Pentagon Rebuilding Teams Will Recreate Life-Saving Design - a Site Selection Online Insider Special Report

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- They were four simple words, hand-scrawled atop a soot-caked salad bar inside a damaged portion of the Pentagon:
"We will build anew."
Yes, they will. The Pentagon, in fact, has already tapped the players to not only rebuild the sections damaged by Sept. 11's terrorist attack, but to also continue renovating the entire 650,000 million sq. ft. (58,500-sq.-m.) structure. Significantly, the master plan for that massive amount of work will perpetuate a feature credited with saving many lives: the structural design in the Pentagon's newly renovated "wedge one," which absorbed the hijacked Boeing 757's initial impact.
"That section was undergoing renovation," explained Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria Clarke. "Because of reinforcements that were put in, the damage was less extensive than it might have been otherwise." President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld

Said Lee Evey, manager of the Dept. of Defense's (DOD) Pentagon Renovation Program, "Had we not undertaken this [renovation] effort, this could have been much, much worse. We believe that the effect of this structure was to dramatically slow the plane as it entered the building and reduce the extent to which it penetrated."

(above top:) Firefighters working to clear the damaged area of the
Pentagon draped the building with a flag soon after arriving on the scene.
(above bottom:) President George W. Bush (left in photo) and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld surveyed the damage to the Pentagon a few days after the attack. Rumsfeld was
one of the first people in the Pentagon to rush to the area that was directly hit, DOD officials reported.

AMEC, Hensel Phelps Head Teams

In Sept. 11's wake, the Pentagon quickly named the teams that will extend wedge one's design. The DOD broke the work into two teams: one to rebuild the damaged parts of wedges one and two, and one to renovate wedges two through five.
AMEC (www.amec.com) will serve as the lead design-bid-build contractor for the rebuilding. The UK-based firm will lead a 29-firm team that will rebuild wedge one, plus the damaged portion of wedge two. While wedge two didn't sustain the initial impact, it was damaged by the plane's "diagonal entry angle," DOD officials said (see accompanying photo). AMEC's contract was valued at US$520 million. Cost estimates for rebuilding the Pentagon have ranged as high as $1 billion.

The hijacked Boeing 757 hit the newly renovated wedge one at a
diagonal angle, as illustrated in the Defense Dept. photo depiction above.

AMEC previously built wedge five, considered more advanced in design than the other four wedges. "On the basis of the good job we did building [wedge five], we were immediately invited to carry out the rebuilding and refurbishing of the parts destroyed," said a spokesman for AMEC, which has offices near the Pentagon in Bethesda, Md.
Greeley, Colo.-based Hensel Phelps Construction (www.henselphelps.com) was named as the lead design-build contractor for an eight-firm team that will renovate wedge two's undamaged portion. The contract was valued at $145 million. Evey, however, told a press briefing, "That [will not be] the full price of wedge two. That was the monies we had available in this fiscal year."
The Hensel Phelps contract is annually renewable for renovating the 4 million undamaged sq. ft. (360,000 sq. m.) of wedges two through five. The full renovation contract, said DOD officials, has a potential value of up to $758 million - plus adjustments for inflation over the renovation's duration. That duration will be long - December 2012 was the original projected completion date. "It's our expectation we'll still be able to make up that time and get this done on schedule," Evey said.
Like AMEC, Hensel Phelps has a government-contract history. The firm was already working on two Pentagon contracts: the new remote delivery facility, and the relocation of the mass-transit entries. Hensel Phelps had some 100 employees at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. All were evacuated unharmed, reported Scott Conrad, Chantilly, Va.-based district manager.

Steel Beams Kept Structure Intact

Hensel Phelps also led the team in the three-year, $258 million renovation of wedge one. (Employees began to move into the renovated space in late February.) Wedge one's remarkable resilience could be influential in the post-Sept. 11 era of design and construction.
Perhaps the key element in the design's durability was its six-inch by six-inch (15.24 cm. by 15.24 cm.) steel beams. Those beams ran through all floors, one through five, and were bolted together into one unit. That interlocking design kept large portions of the structure standing for a precious 30 minutes - allowing most employees to evacuate. Even after the structure collapsed, the beams still held much of the building together (see accompanying photo).
Sept. 11's brutal attack left 184 people missing or killed - excluding the five hijackers. Without the renovation, though, the total would've been much higher, according to DOD officials.

