The Pentagon headquarters of the US military, torn and fire-blackened by an airborne terrorist attack, reopened for curtailed business yesterday as rescue workers pressed the search for as many as 800 victims.
Smoke from the massive concrete structure drifted over Washington, but defense and firefighting officials said fires from a hijacked airliner that slammed into a corner of the five-sided building on Tuesday were nearly under control.
The world's largest government building across the Potomac River in Virginia was evacuated after Tuesday morning's devastating strike, but thousands of workers streamed back to work yesterday.
The attack coincided with other hijackings that toppled the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, where thousands are believed to have perished.
Nearly half of the 27km of Pentagon corridors remained shut for safety reasons, however, and officials said many of the 23,000 military and civilians who work there daily would not report yesterday because of damage to a large wedge of the building.
"We are open for business," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "The search and rescue operation is ongoing."
Arlington County, Virginia, Fire Chief Edward Plaugher, coordinating the firefighting operation at the Pentagon, placed the death toll at between 100 and 800 people. He told reporters early yesterday that it would take "many, many days" to search for survivors and recover the bodies of the dead.
Officials said it was important to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the military of the world's only superpower was seen unbowed by the terrorist strike.
One section of the five-story building, built during World War II and never attacked during the decades of the Cold War, collapsed and burned.
Sixty-four people were aboard the airliner that slammed into the building and burst into flames. But officials were unsure how many of the nearly 800 workers assigned to the damaged wedge were at work when the aircraft struck.
"The building is still under active fire involvement," Plaugher said.
More than a dozen bodies were removed from the rubble early yesterday and rescue teams with search dogs stood by to go into the damaged area when the fires were out. A portable morgue and field hospital were set up on a highway next to the building.
Rescuers probed as far as they could but "obviously in the collapsed areas, that will have to take place at a later time, after we have made the building safe," Plaugher said.
Rumsfeld, who briefly helped with the rescue operation, said later it would be "beyond comprehension" that anyone on board the plane could have survived.
He said the total number of casualties was not yet clear, but added: "It will not be few."
One passenger aboard the doomed aircraft told her husband by mobile phone just before the crash that hijackers had taken over the plane brandishing knives and had herded the passengers and crew, including the pilot, to the back of the plane.
Arlington firefighter Derek Spector, head of the first unit that arrived on the scene, stumbled out of the building two hours after the incident, exhausted and blackened by smoke.
"We got there, and the whole side of the building was in flames. It's terrible in there," Spector said.
Pentagon security officer George Clodfelter, whose uniform was stained with blood, said he pulled a woman and her infant out of a window close to the impact site and they were shaken but unhurt.
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