Flight 93 was second plane crash response for former Butler-based state trooper
When a former state trooper was dispatched to the 2001 crash of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Somerset County, there wasn’t much debris left to clean, he said.
“When you have an object going at that kind of speed … it just blew everything into pieces,” said Terry Seilhamer, a former state trooper and retired Jackson Township Police chief.
Before becoming a police chief, Seilhamer served as an area commander of state police Troops C, D and E, commanding about 1,000 troopers at the time in northwestern and Western Pennsylvania.
Somerset County wasn’t in Seilhamer’s coverage area. State police Commissioner Col. Paul Evanko asked him to join Maj. Lyle Szupinka in Shanksville because Seilhamer was the only one with experience cleaning up an aviation disaster.
Seilhamer had previously overseen the site of the worst aviation disaster in Pennsylvania history on Sept. 8, 1994, when USAir Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township, Beaver County. The crash killed all 132 people on the flight.
“Nobody knew what to do because we had never experienced anything like that,” Seilhamer said.
Flight 93’s crash on Sept. 11, 2001, killed 44 people. Seilhamer was sent there as an adviser.
He arrived Sept. 12. He said the weather was very clear that day. He could see the imprint left after the plane nose-dived into an old strip mine area and its 5,000-6,000-lb. fuel tank exploded, scorching the nearby woods.
“I compared it in my mind to the 427 crash from 1994,” Seilhamer said.
The 1994 crash had been different. Large pieces of the plane and human remains had been scattered for miles, forcing Seilhamer to continually push back the perimeter.
“There weren’t really any remains that I saw (at Flight 93) because everything was vaporized,” he said.
It made Seilhamer think, “Wow, where is everything?” he said.
Seilhamer helped Szupinka establish a perimeter, which had been easier there than at the 1994 crash since this one was in an open field.
However, he said crews still found pieces of the plane miles away from the crash site.
Part of securing the perimeter also means keeping away “sightseers” trying to take pieces of the wreckage. He had a problem with sightseers encroaching on the 1994 crash scene, but they didn’t come to the Flight 93 crash. Seilhamer speculated it was because the entire country understood the gravity of the events.
“You have to compartmentalize stuff like that,” he said.
The scene commander also has to verify that the next shift of first responders will come to relieve the first shift, and that they have food and a place to stay.
“It’s a lot of logistics involved,” he said.
Seilhamer was only at the scene intermittently, but since it was classified as a terrorist attack, federal agencies such as the National Transportation Safety Board investigated the scene for months.
“Our people that responded did an outstanding job during some very tragic circumstances,” he said.
Today, Seilhamer tries not to think too much about his experience that day. He tries to “keep it out of sight, out of mind” and has never been to the Flight 93 Memorial.
“I’m glad they did that to honor the people on that flight, but I have no desire to go back there,” Seilhamer said.