The interlocking steel beams in the Pentagon's redesigned wedge one
held much of the building together even after the structure collapsed (pictured above).

"What held up that whole portion of the building from when the incident occurred was those steel columns that we put in," Evey explained. "Had it not been for that, you would have had a much larger collapse and perhaps many more casualties." Wedges two through five's older structural foundations would've collapsed much more quickly, Evey said.

Protective Cloth, Thick Windows Blunt Impact

Other features in wedge one's renovation minimized damage.
There was the Kevlar cloth, for example, that had been installed between the steel beams to trap fragments in the event of an explosion.
Steel-reinforced, two-inch (5.08-cm.) thick Mylar widows were also installed in the renovation. The windows cost $10,000 apiece, but earned their keep that day, DOD officials explained. Many of the windows outside the collision area remained intact after the attack. Many didn't break, but only popped out, when the structure finally collapsed.
Those windows, however, weren't installed with physical attack in mind, the DOD said. "You get a little ancillary blast protection from the Mylar, but that's not its real, principle purpose. It's almost coincidental," explained Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley. "The principle purpose is to minimize electronic and acoustic eavesdropping."

Rebuilding May Begin by Mid-October

The rebuilding of the Pentagon will begin much sooner than whatever rebuilding ensues at the site of the World Trade Center.
The Pentagon attack left 350 million pounds (157.5 million km.) of debris. In contrast, the Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates that some 2.4 billion pounds (108 million km.) of debris must be removed from the WTC area - much of it compressed into seven underground levels. As a result, New York officials are estimating that total debris cleanup will take a year or more.
The Pentagon rebuilding and renovation may begin by mid October, DOD officials estimated. "We want to start as soon as possible," Evey said. "Clearly, we can't do anything to begin rebuilding and continue renovation until [the] debris has been removed. The building has to been made safe through shoring and support."
The AMEC team will erect construction walls between the damaged and undamaged portions of wedges one and two. That will permit employees in undamaged sections to continue working, protected from noise and dust, while repairs are under way. Areas that suffered only water and smoke damage "should be brought back up and operational relatively quickly," DOD officials estimated. Rebuilding wedge one will take longer. The impact's epicenter "reminded me of being like in a coal mine filled with metal shards all over the place," said Terry Mitchell, Audiovisual Division chief for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Rebuilding wedge one could take as long as four years, DOD officials said.
The rebuilding of the Pentagon - a public facility - will draw funds from the $40 billion federal emergency spending package. That package could also fund WTC rebuilding. First, however, the WTC complex, which is owned by the New York-New Jersey Port Authority, would have to be classified as a public facility to become eligible for funding.

'No Such Thing as a Blast-Proof Facility'

The Hensel Phelps team will continue the $3 billion Pentagon renovation that Congress approved back in 1991. A power plant was built in 1993 before work on the legendary five-sided structure began in 1997.
The Pentagon is badly in need of renovation, officials explained. "The Pentagon is not compliant with any code," Evey said. "The last time the building was compliant with the national electric code, for instance, is 1953." The Pentagon also isn't compliant with fire-safety and handicapped-access codes, DOD officials reported.
The renovation kept some employees out of harm's way. During wedge one's renovation, the some 4,500 employees who normally occupy that area were moved into swing space; 1,000 still hadn't moved back in by Sept. 11, DOD officials said. (The move-in was to have been completed in October.)
In addition, about 70 percent of wedge two's 5,500 employees had moved into swing space in preparation for their area's renovation.
With two-thirds of the Pentagon's work space is usable after Sept. 11's attack, the Pentagon accelerated its acquisition of swing space. DOD officials have leased 800,000 sq. ft. (72,000 sq. m.) of work space for the employees who worked in the Pentagon's damaged areas. Another 1 million sq. ft. (90,000 sq. m.) had already been leased for employees previously displaced by the renovation.
As they unveiled the Pentagon rebuilding plans, DOD officials emphasized that no building can provide ironclad safety.
"No building can be perfectly safe," said Evey. "We all know that. There's no such thing as blast-proof windows and there's no such thing as a blast-proof facility. It can't be built.
"What you can do," he said, "is take reasonable and prudent measures."