Pentagon Strike Alleged Witness: Frank Probst

A

Anders

Guest
In Alleged Pentagon Strike Witnesses Introduction
Laura said:
There are several of these links that bring up errors, they no longer exist on the web. It would be useful if anyone could find them archived somewhere and if a thread has not been created for that witness, to create one in the same style.

Each of these testimonies and witnesses needs to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. After all, the ONLY thing that keeps the "Flight 77 hit the Pentagon" thing going is the so-called witnesses.
The quote from the following text that appears on WhatReallyHappened is underlined.

http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/fortress1.html


November 2001: The Pentagon, cleared of debris, stands ready for a lightning-fast renovation that would have the damaged offices open for business weeks before the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack. Officials had estimated that it would take eight months just to clear away the wreckage. Defense Department photo

FORTRESS REBORN
125 Pentagon workers were killed in the Sept. 11 attack,
but thousands more survived. It was a testament to both
the people who work there and the people who built it.

By Vince Crawley
Times staff

Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes' heart races as she walks down Corridor 4, toward E Ring on the Pentagon's first floor.

"I can still smell the smoke," she says, her voice unsteady. She looks around uncomfortably, as though she sees something other than the corridor's clean, newly rebuilt, freshly painted walls.

Here, a year earlier, most of the first- and second-story offices were obliterated by a hijacked passenger jet, killing 125 in the Pentagon, 59 passengers and crew on the plane and five suicide terrorists.

Cruz-Cortes, a 21-year-old Army personnel specialist from Trenton, N.J., pushed and pulled wounded coworkers to safety and was awarded the Soldier's Medal for heroism. But the rebuilt area gives her something akin to combat flashbacks. She avoids going there if she doesn't have to.

Most people today will see nothing in Corridor 4 but new offices. Racing to meet a self-imposed deadline, a team of up to 3,000 construction workers labored, sometimes around the clock, to rebuild the destroyed section of the Pentagon in time for memorial ceremonies marking the Sept. 11 anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history. The cost: at least $500 million, possibly as much as $1 billion.

The damage is not visible now - except when Cruz-Cortes and the others who barely escaped the carnage close their eyes.


Roosevelt's choice

Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the Pentagon site.

For six decades, until 1941, the military was headquartered in the State, War and Navy Building next to the White House, today known as the Old Executive Office Building.

The War Department had 24,000 employees spread among 17 buildings in and around the city as the Army grew from 270,000 troops in 1940 to 1.4 million in the summer of 1941. Pondering his overcrowded facilities, Brig. Gen. Brehon Somervell, chief of construction for the War Department, hit upon the idea to create one huge building for the department's Washington staff.

Somervell was "dynamic, ruthless, impatient and above all, decisive," said Al Goldberg, the Defense Department's chief historian.

Somervell gave his top engineers a weekend to deliver basic plans for a three- to four-story, fireproof, air-conditioned building on the Virginia side of the Potomac that could house 40,000 workers.

The proposed site was deemed too swampy, so the engineers picked a tract known as Arlington Farms near the gate of Arlington National Cemetery. The plot of land had five sides, which gave the building its basic shape. The initial sketch of July 21, 1941, shows the Pentagon's distinctive exterior columns, which originally echoed the design of the Lincoln Memorial.

Gilmore Clarke, head of the District of Columbia Commission on Fine Arts, led a vocal group opposing the Arlington Cemetery site, fearing such a huge building would desecrate some of the nation's most hallowed ground.

Both Clarke and Somervell vied for Roosevelt's ear. On Aug. 29, 1941, Roosevelt took both men on a drive to view possible sites. According to Clarke's later recollection, Somervell argued so strongly for the Arlington Farms site that the president finally cut him off. "My dear general," he said, "I'm still commander in chief of the Army."

Next, they went a mile to the southeast, to the site Somervell had earlier rejected. It was a hillside leading down to a swampy plain and a recently abandoned airfield, Washington-Hoover Airport. A nearby down-and-out neighborhood was known as Hell's Bottom.

Roosevelt pointed to the location and turned to Clarke. "My dear Gilmore," he said, "we're going to put the building over there, aren't we?" Then Roosevelt turned to Somervell. "Did you hear that, general? We're going to locate the War Department building over there."

