StevenWarRan

2nd verse

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Late in the day of September 11th 2001, how did we go from this...

15 men up on the roof and only a wisp of smoke?

To this in the night?

Arson?

Scott Thewn, Agence France Presse

Well, actually, it's more of a fraud

The giveaway is not in the use of depleted uranium, or white phosphorous, or whatever it is that made for the pretty fires in the night (although it will be interesting to see how a jury will interpret these pictures,) but rather, it's in an effort at a review

It's all about POV isn't it? Where nowhere in its pages do the firematics professionals make it clear what we are looking at in the Hughes Associates report: that under the decorative slate shingle roof mounted on a wooden subsurface is a structural roof made up of cast concrete slabs on beams. We were led to believe that the Pentagon roof fire got out of hand and burned for 48 hours causing enormous water and smoke damage to virtually the entirety of Wedges 1 and 2 underneath it.

So, before we go any further, lets establish what the Pentagon roof is and what it does.

In a wonderful bit of honest story telling found on the web--the personal reminiscence of a man, Stanley Nance Allan, who as a boy worked as a carpenter to build the Pentagon, is this symmetry,

"Twenty-five years later, in 1967, guided by what only could be a mysterious flow of destiny, the architectural design of the Pentagon Metro Station became my responsibility as project manager at the Washington office of Harry Weese Associates."

Mr. Allan writes, "The repetition of the production techniques and the coordinated division of work perfected efficiencies as construction continued upward for each of the five floors and finally for the construction of the sloping concrete roof slabs."

In this FEMA image of the reconstruction is the gable roof over one of the corridors, where the new work will meet the old, and where we get a good glimpse of the thickness of the roof slab.

In a second FEMA image, we see the construction of the wooden base for mounting the decorative slate shingles, on top of the concrete slab, visible to the right.

In a thumbnail, we see the interior of the fifth story of the E-ring, with the underside of the cast-in-place, slab-and-beam roof visible.

This high-resolution aerial image shows the nature of the damage from the roof fire, which worked its way under the old heavy slates and into the wooden substructure, stuffed with horse-hair insulation we were told.

But hair is neither here nor there. The concrete structural roof would protect the building underneath from the superficial effects of fire and smoke on top, or the water used to fight it. (And in the photo above, what are the men collecting on the blue tarp?)

In the Pentagon Building Performance Report of January 2003, (commonly called the ASCE report for the volunteer members of the American Society of Civil Engineers who undertook it,) on page 34, they say this:

"Fire damage in the second story appeared most severe around the region of collapse and near the breach in the second-floor slab. Generally, the most obvious fire damage was between the fire walls to the north and south of the area directly damaged by the aircraft debris. (duh) The most severe fire damage occurred on the first and second floors.The team noted no impact damage above the second story.

"The subsequent fire fed by the aircraft fuel, the aircraft contents, and the building contents caused damage throughout a very large area of the first story, a significant area of the second, a small part of the third, and only in the stairwells above."

So apparently, fire doors to staircases were left open, allowing fire to climb into the upper stories. But this doesn't mean the fire could get up into the roof, unless a roof access door was also deliberately left open to facilitate the spread of fire.

According to Lee Harvey Evey--

These are not lessons learned, it is propaganda. Additional fire breaks in the roof would only reduce the spread of drama. But then, they wouldn't be able to steal half a billion dollars!

Could that figure possibly be right? I think so.

First let's put it in the context of Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, The Pentagon , Monday, September 10, 2001, that $2.3 trillion in DoD budget spending was unaccounted for.

Arlington Fire Chief Ed Plaughter, answers questions about the "very stubborn fire fight" firemen were still engaged in, at a 10am press briefing. News Transcript Presenter Victoria Clarke Wednesday Sept. 12, 2001

