Where was bulk of Flight 93 wreckage *before* cleanup started?

He said every piece of wreckage, whether it was a piece of paper or a body part, was crucial to the investigation because of how much evidence was burned up and lost in the World Trade Center attack earlier.

"It was the busiest day in Pennsylvania State Police history," Monaco said to a room of about 50 various emergency personnel. "We had flight manuals in Arabic, duct taped hands, fingers, toes ... bits of paper everywhere."

"After calling for backup from several area fire companies, King and the other firefighters, who had never responded to an airplane crash, surveyed the scene. None of them was prepared for what they saw. King recalls the paper strewn in the trees and clothing and shoes scattered on the ground. There were no bodies, he says. Just body parts. 'That's when the sheer destruction of the crash really hit home,' he says."


http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/sept11stonycreekjan02.p ...

King is also the Assistant Fire Chief of the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department. He was one of the first emergency workers at the scene of the crash.

The morning of the crash, King was watching the events of Sept. 11th unfold on television in disbelief. King called his sister, and as they were talking, she paused and told him that she could hear a low flying jet flying near her house. King knew all planes were ordered out of the sky, but kept in mind that some of the planes were reported missing. Seconds later, the plane hit, the impact shaking the town. King ran to the firehall, jumped into the fire truck with 4 other firefighters and raced off to the crash site.

"I felt it was too coincidental not to be related to what was going on. I didn't think that Shanksville was a target of terrorists attacks, I just didn't know what was going on,' said King. He was not sure what scene to expect at the crash site. When King and his crew arrived, they saw what smoking pieces remained of the plane. “There were small pieces everywhere and small signs of human remains. It was total destruction.”



Excerpts from "Courage After the Crash: Flight 93" by Glenn J. Kashurba. SAJ Publishing, 2002.

King: "We stopped and I opened the door. The smell of jet fuel was overpowering. I will never forget that smell; it is really burnt into my mind. ...I walked down the power line and got my first glimpse of human remains. Then I walked a little further and saw more."
"

Firefighter Mike Sube: "We made our way to a small pond. That's where I observed the largest piece of wreckage that I saw, a portion of the landing gear and fuselage. One of the tires was still intact with the bracket, and probably about three to five windows of the fuselage were actually in one piece lying there. ...There were enough fires that our brush truck was down there numerous times. ... I saw small pieces of human remains and occasionally some larger pieces. That was disturbing, but what was most disturbing was seeing personal effects."

Lieutenant Roger Bailey, Somerset Volunteer Fire Department: "We started down through the debris field. I saw pieces of fiberglass, pieces of airplane, pop rivets, and mail...Mail was scattered everywhere. ... the one guy who was with us almost stepped on a piece of human remains. I grabbed him, and he got about half woozy over it."


When former firefighter Dave Fox arrived at the scene, "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."

Immediately after the crash, the seeming absence of human remains led the mind of coroner Wally Miller to a surreal fantasy:
that Flight 93 had somehow stopped in mid-flight and discharged all of its passengers before crashing.

SHANKSVILLE, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- The FBI announced Monday that its investigation of the site where a hijacked jet slammed into a field here is complete and that 95 percent of the plane was recovered.

Evidence-gathering was halted Saturday afternoon and the pieces of United Airlines Flight 93 that had been recovered were turned over Sunday to the airline, with the exception of the flight data recorder and the voice recorder, which are being held and analyzed by the FBI, according to FBI agent Bill Crowley.

Crowley said the biggest piece of the plane that was recovered was a 6-by-7-foot piece of the fuselage skin, including about four windows. The heaviest piece, Crowley said, was part of an engine fan, weighing about 1,000 pounds.

Tuesday, September 25, 2001

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

STONYCREEK, Pa. -- The FBI said yesterday that it has finished its work at the crash scene of United Flight 93 after recovering about 95 percent of the downed airliner and concluding that explosives were not responsible for bringing it down.