And they did. But Clarke didn't always get his way. As architects refined the five-sided shape into the one familiar today, Clarke insisted "the Pentagon presented the largest target in the world for enemy bombs." His argument "made no impression" on Roosevelt, who grew ever more fond of the distinctive design.

The official groundbreaking took place Sept. 11, 1941.


'I knew I was dead'

Exactly 60 years later, half the world was watching the World Trade Center burn on television on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Frank Probst was one of them. A Pentagon renovation worker and retired Army officer, he was inspecting newly installed telecommunications wiring inside the five-story, 6.5-million-square-foot building.

The tall, soft-spoken Probst had a 10 a.m. meeting. About 9:25 a.m., he stopped by the renovation workers' trailer just south of the Pentagon heliport. Someone had a television turned on in the trailer's break room that showed smoke pouring out of the twin towers in New York.

"The Pentagon would make a pretty good target," someone in the break room commented.

The thought stuck with Probst as he picked up his notebook and walked to the North Parking Lot to attend his meeting.

Probst took a sidewalk alongside Route 27, which runs near the Pentagon's western face. Traffic was at a standstill because of a road accident. Then, at about 9:35 a.m., he saw the airliner in the cloudless September sky.

American Airlines Flight 77 approached from the west, coming in low over the nearby five-story Navy Annex on a hill overlooking the Pentagon.

"He has lights off, wheels up, nose down," Probst recalled. The plane seemed to be accelerating directly toward him. He froze.

"I knew I was dead," he said later. "The only thing I thought was, 'Damn, my wife has to go to another funeral, and I'm not going to see my two boys again.'."

He dove to his right. He recalls the engine passing on one side of him, about six feet away.

The plane's right wing went through a generator trailer "like butter," Probst said. The starboard engine hit a low cement wall and blew apart.


He still can't remember the sound of the explosion. Sometimes the memory starts to come back when he hears a particularly low-flying airliner heading into nearby Reagan National Airport, or when military jets fly over a burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Most of the time, though, his memory is silent.

"It was pretty horrible," he said of the noiseless images he carries inside him, of the jet vanishing in a cloud of smoke and dust, and bits of metal and concrete drifting down like confetti.

On either side of him, three streetlights had been sheared in half by the airliner's wings at 12 to 15 feet above the ground. An engine had clipped the antenna off a Jeep Grand Cherokee stalled in traffic not far away.

(A: Article continued here): http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/fortress2.html

FORTRESS REBORN, cont.

Built in 16 months

There are a number of reasons the Pentagon didn't suffer the same fate as the World Trade Center. The building has 35 percent more floor space than either of the World Trade Center towers, but it's horizontal - actually built on a gentle slope - so occupants who survived the blast found dozens of exits.

The Pentagon was built of steel-reinforced concrete. And, to save precious steel for wartime weaponry, the builders used generous helpings of concrete and brick. So the interior is actually a maze of thick walls and fat pillars, which helped deaden the airliner's fatal blow.

The Pentagon also owes its sturdiness to World War II politics. Some opposed the costly undertaking because there would be no practical postwar use for such a large building.

Planners insisted they would use the postwar building as a gigantic warehouse for military records, and the floors were reinforced to handle the anticipated extra weight.

The original construction was accelerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was completed in 16 months. It would have been done in just 14 months, but the space-hungry Somervell ordered wooden storage attics to be turned into fifth-floor offices.

At the peak of construction, 15,000 workers toiled day and night. At least eight lost their lives in construction accidents while building the Pentagon.


'It was silent'


Photos by Rob Curtis, Times Staff

Army Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, top, and Marine Cpl. Michael Vera, right, were both inside the Pentagon when the plane hit, and both stayed inside to rescue wounded co-workers.

Marine Cpl. Michael Vera never heard the explosion caused by Flight 77.

On the fourth floor, he was about 100 feet from the impact, but the mass of the building cushioned the sound.

"I didn't hear the blast," said Vera, 22. "You didn't hear any-thing at all. It was silent."

Instead, his office just shook. When he went out into the hallway, he saw it was quickly filling with smoke.

He and a few other Marines heard people calling for help in the darkness. He went toward the voices and realized he had reached the cliff-like edge of a collapsed section of the building.

The air grew hotter. Looking down through the smoke, he saw flames. The voices came from a room next door, one wall away from the collapsed section.

Heading down Corridor 4 on the first floor, they passed sparking electrical cords and collapsed walls. They found more survivors. "Some were badly burned," Vera said. "Some were hurt really bad."

