Former city woman escapes attack on Pentagon

John Stark, The Bellingham Herald

If it wasn't for the sparks from ripped electrical circuits, Tamera Selhaver Ramos said she and her Pentagon co-workers might never have been able to find their way through the darkness that descended upon them when American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building.

In a telephone interview, Ramos described the ordeal that began at 9:38 a.m. EDT Tuesday.

Minutes before, Ramos had gotten word of the World Trade Center devastation and tried to get information from news Web sites. But they were choked.

"I'm a Web developer and it was driving me crazy," said Ramos, a former Bellingham resident who attended Bellingham High School and Whatcom Community College.

The implications of the New York terror attack were just sinking in. Ramos didn't realize the Pentagon might also be in peril. She and two workers decided to head for another office where there was a television. But there was no time.

"My desk blew up and my chair went back and the lights went out and the chaos started," she said.

A civilian contract worker, her office was in the so-called "D Ring," the fourth of five concentric corridors inside the 29-acre building. D Ring is just inside the outermost E Ring, where the general in charge of Ramos' department had an office that overlooked the helicopter pad that was ground zero for the doomed Boeing 757.

At that moment, the general and his staff were dead or dying. Ramos was sitting stunned on the floor. She heard a supervisor yelling, "Get out! Get out!"

But that wasn't easy.

"It was so black you couldn't see a thing," she said.

She and two co-workers, Sean Bruck and Scott Semelbauer, groped around on the floor amid the debris of fallen ceiling tiles.

"I started screaming for the guys," Ramos said. "One of them was on the ground and grabbed for my leg. ... The three of us held hands real tight and started to make our way toward our front office door. ... If (wires) wouldn't have been sparking, we wouldn't have been able to find our front door."

The three were trying to make their way to the Pentagon's central courtyard, as far away from the impact as possible.

"I can't even remember how we got from our door to the main corridor," she said. "We just got there. ... There was a lot of smoke and lots of screaming."

At that point, Semelbauer, a private pilot, said, "I smell jet fuel."

Finally, emergency lights came on in the corridor. But their relief turned to momentary terror when they found that a heavy security door had slammed shut and locked, blocking their most direct escape route, in an automated response to the emergency.

"It definitely worked," she said.

The three saw a shaft of light in the corridor and moved toward it. They found an open door and emerged into a brightly lit office whose occupants were still inside wondering what to do, unaware of the extent of the devastation elsewhere in the building. They were stunned to see Ramos, Semelbauer and Bruck stagger in, covered with dust and bits of insulation.

"Somehow we got from there to the center courtyard," Ramos said. "I don't even remember getting there."

In the courtyard, she remembered that a lot of people were vomiting, apparently from exposure to fuel fumes.

Eventually they made it to the parking lot, then to Semelbauer's car, then to the gridlock on U.S. 1.

"It took an hour and a half to get 10 minutes away," she said.

For other workers in the immense Pentagon, with its 17Þ miles of corridors, the experience was much different.

Air Force Major Laura Olson, a 1978 graduate of Bellingham High School, works at the opposite side of the building. She said she heard a noise and felt a shock wave, then calmly joined colleagues in an orderly departure from the south entrance.

A lieutenant colonel appeared and told people to go home. Not wanting to hazard her usual bus ride, Olson said she walked the two miles to her home.

Worried father

Meanwhile, Ramos' father, Rick Selhaver, was enduring his own day of agony as he watched television news reports. Televised diagrams showed him that the doomed jet had hit the part of the building where he knew his daughter worked.

"Absolute hell, that's what we went through down here," said Selhaver, co-owner of Bobby Lee's Restaurant and Tavern in Everson. "We had to sit and wait, and we called every number that was on TV."

It was five hours before jammed phone lines would permit Selhaver to even leave a message on his daughter's answering machine. It was not until about 7:30 p.m. local time -- more than 12 hours after the disaster -- that Selhaver heard his daughter's voice on the phone.

Selhaver went out of his way to thank a woman named Roxanne at the Bellingham chapter of the American Red Cross. He never got her last name, and she wasn't able to get him any information, but she provided comfort just the same, Selhaver said.

"It was a relief for me just to talk to her," he said. "She was so nice."

Selhaver's Red Cross angel was Roxanne Pierce, data manager at the local office. She said she was relieved to learn Selhaver's story ended happily.

"His story gives me goosebumps," she said.

Selhaver knows that others were not so lucky.

"Our hearts go out to all of the families involved," he said. "We were one of the fortunate ones. Our daughter is alive. A lot of families aren't going to be so fortunate."

Reach John Stark at jstark@bellingh.gannett.com or call 715-2274.