Q: Why it is so difficult in that apparently attic area that continues to burn? What is it about that?
Plaugher: They type of the construction of the Pentagon is very, very, I would call, stout World War II type of construction. A lot of concrete, a lot of very thick masonry. On top of that is a wooden roof structure. On top of the wooden roof structure is slate, and so it's just a very very difficult system to get through to extinguish, and it takes a lot of cutting with special tools and equipment, and then a lot of hand work by the firefighters to get up in there. And we're trying to get ahead of the fire right now.
Q: Question, but with a very brief prelude. Yesterday, earlier, of course, most of the smoke and the fire seemed to be fuel from the plane, and then late yesterday afternoon, that had dissipated or been put out, and there was light smoke, and actually very little late in the afternoon. Now there's a lot more. So, there are two questions, or a two-part question: One, what is burning? And two, what's caused the fire, apparently, to start up again?
Plaugher: Okay. We were never able to fully extinguish the fire in the roof structure. We were able to get it mostly knocked down, and again because we're having extreme difficulty making access under the slate roof, it's to be expected to take awhile to get there. We have had the fuel from the jet catch fire again, and we're now in there with some additional hand-lines and some foam-lines, with aircraft fire-fighters inside of the insides of the Pentagon trying to suppress it, this time with fire-fighting foam.

Q: Will you have to get onto the roof in order to put out that fire?
Plaugher: Yes. We're up on the roof, we're up there now. We have our fire-fighting forces up there with great support from all the area fire departments -- Washington and --
Q: Are you removing sections of the roof to get at the fire?
Plaugher: Yeah. We're doing what's called a "trench cut" which is a slice of the roof, which then lets the fire gases out of that part of the roof. We then bring water streams into the back part of the fire cut, and so that the fire actually sucks the water up to it and helps to extinguish the fire up there. Please excuse me, I've been up all night, so. But that's basically the technique that's used.
Q: Could you describe the extent of the damage caused by the fire now? I mean, Corridors 2 through 6 are closed. Is there fire damage now throughout that -- through all the rings?
Plaugher: Not through all the rings, but to the two rings on each side of the crash site that -- we have some covered walkways and we have fire going down those covered walkways, that has gone out to those covered walkways and now going down those corridors.

Q: When you say the fire is stubborn, does that mean there are spots of fire in different portions, or --
Plaugher: Up in the roof section. It's hard to get to.
Q: I see. Can you tell me where the fire is now?

The next building update wasn't held until Friday afternoon, September 14th, when James Schwartz, assistant chief of the Arlington County Fire Department makes a statement,

DoD News Transcript Presenter: John F. Irby, Federal Facilities Division Friday Sept. 14, 2001

Schwartz: I'll give you one more piece in terms of recent events, and that is an update from the situation regarding the fire that occurred last night. The situation is -- the fire occurred in that collapsed area. I have continually stated that from the very beginning the fire situation in this particular incident has been extremely difficult. It was not a typical fire when we arrived on Tuesday morning, and it does not -- it has not ever gone into a typical fire situation.
We have heavy fire in an area where there was collapse, and there is an awful lot of material beneath that collapse that is still quite hot. I'm not surprised at all by the idea that there is still burning going on underneath there; it's just that you're not seeing a whole lot of it because it's very deep-seated. As that burning continues, or as the rubble starts to shift, we get air in there and then we see a little bit of flame come out, as we did last night.
We continue our fire watch operations; continued them after the fire was extinguished last night, and continue them today as we go further with this operation, and we'll continue that as we see necessary for the remainder of the incident.

At the same press briefing, John F. Irby, Director of the Federal Facilities Division, answers some questions about the extent of damage.

Q: I have a question for Mr. Irby. How much do you estimate it will cost to repair the damage?

Irby: I think it's too soon to know that. We don't have a -- well, as the chief pointed out, all of the damage hasn't occurred yet. We're still having problems that we're having to deal with, and certainly there's a lot of testing that needs to go on before we could give a reliable estimate.

Q: But as a ballpark figure, could it be in the tens of millions of dollars? Or is it likely to be --

Irby: Oh, it's much more than that.

Q: Much more than tens of millions?

Irby: Yes.

Q: Mr. Irby, when the clean-up effort is completed, about how much of the building will be usable for office workers?

Irby: Well, I think we'll need some more engineering analysis before we can make that -- turn the answer into a number. Right now we're at about two-thirds, and we expect to be expanding that. But the engineers are going to have to work with us on that and --

Q: They're studying the structural safety of the parts that appear to be intact?

Irby: Pardon?

Q: They're studying the structure, the parts that appear to be intact?

Irby: That's correct. That will take some time to look at the potential settling and those kinds of things. And it's, again, an area where we're all cooperating together and we're all working at the priorities of what has to come first. And reoccupying is going to be the last thing in line, so there are a lot of other higher priorities.