He went as far as he could, until the burning jet fuel was too hot to stand. Firefighters took over the rescue effort.

In all, Vera helped pull out more than a dozen people.

"We pulled together and we did what we had to do," said Vera, who was decorated for heroism.


A 'remarkable' building

The destruction offered a rare glimpse of the Pentagon's inner skeleton, which includes steel rods known as "rebar" inside reinforced concrete. Ordinarily, these are straight or ribbed.


Lee Evey, Pentagon renovation manager, set the deadline to reopen E Ring offices before the first anniversary of the attacks.

Lee Evey, the Pentagon's renovation manager since 1997, said his workers discovered that the thousands of supporting columns contain not only the highest-grade steel, but that the rebar is twisted into a spiral, making it much stronger than straight-rod rebar.

Spiral rebar is "actually quite rare," and is used widely only in earthquake-prone areas. Evey said it's a mystery why the builders of 60 years ago selected the spiral steel.

The special rebar is "possibly one reason why the building did as good a job protecting its inhabitants as it did," Evey said.

Evey's authoritative records show that 2,600 people were assigned to offices destroyed by the aircraft impact and subsequent fire. Of those, 125 were killed. The other 59 victims killed were aboard Flight 77.

Evey still marvels at the "majesty" of the six-decade-old building and the enormity of the effort that went into creating it. He once calculated that the amount of earth moved would have filled enough dump trucks to form a solid line from the Pentagon to Richmond, Va., 100 miles away.

The first major overhaul of the building since it was built - originally a $1.2 billion effort - began in 1993. The building was showing its age - parts of the original basement had flooded, and the heating, cooling, water and electrical systems were failing. Evey, who commanded an infantry company in Vietnam before embarking on a civil-service career, took over the project in 1997. He planned to retire in January 2002, shortly after the completion of Wedge One, the first 20 percent of the renovation.

Instead, he found himself director of the Phoenix Project after Sept. 11. Within days of the attack, contracts were awarded to restore the damaged section. Within weeks, Evey set the deadline of getting the E Ring near Corridor 4 reopened by the first anniversary of the attack.

Back in October, he explained that his contribution to the memory of those killed would take place Sept. 11, 2002.

"People will be looking out windows" of newly rebuilt offices that were destroyed by the hijacked airliner, he said. "This building's still standing. This building is coming back and it's coming back fast."

He plans to retire Sept. 16.


A baby's cry

On the first floor of the E Ring, in the darkness after the crash, Cruz-Cortes awoke to the sound of a baby crying.

A wall had collapsed, pinning her at her desk. She and her co-workers had been knocked unconscious.

Her colleague, Spc. April Gallop, 30, had brought her 2-month-old son, Elisha, to the office so she could enroll him at the Pentagon day-care center. Gallop, also trapped, regained consciousness and saw the baby's stroller on fire, but Elisha had been thrown clear.

In the room's smoke-filled darkness, Cruz-Cortes sensed fire raging beyond the wall that had collapsed onto her. Another co-worker, Army Cpl. Eduardo Brunoporto, 28, helped free her. They helped Gallop find the baby, who was not badly injured.

These were enlisted clerks and administrative assistants, not the kind of people who get window offices at the Pentagon. So they were in an interior office on E Ring, searching for a way out through the smoke and dust.

"Everybody come toward me," Cruz-Cortes heard Brunoporto yell. He had found a blown-out window in a demolished office across what was left of the hall.

About 10 people gathered at the window and began jumping down. It was a 7-foot drop.

Then Cruz-Cortes heard screams coming from the ruined walls of an office behind hers, in what used to be D Ring. She ran back into the darkness to find two women, civilian employees, who were unable to find a way out. One was screaming, but the other was more badly injured, with third-degree burns across her back.

Cruz-Cortes is a small woman - 4 feet, 11 inches tall and 90 pounds. She grabbed the screaming woman by one hand, then used all her energy to push the more injured woman in front of her through the smoke. She dragged and pushed them to the window and all three jumped out.

Fire trucks and rescue workers were all around in the sunlight.

Once outside, Cruz-Cortes pushed and pulled the women about 10 feet when she felt a powerful explosion in the offices behind her. Its force knocked down the badly burned woman, whose name Cruz-Cortes never learned.

