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evacuation was ordered. “We just threw the tools down and took off out the Southwest Gate as far as we could run. All I kept doing was looking up in the sky for another plane to come down,” said Watson. After learning about the World Trade Center, Assistant Usher Daniel Shanks instructed the catering trucks to leave the South Grounds. He asked a Secret Service Uniformed Division (UD) officer if he could share his post on the South Grounds. He recalled, “Watching the hour unfold from the gatehouse was surreal. The officer called his family to tell them how much he loved them and that he would be careful, then proceeded to unlock the gun cabinet and take out a shotgun, asking whether I knew how to use one.” After 9:30 a.m., Shanks recalled, “I walked outside the booth, moving to the center of the South Grounds to look up at the South Portico for signs of Residence activity, when we all felt the almost implosive concussion of the airplane crashing into the Pentagon. Turning south you could begin to see the heavy dark smoke rising.” Operations Foreman Rickey McKinney was constructing a candy-striped tent for the picnic when Gary Walters told him to stop. McKinney remained on the South Grounds, standing on the southeast
WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION
At the same time, Executive Chef Walter Scheib was standing at the Southeast Gate, receiving mobile kitchen equipment from the U.S. Army. He recounted, “I could hear what sounded like a plane accelerating. I said, ‘That’s strange. I never heard a plane that loud before.’ And I heard the really, really hard acceleration and then a thump, and it was like a concussion. You could feel a concussion in your chest. I remember looking back over my left shoulder, and there was this column of khaki-colored smoke, from the Pentagon.” After watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center South Tower on the Usher’s Office television, Carpenter Shop Foreman Ed Watson returned to the South Grounds to alert his staff, who were building a stage. At that moment they heard the large explosion of the Pentagon crash. He said, “We felt it. I felt the ground shake. I mean, it was an explosion sound, a very loud explosion sound. The ground shook.” Watson watched Scheib run up the driveway then Watson told his staff to get into the White House. Gary asked Watson and his carpenters to remove the stage and help clear the South Grounds. They reluctantly agreed, but when a military jet appeared, an immediate
Smoke fills the air over the White House as the Pentagon burns barely two miles away on the morning of September 11, 2001 (opposite top). Executive Residence staff working on the South Lawn at 9:37 a.m. heard and felt the impact and soon saw the smoke rise when terrorists crashed American Airlines flight 77 into the western wall of the Pentagon. White House carpenters had been at work on the South Grounds building a stage at the time of the impact, “It was an explosion sound. . . . The ground shook,” recalled Ed Watson seen here with his colleagues in the White House Carpenter Shop (left to right, Robbie Thompson, Ed Watson, Charlie Brandts, and Tom Craven). Assistant Usher Daniel Shanks (opposite bottom) described the impact as an “implosive concussion.”