks about the Pentagon to various groups. He would debunk long-standing myths about the building, such as rats the size of cats, hidden bodies, and a truck that got bogged down during construction and remained buried beneath the building. Then one day, he got a call from a contractor who was driving a piling into Basement Segment 2. "Mr. Evey," he said, "you better get over here." "Why? What's the matter?" "We just found the truck."

Also installed in Wedge 1 was a sprinkler system, a first for the Pentagon. Only a few small systems had been installed over the years in select offices. Twenty thousand gallons of flaming jet fuel will overwhelm any sprinkler system, but the system still can prevent fire from spreading and did so in this disaster. Evey's staff has heard from employees who said a fireball had filled the hall where they were standing in Wedge 1 "when sprinklers came on and drenched everything." By contrast, the fire spread down the E ring of Wedge 2, past corridor five, which has no sprinkler system. "It got so hot in there that windows melted," Evey says.

The outside walls of the Pentagon give evidence of the disparity in fire and blast protection between wedges 1 and 2. Exterior windows of Wedge 2, far from the plane's impact, were blown out and the limestone scorched by fire and smoke. Many Wedge 1 windows, close to the impact point, remained intact, and the limestone was relatively clean.

Overall, says Evey, the disaster ended up showing the renovation of Wedge 1 was successful.

"This building was hit with a 757 flying at 350 miles an hour with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel on board—and we had 125 people killed. Those deaths are very unfortunate. You wish no one had been killed. But [considering the potential] that's darn good."

Lasting impressions

A few days after the Sept. 11 attack, Evey stood ankle-deep in mud with members of his staff to watch Marines in hard hats climb atop the roof and unfurl a huge American flag. That image, and so many others from the tragedy, "will stay with our country forever," he says.

Defense officials are discussing a permanent memorial to remember those who died. One plan would locate it where the aircraft entered the building and dedicate it Sept. 11, 2002, the one-year anniversary of the attack. By then, Evey promises, the roof and E-ring offices will be repaired so that, for onlookers at least, the scars will be gone. Limestone from the original quarry in Indiana already is cut and waiting to be shipped to Washington.

Evey says he is proud to be associated with the renovation and to be preserving "the majesty of this building."

"It may not be majesty that soars from many stories, like some buildings," he says. "But there's majesty in its solidity, its strength, its sense of purpose, and in the admirable way it has served the missions. This is a truly remarkable building."