Brunoporto helped Cruz-Cortes carry the injured woman to a medic. Cruz-Cortes held up the IV bottle, then helped load the woman into a rescue helicopter.

She saw firefighters pull more survivors from the burning building. She wanted to go help, to run back inside, but saw that the crowd of would-be rescuers kept growing. She didn't want to be in the way.

She was walking along the west side of the building, still searching for some way to help, when an Air Force officer saw her soot- and blood-covered face and ordered her to get medical attention. Her ribs, she found out, were badly bruised.

The badly injured woman whom Cruz-Cortes pulled to safety, later identified as Antoinette Sherman, 35, died a few days afterward of her injuries. But friends and loved ones said the extra days Cruz-Cortes helped give Sherman were "a gift," according to an inscription in a tribute book in a new chapel at the end of rebuilt Corridor 4.

"She knew we were there," the tribute book quoted Sherman's friend, Vincent Edwards, as saying. "She knew she wasn't alone."

Before returning to her job several weeks later, Cruz-Cortes volunteered for escort duties, assisting the families of those who|didn't survive. She needed to keep helping, she said.

In the weeks afterward, Cruz-Cortes thought she'd had enough of military life and would leave when her enlistment was up.

But now she plans to stay in. She's working on a college degree and has ambitions to go to Officer Candidate School. Her change of heart, she said, is due in large part to her memories of the way she and those around her handled themselves during that terrible September morning.

"Just the way everybody was helping each other. ... At the time I didn't think about it, but now I'm proud to have been there."
 
Below I have re-posted the article and attempted to divide it into sections according to who is listed as the source. One purpose is that it is easier to cross reference, if the article is divided.

[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
[S21WP01= Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, Pentagon staff]
[S21WP02= WRHW22= Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program]
[S21WP03= Marine Cpl. Michael Vera]
[S21WP04=Lee Evey, Pentagon renovation manager]

The time of impact is now about 9:35 a.m. and not 9:45 a.m. or 9:43 a.m. or 9:41a.m. or 9:40 a.m. as was the common time a year.

In this article we learn of the shatter proof glass that had just been installed in the building. The few sound effects from the blast transmitted by the Pentagon architectural structure, the steel reinforced concrete.

Lee Evey is claime to explain: "the thousands of supporting columns contain not only the highest-grade steel, but that the rebar is twisted into a spiral, making it much stronger than straight-rod rebar" But apparently the object that hit the Pentagon had no problems messing them up, since it is said in the Newsweek article that the expert fireman notes how unstable the building was.

SEPT. 11
One nation
One year later


November 2001: The Pentagon, cleared of debris, stands ready for a lightning-fast renovation that would have the damaged offices open for business weeks before the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack. Officials had estimated that it would take eight months just to clear away the wreckage. Defense Department photo


FORTRESS REBORN
125 Pentagon workers were killed in the Sept. 11 attack,
but thousands more survived. It was a testament to both
the people who work there and the people who built it.


By Vince Crawley
Times staff
[S21WP01= Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, Pentagon staff]
Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes' heart races as she walks down Corridor 4, toward E Ring on the Pentagon's first floor.

"I can still smell the smoke," she says, her voice unsteady. She looks around uncomfortably, as though she sees something other than the corridor's clean, newly rebuilt, freshly painted walls.
[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
Here, a year earlier, most of the first- and second-story offices were obliterated by a hijacked passenger jet, killing 125 in the Pentagon, 59 passengers and crew on the plane and five suicide terrorists.
[S21WP01= Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, Pentagon staff]
Cruz-Cortes, a 21-year-old Army personnel specialist from Trenton, N.J., pushed and pulled wounded coworkers to safety and was awarded the Soldier's Medal for heroism. But the rebuilt area gives her something akin to combat flashbacks. She avoids going there if she doesn't have to.
[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
Most people today will see nothing in Corridor 4 but new offices. Racing to meet a self-imposed deadline, a team of up to 3,000 construction workers labored, sometimes around the clock, to rebuild the destroyed section of the Pentagon in time for memorial ceremonies marking the Sept. 11 anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attacks in U.S. history. The cost: at least $500 million, possibly as much as $1 billion.

The damage is not visible now - except when Cruz-Cortes and the others who barely escaped the carnage close their eyes.

Roosevelt's choice

Franklin D. Roosevelt selected the Pentagon site.

