A September 2001 image of the Flight 93 crash site shows a distinct “V” burned into the trees adjacent to the impact location. “(The fire) scorched everything in that “V” instantaneously,” Warren County Sheriff Brian Zeybel, then a Pennsylvania State Police trooper who responded to the scene, said. “The trees themselves looked like someone had painted half with fire retardant.” Department of Justice photo

WARREN, Pa. — For the vast majority in Warren County, the 9/11 attacks were not personal.

We don’t live near the scenes in New York, Washington or Shanksville and the vast majority didn’t directly know anyone killed in the attacks.

That doesn’t mean, though, that many weren’t fearful.

In the wake of the attacks, Pennsylvania State Police troopers from all over the state responded to the scenes of destruction, especially the small south central Pennsylvania town where Flight 93 was heroically brought down.

Warren County Sheriff Brian Zeybel was one of the troopers that got the call the day after the attack to pull together uniforms and get on the road to Shanksville.

“I looked at it as another mass incident, an emergency management type incident,” Zeybel said. “I guess the concern of the incident itself wasn’t my concern. I wasn’t worried about the incident itself. I was worried about America as a whole.”

As law enforcement, he was concerned they “may become the soldiers of our own land” having to respond directly to additional attacks on U.S. soil. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. That was the bigger fear…. As a whole, it was the unknown that was the scary part of it.”

Zeybel was one of two troopers from the Warren barracks sent to Shanksville. He said they got to the scene “in a hurried fashion.” The troopers that responded had been there 24 hours. They needed a break.

His assignment was just three or four days long — the powers that be were rotating officers through so no one was exposed to the scene for too long.

Flight 93 struck the ground outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania at about a 40 degree angle and somewhere between 563 and 580 miles per hour, according to the National Park Service, carrying about 5,500 gallons of jet fuel. Impact created a crater 15 feet deep and about 30 feet across. The largest piece recovered intact was a 6 foot by 7 foot piece of the fuselage.

The appearance of the site itself has stuck with Zeybel.

“I was surprised, still am surprised, (about) the lack of evidence of a plane hitting the earth,” he said. “In the way of debris fields and all that, the earth absorbed that pretty well, almost sucked it up.”

Zeybel explained that the plane crashed in a field near a forested edge. “You could see a “V,” a demarcation line, from a divot in the earth where the fire went in there,” he said. Presumably caused by the jet fuel hundreds of trees were “half scorched on the right hand size. (The fire) scorched everything in that ‘V’ instantaneously. The trees themselves looked like someone had painted half with fire retardant. That was odd for me. That to me looked odd. I’ve never seen anything like that — that hot, that fast, (that) could burn the side of a tree.”

He also had preconceived notions about what he would observe at the crash site.

“I expected to see stuff everywhere,” he said. “It really wasn’t like that…. I think the angle — you think the earth as hard as it is, as light as a plane is, it flies — going at that speed at that angle….” He compared the site to driving a nail into concrete.”

According to the NPS, the wreckage was “largely unrecognizable pieces of twisted metal, pieces of the landing gear of the plane, a tire, the frames of some of the seats, bits of charred paper, and remnants of luggage and clothing. Most of the pieces of wreckage were quite small, the size of a notebook or smaller.”

“I was surprised,” Zeybel said, noting that he expected to see a scene like that of a spilled cargo truck. “It was in the earth.”

He said the day would start with a meeting — right near the crash site — with commanders where assignments were handed out and everyone was brought up to speed on developments in the case.

His role — like that of many other members of the law enforcement community on the scene — was to secure a perimeter around the crash site.

“There were platoons assigned to a woods detail which literally lived in the woods,” he said. “There was no other way to secure some of the perimeter due to the wooded terrain.”

There were mortuary details, transportation details.

“I, personally, was on a detail, a perimeter detail,” Zeybel said. “(We) checked every car trying to enter a 5 mile radius of the crash site.”

They had lists of people that lived in the neighborhoods in that range. “(You) had to have photo ID or we were not letting you in,” he said. People looking to visit people at residences in the perimeter were denied access.

Once or twice a day, people would come up to their checkpoint and hand over pieces of the airplane to him. He described it as “light type debris that would have floated in the air. Some looked like insulation.” Some of those pieces were carbon fiber wrapping that would have been on the exterior of the plane.

“That stuff must have been in the air quite a bit,” he said.

What also stands out was the graciousness of the community that by any measure was inconvenienced by the investigation.

“People present at the scene living there could not have been any more welcoming,” Zeybel said. They’d bring t-shirts, underwear and socks. “The local people there were — (it) chokes me up — they couldn’t have been nicer to us.

“We were true heroes in their eyes. (It was) overwhelming to see people open their hearts like that.”