By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
When the World Trade Center towers fell, and a hijacked jet slammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Maryland’s emergency responders did not wait to be asked twice. Within hours, specialized search-and-rescue teams and other emergency personnel from Maryland were mobilizing toward the attack sites, beginning Maryland’s part in rescue, recovery, and security operations that would continue for weeks.
Maryland Task Force 1 at the Pentagon
“MD-TF1’s 70 members spent about a week at the Pentagon before returning to a hero’s welcome.”
The most direct Maryland connection to the search-and-rescue effort belongs to Urban Search and Rescue Maryland Task Force 1 (MD-TF1), sponsored by Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service. FEMA’s own official account names MD-TF1 and Virginia’s VA-TF1 as the first search-and-rescue teams on site at the Pentagon, both arriving within hours of the attack after Arlington County’s fire department requested federal assistance; VA-TF1, headquartered just six miles from the Pentagon in Fairfax County, had an advance team on scene within roughly half an hour of mobilizing. Two more teams, from Virginia Beach and Nashville, joined shortly after — and a fifth, from New Mexico, arrived in the following days, bringing the total to five task forces that worked the Pentagon site over the following weeks.
Among the MD-TF1 members who responded were Troy Lipp, then an assistant chief with the task force, and Kelvin Thomas, a Montgomery County Fire and Rescue battalion chief. Both later told Maryland Matters the losses they witnessed at the Pentagon site stayed with them for years afterward.
Nationally, FEMA activated 25 of its 28 Urban Search and Rescue task forces in the days after 9/11: 20 deployed to the World Trade Center in New York and five to the Pentagon, MD-TF1 among them. The work went well beyond searching debris — with the immediate fire brought under control enough to allow interior operations, task force crews searched room by room for survivors and remains, shored up damaged sections of the building to prevent further collapse, and worked alongside firefighters still battling pockets of flame started by the jet fuel that had soaked into the structure. Task force leaders worked alongside local incident commanders in a coordinated search of the damaged building, encountering scenes that responders later said were unlike anything they’d trained for. According to Montgomery County’s own record of the deployment, President Bush visited MD-TF1’s team members directly at the Pentagon to express his personal gratitude for their work. MD-TF1’s 70 members spent about a week at the Pentagon before returning to a hero’s welcome at Montgomery County’s Public Safety Training Academy, where children held “Welcome Home Dad” signs and County Executive Douglas Duncan thanked them for making “the nation proud.”
Maryland’s Guard Units Secured the Building
“Different elements of Maryland’s 115th Military Police Battalion reached the Pentagon at different times — some within hours of the attack.”
Maryland’s response to the Pentagon wasn’t limited to fire and rescue. Soldiers from the Maryland Army National Guard’s 115th Military Police Battalion were activated almost immediately after the attacks, though different elements of the battalion reached the Pentagon at different times. Then-Master Sgt. Aarion Franklin, an intelligence sergeant with the battalion who’d been called up by the 290th MP Company, has recalled reaching the Pentagon within a few hours of the attack to help secure the still-burning building — arriving to find part of the structure still on fire and, in his words, “hundreds, probably thousands” of first responders already on scene. Members of the 200th Military Police Company, meanwhile, spent the night of Sept. 11 preparing gear and combat-loading vehicles before reporting to the Pentagon the following morning, Sept. 12; the 200th’s First Sgt. Robert Moxley recalled the anxious overnight wait at the armory before his unit rolled out. About 250 soldiers from the battalion were ultimately involved in the initial mobilization.
Three days into the mission, Franklin recalled, a general approached him at the site, pointed toward a damaged office, and explained quietly that he would have been in it when the plane struck had he not been in a meeting elsewhere. For Franklin and many of his fellow Guard members, the Pentagon mission marked the start of two decades of continued service that followed directly from that morning.
More Maryland Companies at the Pentagon
Prince George’s County sent crews too — more of them than one company alone. Four PGFD engines responded to the Pentagon that day: Engine 113 from the Branchville Volunteer Fire Company in College Park, along with Engine 352, Engine 271 and Engine 332, representing companies from across the county. Assistant Chief Michael Hughes of Branchville served as incident commander for the 33 Prince George’s County personnel who operated at the scene, a group that also included a Montgomery County battalion chief and a truck company from Bethesda. Interior operations ran about six hours, and — remarkably, given the conditions — the county’s crews came away with only one minor injury, an eye irritation.