For six decades, until 1941, the military was headquartered in the State, War and Navy Building next to the White House, today known as the Old Executive Office Building.

The War Department had 24,000 employees spread among 17 buildings in and around the city as the Army grew from 270,000 troops in 1940 to 1.4 million in the summer of 1941. Pondering his overcrowded facilities, Brig. Gen. Brehon Somervell, chief of construction for the War Department, hit upon the idea to create one huge building for the department's Washington staff.

Somervell was "dynamic, ruthless, impatient and above all, decisive," said Al Goldberg, the Defense Department's chief historian.

Somervell gave his top engineers a weekend to deliver basic plans for a three- to four-story, fireproof, air-conditioned building on the Virginia side of the Potomac that could house 40,000 workers.

The proposed site was deemed too swampy, so the engineers picked a tract known as Arlington Farms near the gate of Arlington National Cemetery. The plot of land had five sides, which gave the building its basic shape. The initial sketch of July 21, 1941, shows the Pentagon's distinctive exterior columns, which originally echoed the design of the Lincoln Memorial.

Gilmore Clarke, head of the District of Columbia Commission on Fine Arts, led a vocal group opposing the Arlington Cemetery site, fearing such a huge building would desecrate some of the nation's most hallowed ground.

Both Clarke and Somervell vied for Roosevelt's ear. On Aug. 29, 1941, Roosevelt took both men on a drive to view possible sites. According to Clarke's later recollection, Somervell argued so strongly for the Arlington Farms site that the president finally cut him off. "My dear general," he said, "I'm still commander in chief of the Army."

Next, they went a mile to the southeast, to the site Somervell had earlier rejected. It was a hillside leading down to a swampy plain and a recently abandoned airfield, Washington-Hoover Airport. A nearby down-and-out neighborhood was known as Hell's Bottom.

Roosevelt pointed to the location and turned to Clarke. "My dear Gilmore," he said, "we're going to put the building over there, aren't we?" Then Roosevelt turned to Somervell. "Did you hear that, general? We're going to locate the War Department building over there."

And they did. But Clarke didn't always get his way. As architects refined the five-sided shape into the one familiar today, Clarke insisted "the Pentagon presented the largest target in the world for enemy bombs." His argument "made no impression" on Roosevelt, who grew ever more fond of the distinctive design.

The official groundbreaking took place Sept. 11, 194.
[S21WP02= WRHW22= Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program]
'I knew I was dead'
[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
Exactly 60 years later, half the world was watching the World Trade Center burn on television on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
[S21WP02= WRHW22= Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program]
Frank Probst was one of them. A Pentagon renovation worker and retired Army officer, he was inspecting newly installed telecommunications wiring inside the five-story, 6.5-million-square-foot building.

The tall, soft-spoken Probst had a 10 a.m. meeting. About 9:25 a.m., he stopped by the renovation workers' trailer just south of the Pentagon heliport. Someone had a television turned on in the trailer's break room that showed smoke pouring out of the twin towers in New York.

"The Pentagon would make a pretty good target," someone in the break room commented.

The thought stuck with Probst as he picked up his notebook and walked to the North Parking Lot to attend his meeting.

Probst took a sidewalk alongside Route 27, which runs near the Pentagon's western face. Traffic was at a standstill because of a road accident. Then, at about 9:35 a.m., he saw the airliner in the cloudless September sky.
[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
American Airlines Flight 77 approached from the west, coming in low over the nearby five-story Navy Annex on a hill overlooking the Pentagon.

How would Probst know that is was flight 77? And that is one of the proofs of What Really Happened!
[S21WP02= WRHW22= Frank Probst, an information management specialist for the Pentagon Renovation Program]
"He has lights off, wheels up, nose down," Probst recalled. The plane seemed to be accelerating directly toward him. He froze.

"I knew I was dead," he said later. "The only thing I thought was, 'Damn, my wife has to go to another funeral, and I'm not going to see my two boys again.'."

He dove to his right. He recalls the engine passing on one side of him, about six feet away.

The plane's right wing went through a generator trailer "like butter," Probst said. The starboard engine hit a low cement wall and blew apart
He still can't remember the sound of the explosion. Sometimes the memory starts to come back when he hears a particularly low-flying airliner heading into nearby Reagan National Airport, or when military jets fly over a burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Most of the time, though, his memory is silent.

