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It was supposed to be a slow day today. The radio
show that I produce ended up going on location to a cafe in
Georgetown for a round-table discussion and debate, and most of
the work had been done before hand. And in this town
of constantly breaking news and shocking revelations, planning
stories and booking guests even three days in advance usually
proves to be an exercise in futility.
I finished up at the station (which is three blocks from the
White House) at 3pm, and took the metro to the Library of
Congress. I intended to do a little background
research in preparation for my political commentary this week.
I emerged from the Capitol South metro station to sounds of
several sirens and helicopter. In my high-heeled
black pumps and pinstriped business suit, I followed the
firetrucks and sprinted a few blocks towards the Capitol
building. When I got there, the building had been
evacuated. People stood on the lawn and on the steps
of the building, beneath and around a large red and white banner
which read, "In God We Trust." Reporters
from various agencies such as the Associated Press, the
Washington Post, and CBS gathered with their notebooks and
cameras in front of the building at the corner of East Capitol
Street and First Street. Most of them were explaining
to their editors via cellphone that they were hoping for a press
conference to determine what had just transpired.
I turned around and noticed that a couple of 30-something men,
with a pamphlet-sized guide to the Capitol Building in hand,
were hovering around the reporters. They were being
completely ignored. I asked the one with the pamphlet
if he got it from the Capitol Building, and he said that they
had just been on a guided tour of the building when the mayhem
hit. I immediately whisked them off to a shady place
under a few trees on East Capitol street--about 25 meters away
from where the other reporters were perched, waiting for their
next spoon-feeding of information from some official government
mouthpiece.
My witnesses were John Lazarus and David Withem: a
couple of tourists from Oregon who happened to be near the
rotunda--the main, dome-shaped part of the Capitol that is
always shown on postcards--when alarms started going off at 3pm. They
were on a tour of the Capitol with two interns from the office
of Senator Conrad Burns of Montana. Withem described
the alarms as being "not like a school recess alarm, but
much softer." Lazarus said that there was an
"eerie calmness" about the incident, despite all the
threats with which this town has been bombarded recently. As
recently as this week, 25,000 heavy duty astronaut-style gas
masks had been ordered for politicians, staffers, and tourists
on the Hill.
A guard came up to the tour group and said, "Everyone must
exit the building immediately. This is not a
drill." Lazarus said that the interns and guards
directed the flow of people to the south exit of the building,
and they walked out just as firefighters were coming in and
beginning to scale the building from the outside.
But the scene wasn't without some panic. One of the
interns--who was on the last day of her internship--had invited
her parents along on the tour. When the alarm bells
started ringing, she ordered her father to hand her his cell
phone. She immediately called Senator Burns' office
in a panic, only to find that no one there knew anything about
what was going on.
Lazarus claims that, once outside, they were told that the alarm
was set off by smoke on the fourth floor of the building. That
happens to be the floor where the cloakroom is located and where
politicians can go to conduct private negotiations during breaks
in session.
As it turns out, neither the Congress nor the Senate was in
session during the incident. They had all left
earlier that day to go home for the weekend. Lazarus
said that once they arrived back at Senator Burns' office in the
Senate Building after the evacuation, a staffer told them that
it had been months since they had experienced a similar scare on
the Hill.
Later on in the day, Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said
the smoke that sparked the incident was actually dust that
settled on an attic fan on the House side of the building. The
dust created a scent of smoke as it spread through the
ventilation system.
Although it turned out to be a false alarm, the event made for
an inadvertent test of the security and emergency systems on
Capitol Hill. I, for one, find some comfort in
knowing that all systems are clearly operational. Withem
doesn't feel quite the same way. He was disturbed by
the fact that interns with barely any experience were left to
deal with an emergency that could very well have been another
September 11th type of incident. Withem and Lazarus
are a little shaken up, but they are shrugging off the incident. Withem
says they are determined to continue on and "explore some
other things here in Washington before they catch fire."
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