'They Were Horrific' — Dispatcher Remembers Pentagon Phone Calls On 9-11

ARLINGTON, VA — Fire Station 5 is located in Crystal City, about a mile from the Pentagon. As such, the station's fire and rescue crews were the first to respond to the crash site of American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11, 2001.

Current and past Arlington public safety personnel and local officials gathered Saturday morning at Fire Station 5 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

"We convene on this anniversary to acknowledge the loss of 2,977 fellow Americans, 184 just down the street from this firehouse at the Pentagon," said Deputy County Manager Jim Schwartz, who was the keynote speaker on Saturday.

Schwartz also recalled the hundreds of first responders in Arlington and New York, including members of the FBI, who have died in the intervening years from diseases caused by exposure to materials at the crash sites.

"While their ultimate sacrifice was done under different circumstances than that of our heroes on Sept. 11, we should honor their memory just as much," he said.

As the former chief of the Arlington County Fire Department, Schwartz was in charge of the operations center that oversaw the combined public safety response at the Pentagon in September 2001.

On Sept. 11, Capt. Eric Wesley first heard about American Airlines Flight 77 slamming into the Pentagon when he was working overtime at his second job, doing IT work for the Fairfax County Police Department. Wesley went to Station 6 in Falls Church and hopped on a bus with other firefighters to be shuttled to the crash site.

"When I got there, it was something out of a movie," Wesley said. "It was probably six hours in when I got there. There was a lot of lights, a lot of people moving. It was unbelievable. When we saw it initially on TV, when you got there, it was almost breathtaking to see people running around, still working.

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"When I first got there, I was assigned to a suppression team, so we went directly into it. We went to the D ring to recover a line that was abandoned. We went in. We did fire suppression and we came back out. But that was around about 3 o'clock, 3:30 during the day, so it was still an actively working fire."

Over the next month, Wesley and the other firefighters worked 12-hour shifts every day, doing clean up and recovery work at the Pentagon as well as their other duties.

"When I look back at it now, it showed me a lot of camaraderie," he said. "What we have now is what we call mutual aid, when we work with other jurisdictions. We work with Alexandria, Fairfax, and we respond to their jurisdictions. But to see all that coming together and unify command the way that it did, it gave me a new insight on what camaraderie meant to work with these other people."

"When the planes hit the towers, I heard it on the car radio," said Jen Meyers, who was dispatcher with Arlington County. "I was driving. Then my pager all of a sudden was saying — I remember it to this day, because it's ingrained in my head — 'Plane into Pentagon. All help respond now.'"

Driving in from her home in Ashburn, Meyers remembered seeing no planes overhead and no traffic on the road, except for a line of first responders heading toward Arlington.

"As soon as I got there, the phones were off the chain," she said. "In my entire 25 year career there, I never saw the phones ring like they rang that day.

"A lot of that volume was people looking for their loved ones. So, once they were able to release some more information, like the children at the [Pentagon's] daycare center, that made a difference. Then we still had our regular call volume, which some people forget. ... We still had to keep everybody going on the road, fire and police responding to things. But the calls that came from the Pentagon, they were hard. They were horrific."

Battalion Chief Tiffanye Wesley remembers Sept. 11, 2001 as if it had just happened yesterday.

"It was eerie this morning getting up because it was almost identical weather conditions," she said. "When I walked out the door this morning, it was a little brisk, bright and clear."

Although Tiffanye Wesley was an instructor at ACFD's training academy at the time of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, she didn't have a class on that Tuesday morning. Her husband, Eric Wesley, had just graduated from the academy in May and she was preparing for the incoming class.

"My captain was watching the news and he saw the first plane hit and he actually pulled it up on the scanner app to listen to the radio traffic coming from New York," she said. "In the midst of pulling up the traffic, we saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center."

Shortly after, they heard a radio call from the captain of Station 101 as he was traveling down Washington Boulevard.

"He came over the radio and said, 'There's a plane that crashed somewhere in Crystal City,'" she said. "He didn't immediately say the Pentagon."

Related: Arlington Remembers Lives Lost 20 Years After Attack On Pentagon

Having seen the two planes crash into the World Trade Center, Tiffanye Wesley and her captain knew the crash in Arlington was connected to what was happening in New York.

"We knew at that point that it was definitely probably intentional," she said. "So, we were able to immediately grab all of our things and we responded right from the training academy with the entire staff. We were probably there within 10 minutes after the crash."

Upon arrival, they encountered smoke and flames coming from the impact zone of the aircraft.

"It was mass chaos," Tiffanye Wesley said. "Everyone was running from the Pentagon in panic. So, we just rendered first aid and assisted those that were coming out."

After spending three days at the Pentagon assisting in the rescue and recovery effort, Tiffanye Wesley was assigned to the Joint Operations Center, working 12 hour shifts. In that role, she was able to work with all of the public safety agencies that had come together from around the region to response to the crisis.

Retired Capt. Keith Young was in the training academy on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and drove one of the vehicles that responded to the call at the Pentagon.

"Normally, when you arrive at any scene, you check in with operating commander," he said. "The commander will give you instructions of what to do. That day, was so unusual for me from the instructions. The instruction was, 'Just do whatever you can.'

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"You could see the devastation in front of you. That's when I started working, helping patients, helping the paramedics, and moving forward toward the building to do whatever I could."

Young stayed at the Pentagon for 10 days.

"We weren't permitted to leave, because the service was needed," he said. "Every day, all throughout the night. I still remember it. I said, I just have to make one phone call, so someone can pick up my daughter, cause I'm not going home.

"After 20 years, 9-11 will always be a scar for me, because I can tell you exactly what I did 20 years to this day. But sir, I cannot tell you what I did yesterday sometimes. Honestly, I can tell you every move I made, everything I touched, and every person I tried to help. It's a vivid memory in my mind and will always be in my heart."

During his keynote speech, Schwartz credited the success of the public safety response at the Pentagon on 9-11 to the preparations ACPD and its partners across the region had already put in place. This included establishing an incident command system, which was not standard practice in most jurisdictions across the country at that time.

"To our regional partners in Northern Virginia, the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland, we could not have done what we did that day without you," he said. "Your partnership begun decades before, your commitment to stand with us on that day, to provide us all that we needed, all that we could not provide for ourselves, was absolutely essential to the outcome I just described."