“E113 became known within the department as the ‘Pentagon Pumper.’”
Engine 113 ended up staying the longest. Once the Pentagon’s fire had burned long enough for crews to begin interior operations, Branchville’s engine was assigned to provide water supply from a courtyard next to a café with an unsettling coincidence of a name: the “Ground Zero Café,” so named long before anyone attached that phrase to Sept. 11. Because the engine was positioned inside the courtyard, it couldn’t easily be pulled out, so its crew stayed with it. By evening, the crew was, in the words of the volunteers who relieved them that night, drained both physically and mentally; the relief crew worked through until 9:30 the next morning. The company has kept the connection alive ever since — E113 became known within the department as the “Pentagon Pumper,” and Branchville marked the 20th anniversary in 2021 by reuniting the seven members who’d been on the rig that day.
The Pentagon response was only part of the county’s day. Acting Fire Chief Ronald Blackwell — who was scheduled to be confirmed in the role that very morning, in a ceremony that got postponed — ordered an emergency recall of every off-duty firefighter and paramedic in the county, the first such recall in the department’s history. It worked almost too well: then-Battalion Chief Robert McCoy later recalled that some stations ended up with more personnel than they had riding positions on the trucks, forcing officers to redistribute apparatus across the county to put the extra crews to use. Some Prince George’s units backfilled District of Columbia fire stations whose own crews had been sent to the Pentagon; others staged in Arlington, Virginia, ready if needed. Years later, in 2005, McCoy had the job of formally recognizing every Prince George’s County responder who had worked the Pentagon that day with certificates and commemorative uniform bars.
Frederick County sent something the Pentagon needed badly: a small truck. On Sept. 12, the volunteer fire company in Woodsboro, about 60 miles from Washington, got the call — mutual aid to Virginia to help at the Pentagon. Chief Micky Fyock’s company had exactly what was needed: a 1955 Mack ladder truck small enough to maneuver through the building’s tight tunnels. His crew drove down I-270 on an eerily empty interstate and spent the night fighting fires still burning inside, arriving to find himself, as he put it, a world away from his small-town department. A Pentagon fire captain’s first words to him stuck with him for years afterward: “How can I help you help us.” Command released the volunteers and their truck the next morning; a Virginia fire officer thanked them personally. The company was never included in the official commemorations built around the units that responded that day — no patch on the memorial shirts, no invitation to the ceremonies — but Fyock has said the crew did get one thing: a letter of thanks from President Bush, addressed to the whole company by name. A decade later, Vice President Joe Biden told the story of the little truck from the Pentagon itself at the attacks’ 10th-anniversary ceremony.
“Frederick County sent something the Pentagon needed badly: a small truck.”
Maryland Crews at Ground Zero
Maryland units also traveled north. Members of the Anne Arundel County fire and police departments were sent to assist at Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania, according to the governor’s office, which has recognized the county’s responders at state 9/11 ceremonies in the years since.
Baltimore County Fire Department sent a team as well: 10 members of the department’s Texas fire station, all trained in urban search and rescue for FEMA, were dispatched to Ground Zero that day. Wilhelm remembered the pagers on their belts going off that morning, followed by phone calls confirming what had happened; by around 11 a.m., the team was headed north. Gardner recalled the bus falling silent as it neared the city and the column of smoke where the towers had stood came into view — “the entire bus that I was on got totally quiet,” he said. Once on scene, the team split into two 12-hour shifts to keep the search going around the clock. Two of them, retired Lt. Mark Gardner and apparatus driver Chris Wilhelm — a rookie firefighter at the time — later described how the experience reshaped their careers and their view of the anniversary, which the department marks every year.
The Ripple Effect Closer to Home
Even responders who never left Maryland found their duties upended that morning. On the Eastern Shore, David Meienschein — then a Salisbury patrol sergeant who’d just come off a night shift, and who went on to become the department’s police chief — got calls from military colleagues and fellow officers telling him to turn on the television. With years of military experience of his own, he suspected right away that the attacks were intentional. His Air Force Reserve unit was activated for a year, and he spent it stationed at Dover. Salisbury’s fire chief, Rob Frampton, was working part-time for the Ocean City fire department that morning, attending a training session with the State Fire Marshal’s bomb team, when one of the marshals interrupted the exercise to say it had to stop.