"It was pretty horrible," he said of the noiseless images he carries inside him, of the jet vanishing in a cloud of smoke and dust, and bits of metal and concrete drifting down like confetti.

On either side of him, three streetlights had been sheared in half by the airliner's wings at 12 to 15 feet above the ground. An engine had clipped the antenna off a Jeep Grand Cherokee stalled in traffic not far away.
[S21WP00=Journalist or Unknown]
http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/fortress2.html
FORTRESS REBORN, cont.
Built in 16 months

There are a number of reasons the Pentagon didn't suffer the same fate as the World Trade Center.

The building has 35 percent more floor space than either of the World Trade Center towers, but it's horizontal - actually built on a gentle slope - so occupants who survived the blast found dozens of exits.

The Pentagon was built of steel-reinforced concrete. And, to save precious steel for wartime weaponry, the builders used generous helpings of concrete and brick. So the interior is actually a maze of thick walls and fat pillars, which helped deaden the airliner's fatal blow.

The Pentagon also owes its sturdiness to World War II politics. Some opposed the costly undertaking because there would be no practical postwar use for such a large building.
Planners insisted they would use the postwar building as a gigantic warehouse for military records, and the floors were reinforced to handle the anticipated extra weight.

The original construction was accelerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor and was completed in 16 months. It would have been done in just 14 months, but the space-hungry Somervell ordered wooden storage attics to be turned into fifth-floor offices.

At the peak of construction, 15,000 workers toiled day and night. At least eight lost their lives in construction accidents while building the Pentagon.
'It was silent'
Photos by Rob Curtis, Times Staff
Army Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, top, and Marine Cpl. Michael Vera, right, were both inside the Pentagon when the plane hit, and both stayed inside to rescue wounded co-workers.
[S21WP03= Marine Cpl. Michael Vera]
Marine Cpl. Michael Vera never heard the explosion caused by Flight 77.
On the fourth floor, he was about 100 feet from the impact, but the mass of the building cushioned the sound.

"I didn't hear the blast," said Vera, 22. "You didn't hear any-thing at all. It was silent."
Instead, his office just shook. When he went out into the hallway, he saw it was quickly filling with smoke.

He and a few other Marines heard people calling for help in the darkness. He went toward the voices and realized he had reached the cliff-like edge of a collapsed section of the building.

The air grew hotter. Looking down through the smoke, he saw flames. The voices came from a room next door, one wall away from the collapsed section.
Heading down Corridor 4 on the first floor, they passed sparking electrical cords and collapsed walls. They found more survivors. "Some were badly burned," Vera said. "Some were hurt really bad."

He went as far as he could, until the burning jet fuel was too hot to stand. Firefighters took over the rescue effort.

In all, Vera helped pull out more than a dozen people.

"We pulled together and we did what we had to do," said Vera, who was decorated for heroism.
[S21WP04= Lee Evey, Pentagon renovation manager]
A 'remarkable' building
The destruction offered a rare glimpse of the Pentagon's inner skeleton, which includes steel rods known as "rebar" inside reinforced concrete. Ordinarily, these are straight or ribbed.

Lee Evey, Pentagon renovation manager, set the deadline to reopen E Ring offices before the first anniversary of the attacks.

Lee Evey, the Pentagon's renovation manager since 1997, said his workers discovered that the thousands of supporting columns contain not only the highest-grade steel, but that the rebar is twisted into a spiral, making it much stronger than straight-rod rebar.

Spiral rebar is "actually quite rare," and is used widely only in earthquake-prone areas. Evey said it's a mystery why the builders of 60 years ago selected the spiral steel.

The special rebar is "possibly one reason why the building did as good a job protecting its inhabitants as it did," Evey said.

Evey's authoritative records show that 2,600 people were assigned to offices destroyed by the aircraft impact and subsequent fire. Of those, 125 were killed. The other 59 victims killed were aboard Flight 77.

Evey still marvels at the "majesty" of the six-decade-old building and the enormity of the effort that went into creating it. He once calculated that the amount of earth moved would have filled enough dump trucks to form a solid line from the Pentagon to Richmond, Va., 100 miles away.

The first major overhaul of the building since it was built - originally a $1.2 billion effort - began in 1993. The building was showing its age - parts of the original basement had flooded, and the heating, cooling, water and electrical systems were failing.

