Rebuilding the Pentagon: The Pentagon Renovation Project, 1993-2011

REBUILDING THE PENTAGON

The Pentagon Renovation Project, 1993-2011

By Craig Collins

If you compare an overhead picture of the Pentagon today with one from 1943, they’ll look pretty much the same, aside from some obvious changes to the adjacent roads and grounds. But nearly all of what people see when they look at the Pentagon today didn’t exist when the building was completed in 1943.

Officially, the Pentagon Renovation Project (PenRen) is recorded as being carried out from 1998 to 2011, but the building underwent changes almost immediately after it was built. The wide-open office bays, built to take advantage of cross-ventilation via open windows, were carved into warrens of enclosed private offices. Service corridors and walkways were sealed off and converted into office and storage space. With passage of the National Security Act of 1947, the building became a headquarters not only for the Army, but for the Air Force and Navy as well, with each service branch eventually occupying its own wing and making its own functional modifications. Internal spaces were altered to accommodate the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Command Authority.

Changes were implemented piecemeal over the decades. A 100-by-100-foot helicopter pad was built on the lawn in 1955, a peak in Cold War tensions, to enable the emergency evacuation of top-ranking officials. Helicopter transport soon became a means of official transportation to and from the building, handling, in the words of Pentagon historian Alfred Goldberg, “hundreds of flights a month. A control tower was added in April 1959.”

In 1977, when the Washington Metro rail system completed a line to the Pentagon, the old underground bus lanes were replaced by an above-ground terminal that brought buses within less than 10 feet of the building on the Concourse side, and an escalator from the new Metro station brought passengers directly into the Pentagon and its underground shopping center.

Many of these changes hampered the functionality of the building’s interior spaces, and a few created security risks that became increasingly obvious as the Pentagon approached its 50th anniversary. Efforts to improve or upgrade some of the building’s internal systems were also implemented piecemeal. When renovation became an object of serious discussion in the late 1980s, the Pentagon had not met the National Electrical Code standards since 1953, and averaged 20 to 30 power failures a day. In 1989, the coal-fired utilities plant, located in a separate building, had quit working entirely, and was replaced by several rented boilers and chillers that cost $200,000 a month to run.

By the 1970s, many other Pentagon features were out of compliance with federal laws. The only elevators available to employees with disabilities were the freight elevators, which had vertically operated doors that tended to knock people on their heads. The building contained an estimated 58,000 tons of asbestos-contaminated material, along with several other hazardous materials that violated environmental and workplace safety codes. Because the use of steel had been minimized during construction, pipes were made from concrete or cast iron. Much of the building’s plumbing had become brittle and corroded. The marshy soil on which the Pentagon had been built was sinking; some parts of the basement had dropped nearly a foot since 1943.

The deterioration reached a crisis point recounted by author Steve Vogel in his book The Pentagon: A History. On the evening of Aug. 7, 1990 – the day the military launched Operation Desert Shield and began moving troops and flight squadrons into the Middle East to counter Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait – a smoking coffeepot in the Joint Chiefs’ area triggered fire alarms, which brought Arlington County firefighters to the scene. When the firefighters connected their truck to a standpipe and pressurized the system, an old 10-inch pipe blew apart in one of the underground steam tunnels. Chaos ensued. Vogel wrote: “A torrent of muddy water began pouring into the Pentagon basement . . . Water was cascading down the hallways and spraying violently out of a crawlspace … Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water – eventually millions of gallons – poured into the building.”

The rising water approached a high-voltage electrical vault, and for a frightening interval electricians feared they might have to cut power to half the building just as U.S. forces were inserting themselves into Saudi Arabia. The flood was brought under control, but the point many had been trying to make for years – most notably David O. “Doc” Cooke, the civilian director of administration and management known informally as “The Mayor of the Pentagon” – could no longer be denied: The disintegration of the Pentagon was an urgent national security issue.

The sheer size of the Pentagon is evident as a worker uses an excavator inside the buiding to dig a trench during renovation.

National Archiving via Picryl

At Cooke’s urging, Congress passed legislation in November transferring stewardship of the Pentagon from the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal “landlord” agency charged with maintaining all federally owned buildings, to the Department of Defense (DOD). Maintenance and upkeep of the Pentagon were at last in the hands of its occupants.

STARTING IN THE BASEMENT

The law that gave the DOD control of the Pentagon created a fund that would pay for a 10-year renovation plan. Though the abrupt end of the Cold War in 1991 led some to question whether the Pentagon was necessary anymore, it was soon clear that though it would have to be essentially rebuilt in place, doing so would be cheaper than either abandoning it or rebuilding a new headquarters. The military would be stuck, in any case, with the cost of removing all the hazardous materials – asbestos, lead, mercury, and PCBs – from the building, and would no longer occupy what had become widely regarded as an institutional icon. The National Park Service, in declaring the building a National Historic Landmark in 1992, helped the DOD decide to hang on to the building.

