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Emergence of police state |
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STATISTICS |
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 Wednesday, 19 June 2013 |
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UA93 crash but no drop of blood |
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Written by Robb Frederick (Pittsburgh-Tribune Review, Sept 11, 2002)
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25 July 2007 04:07 |
The day that changed America
By Robb Frederick
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_90823.html
Were you watching TV?
Did you stand there, slack-jawed, staring at the tape loop, seeing the
tower explode again and again when the jet plowed through?
Did you feel for those people, at their desks, drinking coffee, then
caught in a hellfire so hot they just had to jump, their neckties
snapping like kite tails as they fell 84 floors? And the people in the
street, their necks craned, their cheeks wet, their hearts breaking;
their Prada bags dropped as the first tower rumbled and they ran,
panicked, like extras in a Godzilla film?
John Shaw did. He stood in front of the set at Westmoreland County's
911 center. He saw the fireball, the smoke, the investment bankers at
the window. He heard the phone ring.
"We are being hijacked," the man on the other end said.
Whoa.
He sat down. The man on the line was crying, trying hard to hold himself together. He'd be dead in six minutes.
He talked fast. His name was Edward Felt. F-E-L-T. He was on United
Airlines Flight 93. To San Francisco. He had locked himself in the
bathroom.
The plane had been hijacked turned an explosion white smoke.
"We're going down," he said. "We're going down."
???????-
Val McClatchey heard the 757 roar over Indian Lake, three miles east of
where it would crash. She had been watching the "Today" show, with
footage from New York, and now the Pentagon.
She looked out the window, above the red barns. She caught a glimpse of
it, like light off a watch face. Then nothing, and then a boom that
nearly knocked her off the couch.
The lights went out. The phones, too.
She grabbed her camera. She stepped onto the front porch and shot one
frame of the smoke cloud, a charcoal puff in a pure blue sky.
That image ? "End of Serenity," she called it ? caught the essence of
Somerset County that day. The barns, the blue sky, the open slope of
pasture ? it's a postcard, except for that fat, black cloud, swelling
like a smoke signal, warning that something horrible has happened.
"I thought it was an accident," McClatchey says, a Time and a Newsweek
and a Reader's Digest in the binder on the coffee table, the pages with
her photo marked with Post-Its. "I thought it was a small plane. I
figured they were just trying to get out of the air."
She didn't walk up that road, toward the hole in the tree line. She
could hear the sirens; she knew it was bad. She didn't need to see.
She went into the kitchen and put on barbecue for the rescue crews.
???????-
Dave Fox did go out to Skyline Drive, to the old strip mine, abandoned in 1996.
The former firefighter had heard the emergency tones. He, too, had been
watching television, in a back office at the Deaner Funeral Home, where
he was preparing an 11 a.m. service.
He saw the smoke. He drove out in the funeral van, expecting a skid
crash, with fire and fuselage chunks, and the tail off to one side. And
a survivor or two, God willing.
Some scrap yard workers had run up, hoping to help. Some coal truck
drivers had stopped. And now the firefighters were coming, their radios
crackling, calling out four more companies.
They couldn't find the plane.
At about 500 feet, with the wind so loud they could barely hear, the
passengers had fought back. Several had forced their way into the
cockpit, where the hijackers had the controls. They struggled,
shouting, swearing. They grabbed at the instrument panel. Behind them,
a woman cried.
The plane pitched, then rolled, belly up. It hit nose-first, like a
lawn dart. It disintegrated, digging more than 30 feet into the earth,
which was spongy from the old mine work.
The hemlocks caught fire. The jet fuel pooled. The wind played with
paper scraps: a Bible page, some bank-machine receipts, the corner of a
business card.
Fox stepped over a seat back. He saw a wiring harness, and a piston. None of the other pieces was bigger than a TV remote.
He saw three chunks of torn human tissue. He swallowed hard.
"You knew there were people there, but you couldn't see them," he says,
home now, the kids playing in the background. "You try not to let it
sink into you too much."
He'd assumed it was an accident. A Cessna, maybe. A spark in the fuel
tank. A stuck rudder. He didn't connect it to the other planes, still
crashing on cable TV.
???????-
In Friedens, at Mostoller's Country Corral, the dining room went quiet.
The twin towers were smoking. The news anchors looked lost.
"You have got to be kidding me," said Pamela Tokar-Ickes, one of the
three county commissioners. She'd stopped for breakfast after a coffee
klatch, a meet-and-greet with the Chamber of Commerce.
Her staff had moved to new offices, which weren't yet wired for TV. So
she went to the county's 911 center, in the basement of the old
Greek-revival courthouse. The dispatchers were watching CNN. The
Pentagon was burning.
She asked them to keep her posted, then left for another meeting.
She was in the commissioners' room, with proclamations to be read, when Rick Lohr called. He runs the 911 operation.
"We have a jet down in Buckstown," he said. "This is the real thing, guys."
"We just went numb," Tokar-Ickes remembers.
She ran a disaster declaration to the 911 center. She worked the
phones, lining up a command center and morgue space, signing purchase
orders for fencing and phone lines, lights and aspirin, rubber boots
and bottled water. The county spent $250,000 on crash-site supplies;
the state has yet to pay it back.