Evey, who commanded an infantry company in Vietnam before embarking on a civil-service career, took over the project in 1997. He planned to retire in January 2002, shortly after the completion of Wedge One, the first 20 percent of the renovation.

Instead, he found himself director of the Phoenix Project after Sept. 11. Within days of the attack, contracts were awarded to restore the damaged section. Within weeks, Evey set the deadline of getting the E Ring near Corridor 4 reopened by the first anniversary of the attack.

Back in October, he explained that his contribution to the memory of those killed would take place Sept. 11, 2002.

"People will be looking out windows" of newly rebuilt offices that were destroyed by the hijacked airliner, he said. "This building's still standing. This building is coming back and it's coming back fast."

He plans to retire Sept. 16.
[S21WP01= Sgt. Roxane Cruz-Cortes, Pentagon staff]
A baby's cry
On the first floor of the E Ring, in the darkness after the crash, Cruz-Cortes awoke to the sound of a baby crying.

A wall had collapsed, pinning her at her desk. She and her co-workers had been knocked unconscious.

Her colleague, Spc. April Gallop, 30, had brought her 2-month-old son, Elisha, to the office so she could enroll him at the Pentagon day-care center. Gallop, also trapped, regained consciousness and saw the baby's stroller on fire, but Elisha had been thrown clear.

In the room's smoke-filled darkness, Cruz-Cortes sensed fire raging beyond the wall that had collapsed onto her. Another co-worker, Army Cpl. Eduardo Brunoporto, 28, helped free her. They helped Gallop find the baby, who was not badly injured.

These were enlisted clerks and administrative assistants, not the kind of people who get window offices at the Pentagon. So they were in an interior office on E Ring, searching for a way out through the smoke and dust.

"Everybody come toward me," Cruz-Cortes heard Brunoporto yell. He had found a blown-out window in a demolished office across what was left of the hall.

About 10 people gathered at the window and began jumping down. It was a 7-foot drop.
Then Cruz-Cortes heard screams coming from the ruined walls of an office behind hers, in what used to be D Ring.

She ran back into the darkness to find two women, civilian employees, who were unable to find a way out. One was screaming, but the other was more badly injured, with third-degree burns across her back.

Cruz-Cortes is a small woman - 4 feet, 11 inches tall and 90 pounds. She grabbed the screaming woman by one hand, then used all her energy to push the more injured woman in front of her through the smoke. She dragged and pushed them to the window and all three jumped out.

Fire trucks and rescue workers were all around in the sunlight.

Once outside, Cruz-Cortes pushed and pulled the women about 10 feet when she felt a powerful explosion in the offices behind her. Its force knocked down the badly burned woman, whose name Cruz-Cortes never learned.

Brunoporto helped Cruz-Cortes carry the injured woman to a medic. Cruz-Cortes held up the IV bottle, then helped load the woman into a rescue helicopter.

She saw firefighters pull more survivors from the burning building. She wanted to go help, to run back inside, but saw that the crowd of would-be rescuers kept growing. She didn't want to be in the way.

She was walking along the west side of the building, still searching for some way to help, when an Air Force officer saw her soot- and blood-covered face and ordered her to get medical attention. Her ribs, she found out, were badly bruised.

The badly injured woman whom Cruz-Cortes pulled to safety, later identified as Antoinette Sherman, 35, died a few days afterward of her injuries. But friends and loved ones said the extra days Cruz-Cortes helped give Sherman were "a gift," according to an inscription in a tribute book in a new chapel at the end of rebuilt Corridor 4.

"She knew we were there," the tribute book quoted Sherman's friend, Vincent Edwards, as saying. "She knew she wasn't alone."

Before returning to her job several weeks later, Cruz-Cortes volunteered for escort duties, assisting the families of those who didn't survive. She needed to keep helping, she said.

In the weeks afterward, Cruz-Cortes thought she'd had enough of military life and would leave when her enlistment was up.

But now she plans to stay in. She's working on a college degree and has ambitions to go to Officer Candidate School.

Her change of heart, she said, is due in large part to her memories of the way she and those around her handled themselves during that terrible September morning.

"Just the way everybody was helping each other. ... At the time I didn't think about it, but now I'm proud to have been there."
thorbiorn
 
Great work Thorbiorn,
The new format is much easier to understand and easier to skim for info. Your comments on the matter are appreciated too and stand out as opposed to the earlier workings.
Anders
 
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