A welder works to install new piping during renovation.

National Archives via Picryl

The ambitious new renovation program aimed to provide “new mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, cable management systems, improvements in fire and life safety systems, and flexible ceiling, lighting, and partition systems.” It would provide accessibility for people with disabilities, and “preserve historic elements, upgrade food service facilities, construct co-located operations centers, install modern telecommunications support features, comply with energy conservation requirements, reorganize materials handling, and provide safety improvements in vehicular and pedestrian traffic.”

The plan laid out in the early 1990s began with replacing the old power plant and doubling the size of the basement, adding more than a million square feet of usable space. The above-ground interior of the Pentagon would be gutted and rebuilt in five chevronshaped wedges, roughly equal in size, starting at the southwest point of the Pentagon (Wedge 1) and working clockwise. During Wedge 1’s rebuilding, employees would be moved to temporary “swing space” offsite – rented offices in the nearby communities of Rosslyn and Crystal City. After Wedge 1’s completion, employees from each section would be temporarily rotated into other parts of the building.

Work launched in 1993. Contractors began replacing the heating and cooling plant. Wedge 1 renovations were designed. Workers started to jackhammer out the basement floor, which would be lowered to accommodate a full mezzanine level between the basement and the first floor.

It was a rough start. The more workers dug, the more problems they uncovered, including leaking sewer pipes. Studies revealed the floodplain subsoils would continue to sink for another 50 years. Costs soared. Everyone in the building hated the noise and dust generated by the project, particularly senior leaders. When the Joint Chiefs met in The Tank, the jackhammers were shut down.

The renovation project was in trouble. Cooke, in 1997, created the position of Pentagon Renovation Program Manager and hired Walker Lee Evey, an Air Force contracts specialist, to bring the project under control. Evey began by scaling back ambitions for the basement (adding a little more than 320,000 square feet to the mezzanine level, instead of a planned 1.1 million) and focusing more resources on the above-ground sections. His slogan for the project – On Cost, On Schedule, Built for the Next 50 Years – proved surprisingly inspirational for people tired of being reviled by everyone else in the building. On Feb. 12, 1998, Evey staged a ceremonial “Big Bash” to mark the beginning of Wedge 1 renovations: Pentagon VIPs, armed with sledgehammers, each took a swing at a fourth floor wall of the E ring. The Pentagon renovation was, once again, officially underway.

A VULNERABLE TARGET

By the time of the 1998 reboot, additional concerns had to be addressed in the Pentagon’s renovation. The building had always been remarkably open for a military headquarters, prompting vague security concerns that became increasingly specific as the project took shape.

While the exterior walls of the Pentagon retained their familiar shape and character, the interior was almost entirely gutted and rebuilt from the basement up to the top floor. Even the windows were replaced with blastresistant versions.

National Archives via Picryl

The 1993 attack on the North Tower of the World Trade Center, when a truck bomb was detonated by terrorists in the underground parking garage, was intended to bring down the entire 110-story building. In hindsight, the decision to close off the Pentagon’s underground tunnels to vehicle traffic seemed wise, but buses, taxis, and other hired passenger transports still came incredibly close to the Pentagon. Planes flew over it. Commercial trucks drove right up to it and unloaded their cargo. Two highways, Virginia state routes 27 (to the northwest) and 110 (to the northeast), passed close by. Metro rail passengers got off the train and rode an escalator straight into the belly of the Pentagon.

Two more terrorist attacks influenced the design of the Pentagon Renovation. In April 1995, a truck bomb parked in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City detonated and ripped through every floor in the building, killing 168 people. In August 1998, two truck bombings were carried out nearly simultaneously, killing more than 200 people at the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya.

The concerns raised by these attacks were twofold: First, they highlighted how easy it would be for a truck bomb to be parked at the Pentagon’s doorstep. Passenger transports stopped at the curb, and every day around 250 delivery trucks backed up to the loading docks on the Pentagon’s south side to unload their cargo. Cooke had been arguing for years to move the loading docks to a facility away from the building.

The materials used to build the Pentagon comprised a second vulnerability. The exterior walls were made of unreinforced brick and concrete; its builders had avoided steel to reserve it for the war effort. Many casualties of the African embassy bombings were killed by flying chunks of masonry, and in Nairobi the bomb shattered every window within nearly a halfmile radius. In all of the United States, there was probably no greater symbol of American might than the Pentagon, which made it a prime target for terrorist attacks. And the Pentagon had been built with a lot of windows: Each of the five 924-foot exterior walls had up to 400 windows, each about 5 feet wide and 7 feet tall.