A man arrived in hospital scrubs, asking how he could help. Across the
street, in her new office, Tokar-Ickes' voice mail filled. There was a
nurse, an attorney, a man from California. What could they do? When
could they come?
She rode out to the crash site, just north of Shanksville. A state trooper waved her through.
She stood there as the men hunched in contamination suits, sifting
through what was left of the plane and the 44 people on board. She
shivered.
"This isn't happening," she said to herself. "This is unreal."
???????-
The state police secured the scene. Troopers stood in the woods, each
within sight of the next, so no one could slip in. They worked 14-hour
shifts, the mosquitoes biting, the sun beating down. They stayed 11
days.
The FBI arrived. The governor came. The Smithsonian sent forensics experts, pulled off an Indian dig.
The plane hit at about 575 mph. The cockpit and first-class cabin
collapsed; the rest crumpled into it, the rivets giving, the fireball
scorching everything.
Investigators crawled through the debris field, bagging bolts and bone
fragments. They found chunks of seat cushion foam, and honeycombed
sound insulators. Then a shoelace, some shirt buttons, and a wedding
ring. Then part of a passport, and a necktie, still knotted.
"The first responders really went through a lot," says Capt. Frank
Monaco, commander of state police Troop A at Greensburg and the
coordinator of the state's 400-man crash site team.
The work wore on them. "People say, 'Wasn't it horrible?'" Monaco says.
"Well, we didn't have time to think about it. We literally ran on
adrenaline for two weeks."
Monaco has never seen the twin towers footage. The networks had backed off by the time he got home.
Wallace Miller, the lanky, Civil War-studying county coroner, did see
it. He sat at the family funeral home, his father, Wilbur, with him.
They watched the second plane sweep in low, from nowhere. They winced
when it hit.
"Boy, how'd you like to be the coroner there?" the son said.
He could have been out of town, at a coroners convention in eastern
Pennsylvania. His colleagues had gone early, to golf. But his game had
slipped, so he stayed back.
His secretary called.
He couldn't believe the scene. He saw the burnt trees, and some debris
smoking in the dirt. He saw half a window frame. He saw shreds of that
white cloth they put over the headrests.
He saw things in the trees.
He takes off his glasses, cleans them with his T-shirt. "This is the
most eerie thing," he says. "I have not, to this day, seen a single
drop of blood. Not a drop."
Every day he thinks about the people on that plane. John Talignani was
flying to his stepson's funeral. Patricia Cushing was flying for the
first time. Lauren Grandcolas was pregnant.
Honor Elizabeth Wainio was 27; Nicole Miller just 21.
Wallace Miller's own daughter is 18.
"That hit kind of close to home," he says. "I thought about what I would have done if this was my daughter, in California."
He'd have been there, he thinks. He'd have asked for her body, and her things.
He decided he would help the families. He would take them to the crash
site. He would introduce them, so they would know they weren't alone.
"People here look at these families as a group, like it's a club," he
says. "No. They don't know each other. When have you ever gotten onto a
plane and known everyone on it?"
He organized a family meeting in New Jersey, and then another. He
wrote. He called. He attended a Buddhist service for Toshiya Kuge,
whose mother left behind origami birds.
On Sept. 11, though, he simply tried to make sense of the crash site.
He went home about 2 a.m., too tired to think straight. He'd start
fresh in the morning. The federal mortuary team would be there then.
The light would be better.
He lay down on his couch, still dressed.
The phone rang. A man had died near Rockwood.
He woke his father and went for the body.
???????-
Fifty-five thousand people lost loved ones on Sept. 11, according to American Red Cross estimates.
The people of Somerset County lost something else, something that cloud
crowded out of Val McClatchey's photograph. She realized it that night,
in bed, listening to the hum of the emergency generators. The lights up
the hill came through the curtains.
"You go along, day to day, and you never think much about your
situation in life," says her husband, Jack. "Something like this, it
changes your outlook on things. You're waiting for the other shoe to
drop.
"This area will never be the same," he says.
That day was bad enough on television. But that was New York, and Washington. Obvious targets, if you think about it.
But here? This is a county of mom-and-pop shops, of Mail Pouch barns
and windmill farms. A dime still buys an hour of courthouse parking.
"In the back of your mind, you never think these things can happen," Tokar-Ickes says. "Not here."
Now, though, there is a memorial to plan, and a legacy to keep.
"An extraordinary thing happened on that airplane," says Miller, who
spent five months and $500,000 and found less than a tenth of the
victims' remains.
To him, that old strip mine is now a cemetery. "In 20 years, this will
be a historic site," he says. "I won't be coroner. The commissioners
won't be commissioners. The president won't be president. But those
(victims') families are still going to be coming back here."
Four thousand people already come to the crash site every week. They
pose for photographs. They leave flags and flowers and St. Christopher
medals, set on the rocks. The turnpike toll collectors hand them
printed directions.
"It's kind of amazing, how many people come," says Dave Fox, who drives
by the memorial every few weeks. He rarely gets out of the car.
His mother still lives on Lambertsville Road, a short walk from the
crash site. He was out there a few nights ago, cooking mountain pies
with his nieces and nephews. They sat there, under the stars, licking
their fingers and counting all the cars.
Robb Frederick can be reached at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
or (724) 837-6689.
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