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'

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."
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