To minimize such vulnerabilities, Evey and the project team folded security measures and material modifications into the Wedge 1 renovation, but the Pentagon Renovation wasn’t without its critics, and some thought the security features were overkill. Steel columns were bolted in place along all five floors to shore up the integrity of the walls, and the windows were framed with 6-inch-thick steel beams. Fabric made of Kevlar – the material used to make bulletproof vests – was stretched between these steel members inside the walls to minimize the shrapnel effect of potential explosions. Two-inch-thick blast-resistant windows, each costing $10,000 and weighing three-quarters of a ton, were installed on the Wedge 1 exterior, 312 on the outside and 70 facing the inner courtyard. Additional fire exits with automatic doors were added. A sprinkler system was installed throughout most of the section.

The teardown and rebuilding of Wedge 1 continued more or less on schedule. The demolition of this segment alone removed about 28 million pounds of asbestos. In the new mezzanine area, the DiLorenzo Tricare Health Clinic opened in 2000. By September 2001, the Wedge 1 renovation was nearly complete, and the first workers in this section were making their way back in. More than half the occupants of Wedge 2 had moved out to prepare for the next phase of renovation. By the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, five days shy of the official completion of the Wedge 1 renovation, these two sections contained about half of the 9,500 people who would have been there on a normal workday.

THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACK

It was a little after 9:30 in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 airliner carrying 59 passengers and crew, slammed into the new western façade of the Pentagon, traveling 350 miles an hour and carrying 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. The hijacked jet struck the building at about a 45-degree angle, causing catastrophic damage to support columns on the first and second floors. It penetrated the three outermost (E, D, and C) rings of the Pentagon, passing from Wedge 1 into Wedge 2 as it disintegrated. The impact, explosion, and ensuing fire killed all 59 victims on the aircraft and 125 people in the Pentagon – including 29 of the 30 naval officers at work in the new Navy Command Center.

Nearly 200 Americans were killed in the Pentagon attack. Thousands of friends and family members were grieving and their lives would never be the same – but the attackers somehow had struck precisely where they would cause the least amount of damage. “This was a terrible tragedy,” Evey told reporters a few days later, “but I’m here to tell you that if we had not undertaken these efforts in the building, this could have been much, much worse.”

Probably the most important factor in the relatively low number of Pentagon casualties in the building was that so much of the affected area was unoccupied that day, due to the ongoing renovation. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times a few days after the attack, only about 800 of the 4,500 people who would normally have been working in the hardest-hit area of the building were there.

No building could have withstood the impact of such a violent crash, but the hardened features of Wedge 1 probably helped save many people who wouldn’t have survived otherwise. While the first and second floors were immediately destroyed, the third, fourth, and fifth floors remained in place, held up by steel supports, for another 30 to 40 minutes, allowing people time to evacuate. All but two of the victims in the Pentagon were on the first or second floor. What eventually caused the upper floors to collapse was the intense heat of burning jet fuel. Without the steel supports, a much larger expanse of the building probably would have fallen immediately, with a much greater loss of life. Demolition crews later found a message scrawled on a wall: “Thank you for the safety windows + reinforcement! All our people escaped!”

Images of the building exterior after the collapse showed intact windows, literally inches away from where the rest of the building had fallen. An article in ArchitectureWeek magazine the following month marveled: “So resilient was the newly strengthened section of the Pentagon that a glass display case only 40 feet from where the plane entered the building survived without a crack.” The new sprinkler system, admittedly useless in combatting a fire that was estimated to have burned hotter than 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, cooled and protected many evacuees.

Part of the building renovations included replacement of old communications technology, such as the WECO switch shown here, with 100,000 new voice, video, and data drops and 16 consolidated server rooms.

National Archives via Picryl

From a distance, in fact, the damage to the Pentagon seemed so slight, for a building that had just absorbed the impact of a 757 jetliner, that some 9/11 conspiracy theorists seized on images of the scene as evidence that there had been no plane crash at all: Why was the opening so small, when a 757 had a 124-foot wingspan? Why were windows intact just inches from the collapsed section?

Not all of the new features worked as expected, because nobody had ever expected an attack to take the form of a jet plane. The emergency fire doors worked flawlessly, slamming shut to seal off corridors and prevent the spread of fire, but they also temporarily trapped people who had to pry them open to escape; they were designed to funnel evacuees into nearby stairwells – but the stairwells had been destroyed in the explosion.