Q: I'm sorry to belabor, but you said a moment ago that while you can't give a precise estimate on how much it's going to cost to repair, it's certainly going to be more than in the tens of millions of dollars. Can you, in a ballpark way, characterize where you think it's going to end up -- a billion, several hundred million?

Irby: Well, I think it'll be less than a billion, but certainly more than a hundred million by quite a bit.

Q: Mr. Irby, could you tell us what it cost to renovate that wedge of the Pentagon and what the budgeted amounts are for each of the other wedges?

Irby: Again, I'm operation and maintenance. Lee Evey would be a better one to answer that for you. He's the director of the -- or the program manager of the Pentagon reservation.

Quigley: Renovation.

At the sixth month mark after the attack, Lee Ivey, director of the Pentagon Renovation project, in a DoD News Briefing March 2, 2002, makes a subtle reference:

"After that, we will begin putting the gabled roof above it. It
actually has two roofs in that section of the building."

Which, typically, the news reporters didn't pick up on.

The Hughes Associates report is something of a mystery to me. Who commissioned it? What was its purpose? Was it designed to augment the Arlington County After-Action report? If that's the case, was the intent to justify the enormous damage to the Pentagon building that is being claimed? If so, why does this report also include these two illustrations, which are the closest to being truthful summaries?

To the report's credit, it's damage summaries reflect reality far better than the more commonly seen illustrations. They even separate out different floors. Compare that with the next two put out by the renovation office, or the one following, published in the Washington Post.

All have a single-minded objective, I think. To indicate to the public mind that a full two wedges, in other words two million square feet of space, was damaged or destroyed.

WEDGE 1 RENOVATION SCHEDUEL Core and shell construction, the building of common elements such as public corridors and utilities, in Wedge 1 is complete. All of the window units are in place and all underground utilities have been completed. Core and shell construction was phased to overlap the next sequence of renovation, tenant fit-out. The A and B-rings of the wedge were completed first, working from the fifth floor down.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/projects-W1.htm

Tenant fit-out work, the construction of office areas based on the requirements of the intended tenant, is being completed in phases, following the same sequence as core and shell construction. The A and Brings were completed, with carpet, ceiling tile and painting in January 2001. Tenant fit-out work is nearing completion in the remainder of the wedge with the last area expected to be completed by Summer 2001. Tenant fit-out is followed by furniture installation, communication hook up and move-in.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/projects-W1.htm

In order to begin demolition and abatement work, it was necessary to isolate Wedge 1 from the rest of the building. To accomplish this task, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and communications systems had to be disconnected in Wedge 1 while ensuring that the rest of the building remained operational. Two sound attenuating barrier walls were constructed to separate Wedge 1 from the two adjacent wedges (2 & 5). The barrier walls were mostly built in occupied spaces at night. The work was completed by the end of 1998.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/projects-W1.htm

The Consolidate Server Room is the first of 16 server rooms that are planned for the rest of the Pentagon. This will reduce the number of server rooms from 70, greatly increasing the level of computer security.
Pentagon Renovation Pr...
Allyn Kilsheimer from KCE KCE Structural Engineers, P.C.

What you don't think about is, in a fire event, you're not going be standing, looking at that exit sign. You're going to be on your hands and knees, okay? And you probably wont be able to see your hand in front of your face. And if you're underneath that exit sign, just eight or 10 feet away from it, it might as well be a hundred miles away, because you won't be able to see it. So some of the things that we're doing is, we're using non-electrical, glow-in-the-dark devices that can be placed at floor level, so that when you are on your hands and knees, and you are crawling, trying to find your way out, you can find your way out. You will have something very close to you that you can see and that you can follow.

That doesn't cost a whole lot. It's not very sexy. It's not very exciting, okay? But it's just very, very practical, and it seems to work pretty darn well. We've worked with some of our customers in the area, gone in there and in a very simple way, tried to simulate that kind of situation; we've turned off all the lights and let them see if they could find their way out.
It just so happened that the particular groups that we worked with -- most of those people had been in the area of the

010911-N-3783H-169 Arlington, Virginia (Sept. 11, 2001) -- Smoke and flames rose over the Pentagon late into the night, following a suspected terrorist crash of a commercial airliner into the southwest corner of the Pentagon. Part of the building has collapsed meanwhile firefighters continue to battle the flames and look for survivors. An exact number of casualties are unknown. The building was evacuated, as were the federal buildings in the Capitol area, including the White House. U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Bob Houlihan.