The 9/11 attack forced a fresh look at the existing plan for renovation. The Remote Delivery Facility was being built north of the Pentagon, severing the direct link between the building and cargo trucks, but the nearby highways, state routes 27 and 110, now seemed too close for comfort. The Metro Entrance Facility, which would move arriving buses and other passenger vehicles away from the building, was under construction adjacent to the southwest wall, but the escalator from the underground Metro station was still disgorging about 15,000 people a day into the Pentagon lobby. These and other issues would have to be addressed.

Workers spread concrete for new flooring during Pentagon renovation. The project progressed through the gutting and reconstruction of five wedges, with the workers in the affected wedge moving offsite until each one was renovated.

National Archives via Picryl

The Pentagon Renovation team absorbed and integrated the lessons learned into a revised plan, one that would now include an entirely new effort called the Phoenix Project: the complete demolition and rebuilding of the 400,000-square-foot damaged section within a year. The renovation of Wedges 2 through 5 would continue. Originally scheduled for completion in 2014, they were accelerated with funding from Congress, whose legislators realized the program’s urgency. Far from delaying the project, the 9/11 terror attacks were a catalyst that drove it closer to completion.

WEDGES 2-5

At the peak of activity, more than 3,500 workers toiled away at the site, working wedge to wedge while the DOD continued to function at full strength – a job Evey compared to “taking apart a black-and-white TV and putting it back together again in color, without missing any of your favorite programs.”

In the spring of 2011, the last of the displaced employees returned to work at a new Pentagon, in compliance with every applicable statute and code and built for efficiency, using sustainably harvested lumber, lower-water plumbing fixtures, energy-efficient lighting, and carpeting and other materials made from recycled content. More than 50 percent of the construction waste had been salvaged and recycled.

Inside, the Pentagon, though familiar, looked entirely new. In June of 2011, in The Washington Post, Steve Vogel wrote:

Old-timers accustomed to marching up ramps and stairs marvel at the 70 passenger elevators in the new Pentagon. The institutional cafeterias with kitchen mixing bowls the size of Volkswagens are gone, too, replaced by an airy twostory dining atrium of terrazzo, stainless steel and glass. The hot dog stand in the center courtyard was rebuilt and is now known as the Center Court Cafe, offering panini and quesadillas. Built in an era of analog telephones and manual typewriters, the Pentagon was now a headquarters fit for the Information Age, with more than 100,000 voice, data, and video drops and 16 consolidated server rooms.

In addition to these modernized spaces, the surrounding grounds featured several conspicuous differences, including the reconfiguration of State Route 27, which had entrance and exit ramps altered to provide a security checkpoint at the Remote Delivery Facility entrance, and State Route 110, which was swung out to the east to skirt the Pentagon Lagoon rather than the building itself. Each of the new facilities on the Pentagon Reservation was certified under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program:

• The computer-controlled New Heating and Refrigeration Plant (NHRP) relies on natural gas and a solar roof to achieve 30 percent greater efficiency than its predecessor.

• The 250,000-square-foot Remote Delivery Facility, on the north lawn, provides a secure consolidated location for receiving and screening thousands of items shipped to the building each day. With its landscaped roof, it’s hardly visible to anyone looking out the north windows.

• The Metro Entrance Facility, off the southwest façade of the building, moved vehicular traffic away from the building itself by providing a new Metro bus stop and an arrival point for Metro rail passengers.

• A new Pentagon Athletic Center on the north side of the building accommodates 8,000 members daily with workout equipment and exercise areas.

• The Pentagon Library and Conference Center, near the Pentagon Lagoon, houses the Army library, several offices of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, a café, and 16 conference rooms. The last feature to be added to the grounds was the Pentagon

Memorial, dedicated on Sept. 11, 2008, on the southwest lawn where Flight 77 approached the building seven years earlier. The wide expanse features 184 benches, each bearing the name of a victim of the Pentagon attack and arching over a shallow reflecting pool lit from below.

In his remarks at the memorial’s dedication, President George W. Bush remembered the victims, as well as the Pentagon employees, first responders in Arlington and New York, and the passengers of United Flight 93 who sacrificed their lives on that day to protect other Americans from harm. “On a day when buildings fell, heroes rose,” he said. “And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice.”

At the ceremony, the president also recognized the men and women of the armed forces. “When our enemies attacked the Pentagon,” he said, “they pierced the rings of this building, but they could not break the resolve of the United States Armed Forces.” It was a sincere, moving tribute to all that the Pentagon – the understated, sprawling low-rise, built in a hurry in Hell’s Bottom on the Potomac – had stood for since 1943, and now, thanks to the work of those who’d rebuilt it, would embody for at least another half-century.