010911-N-1350W-022 Arlington, Virginia (Sept. 11, 2001) -– Smoke and flames rise over the Pentagon following a terrorist attack in which terrorists hijacked a commercial airlined and crashed it into the side of the Pentagon. Part of the building collapsed while firefighters continued to battle the flames and look for survivors. The building was evacuated, as were the federal buildings in the Capitol area, including the White House. U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Lisa Borges

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=1617

The Navy Build-Out project is located in the basement of Wedge 4 and consists of approximately 30,00 square feet of occupiable. Demolition and abatement of this space was completed in November of 2001. The Build-Out was awarded to Gilford Corporation in September 2001 and construction began in early November. The contractor will design and construct office space, conference/training rooms, and support spaces including mechanical rooms, telephone closets, electrical closets, bathrooms, equipment rooms, etc. to house the Navy.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/projects-NBO.htm
1999 The construction of Segment 1 of the Basement Renovation was completed.
1999 A program decision was made not to build-out the basement until after construction of
Wedges 2-5 is finished.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/history-renovation.htm
1999 Last design revisions for Wedge 1.
1999 Abatement was completed in September for Wedge 1.
1999 A systems workstation schedule contract was awarded in January to five workstation
manufacturers.
http://renovation.pentagon.mil/projects-W1.htm

Wedge 1 officially opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on March 8, 2001.

march 10 2002 WAPO Congresss appr. 300 million

NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN WEDGES 1 & 2 AT TIME OF CRASH News Transcript Presenter: John F. Irby, Federal Facilities Division Friday Sept. 14, 2001 Q: Could we revisit for a minute how many people might have been in wedge one and wedge two when the airplane hit?
Evey: If wedge one and wedge two were fully populated, okay, there would be about 10,000 people in there.
Q: What was the actual? An estimate.
Evey: Yeah, an estimate.
Q: Wedge two, you say the people were moving out.
Evey: That's correct, sir.
Q: Was wedge two empty?
Evey: Wedge two was not totally empty. Let me put it in perspective for you. Eighty-five percent of the people wedge two move into wedge one. So, while we were vacating wedge two, they are moving in to and populating wedge one.
Q: Uh-huh.
Evey: Okay. So, 15 percent of the people moved out of wedge two into some other location, okay. So, you didn't have a full complement of people in wedge one. It was not fully populated. But it was -- it was getting close, okay. It was to be fully populated by the end of October. My guess it was probably about -- probably about 80 percent, okay. So --
Q: So, about 4,000 people?
Evey: Actually, wedge one is a little light on people because it has some facilities we're moving in there that have a lot of acreage but not many people -- like the library, which is very large, okay. It was actually going to have around 4,500 people in it, a little short. So, my guess is probably nearer to 3,500 people.
Q: So was wedge two mostly vacated, or to what degree was it vacated?
Evey: Wedge two was probably about -- my guess is about 60 or 70 percent vacated.
Q: So, you estimate that 3,500 people were in wedge one when this happened, or could have been?
Evey: Could have been. Could have been.
Q: So, as a percentage, the casualties seem to be reasonably light, although, of course, each one is significant.
Evey: I think that the fact that they happened to hit an area that we had built so sturdily was a wonderful gift.
Q: In a perverse way.
Evey: In a perverse way.
Staff: Are we done?
Q: Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you.

MONEY BUDGET AMOUNTS FOR RENOVATION & REPAIRS News Transcript Presenter: John F. Irby, Federal Facilities Division Friday Sept. 14, 2001 Q: Your 758 figure would include the Wedge 1 costs, correct?
Evey: No, ma'am. 758 is wedges two through five.
Q: Wedges two through five.
Q: Could I ask you just one thing? I don't know if you made this clear. There's $758 million you estimated wedges two through five?
Evey: Yes, sir.
Q: Does that include the hundreds of millions you're talking about in repairs?
Evey: No, sir.
Q: That doesn't?
Evey: No, that was --
Q: That would be on top.
Evey: That would be on top. That's correct, sir.

Evey: The way -- first let me make the point. It's something that we always remain aware of. We all know where the money ultimately comes from. It comes from the taxpayer of the United States. And that's something that we always have in mind in this renovation.
And let me make a little aside. Sorry. (Laughs.) You get the paid political announcements here, okay? When we do this job, if you go into what we renovate in this building, I'll challenge you: Walk down any corridor, open any door, walk in any room and talk to any customer. We do good work. We do it efficiently, we do it effectively, and we do it economically. You will not find one square inch of mahogany. You will not find one square inch walnut. You will not find anything that's gold-plated in this project anywhere. We are doing a good and efficient and effective job, and we are good shepherds of the taxpayers' money.
Q: Can you clarify something, sir, when you say all that, because part of it's one wedge and part of it is another wedge? Basically the broadest ball park figure in your own mind from your experience with this building of basically putting the space back together.
Evey: It will cost us hundreds of millions of dollars.
Q: More than five? (Laughter.)
Evey: It will cost us hundreds of millions. I know there were some discussion yesterday: Would it cost $10 million? It will cost a lot of money, okay? But I can't right now in good faith try to estimate what that amount is. We simply don't have enough information.Evey: No, the wedge line is between Corridor 4 and Corridor 5, okay. That's the line of demarcation between the first wedge and the second wedge.
Q: So is $758 million in this year dollars?
Evey: That's correct, that's in this year dollars that would be inflated as we went from wedge to wedge. So it does not count inflation costs through the year 2012.
Q: And that's if the contractor gets all the rest of the wedges?
Evey: If the contractor gets all of the options for the remaining wedges, that's correct, sir.
Q: So the award value then of $145 million is for wedge two?
Evey: That's to get the work started in wedge two. But that was not the full price of wedge two. That was the monies we had available in this fiscal year, yes, sir

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Some changes are tiny, but very important, he said.
"In a fire, for example, it is unlikely people are going to be standing upright, looking for exit signs over doorways. You're going to be on your hands and knees," he said, "You probably won't be able to see your hand in front of your face. If you're underneath that exit sign, just eight or 10 feet away from it, it might as well be a hundred miles away, because you won't be able to see it."
To correct this, he said, workers are installing nonelectrical, glow-in-the-dark devices that can be placed at floor level so that a person on hands and knees can find the way out. "That doesn't cost a whole lot. It's not very sexy. It's not very exciting. But it's just very practical, and it seems to work pretty darn well," Every said.
Pentagon officials are also looking at ways to improve the sprinkler system, how to make the building more resistant to different types of attack, and how best to evacuate the building. Some new forms of protection had already been installed as part of renovation work under way at the time of the attack, he noted.

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Days after the crash, PENREN hired KCE Structural Engineers, P.C., Washington DC, to conduct a full structural analysis before repair work commences.

Buildings: Pentagon Shifts Into High Gear(designbuildmag.com- 10/15/01) By Victoria L. Tanner McGraw-Hill Construction

Wearing protective suits, helmets and respirators, Wertheimer and a handful of team members first ventured into the ruined spaces of the D and E rings on Sept. 27.
Mark Wertheimer and his fellow military history curators.
Comprised of specialists from the Navy, Marine Corps and Army history offices, the group was called the Joint Historical Property Recovery Team.

The curators worked according to strict guidelines. The impact area was a crime scene, and nothing could be removed that might prove useful as evidence in a criminal trial, such as the airplane seat-belt buckle they found while searching one of the floors.
_________________________________________________________________--

Friday, August 18, 2006 Pentagon library preps for new office by Matt McFarland Pentagram staff writer DCMilitary.com

Pentagon Library Director Mena Whitmore
Despite being 150 feet from the explosion, no books were burned. During the rescue effort moisture did leech through a wall and mold destroyed 200 books.
Whitmore credited a co-worker who contacted the assistant to the secretary of the Army and warned of the growing damage. Contractors quickly moved the books to a Crystal City office, but in the process the collection has became completely disorganized.
The library’s new home covers two floors on the North side of the Pentagon. It is built from the same plans for the new library that was expected to open just weeks after Sept. 11, 2001.
She said the space is about 20 percent smaller than ideal so they will use compact shelves and purchase electronic resources that can be accessed through the Web site.