Departments across Delmarva have continued to mark the anniversary in the years since — Ocean City’s volunteer fire company and Salisbury’s fire department both hold annual remembrance ceremonies honoring the hundreds of first responders who died on 9/11, alongside the local personnel who deployed or stood ready in the attacks’ immediate aftermath.
“For thousands of 9/11 responders nationally, the consequences of that work didn’t stop when the debris was cleared.”
The Deployment Didn’t Always End When They Came Home
For thousands of 9/11 responders nationally, the consequences of that work didn’t stop when the debris was cleared. Exposure to smoke, pulverized building material, jet fuel, and other contaminants at Ground Zero and the Pentagon became the subject of long-running federal health monitoring and treatment programs. The World Trade Center Health Program — the federal program created to track and treat responders and survivors — now serves more than 145,000 responders and survivors nationwide, according to the program’s own current figures; by the program’s own accounting, thousands of enrolled members have died since it began tracking deaths in 2011, a toll that has climbed steadily every year since.
That safety net has only recently widened to include people like some of Maryland’s own Pentagon responders. For years, the federal law establishing the health program limited Pentagon and Shanksville eligibility mainly to law enforcement, recovery or cleanup contractors and volunteers — leaving out many military and federal personnel who performed security and other response duties at the sites. A 2024 defense authorization law expanded eligibility to active-duty, retired and reserve military personnel and to civilian Defense Department employees and contractors who responded to the Pentagon or Shanksville, with the expansion taking interim effect on the 23rd anniversary of the attacks, Sept. 11, 2024, and becoming final in May 2025. The program estimates as many as 9,500 people may qualify under the combined original and expanded criteria — a population that could include Maryland National Guard soldiers such as members of the 115th Military Police Battalion who performed qualifying duties at the Pentagon, and who by the letter of the original law had no clear path to enroll at all.
The story isn’t purely grim, though. A CDC study published in June 2026 found that responders enrolled in the program actually had a lower risk of death than comparable responders who weren’t enrolled — 13% lower risk of death from any cause, and 17% lower risk of death from smoking-related illness — suggesting the ongoing monitoring and treatment access the program provides may itself be extending responders’ lives. Maryland’s responders were part of a generation of first responders whose service to 9/11 increasingly came to be measured not just in the days they spent at an attack site, but in health effects that, for some, wouldn’t surface for years — and in a federal safety net that, for some of them, took nearly a quarter-century to fully include them.
Sources
This report draws on FEMA’s own archived 9/11 Urban Search & Rescue fact sheets documenting task force deployments and the Pentagon response timeline, including the official five-team Pentagon roster; a Fire Engineering first-person account from VA-TF1 responders describing the shoring and search work inside the building; Montgomery County’s own government record of MD-TF1’s deployment and President Bush’s visit to the team; Maryland Matters’ 20th-anniversary interviews with MD-TF1’s Troy Lipp and Kelvin Thomas; a contemporaneous September 2001 Capital News Service Maryland account of MD-TF1’s return home; the Maryland National Guard’s and U.S. Army’s own published accounts of the 115th Military Police Battalion’s Pentagon deployment, including a 2011 DVIDS feature with First Sgt. Robert Moxley of the 200th MP Company establishing that unit’s Sept. 12 arrival, and Master Sgt. Aarion Franklin’s own account, published across multiple official Guard and Air Force channels, of reaching the Pentagon within hours of the attack; the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department’s own official blog, which compiled first-person, on-the-record accounts from the personnel who responded to the Pentagon, including Assistant Chief Michael Hughes, the incident commander, Battalion Chief Robert McCoy, Branchville volunteer Victor Weatherford, and then-Acting Fire Chief Ronald Blackwell; the Branchville Volunteer Fire Company’s own published history of Engine 113, the “Pentagon Pumper,” and its 20th-anniversary reunion; a 2006 Firehouse.com feature on Woodsboro’s Chief Micky Fyock, driver Robert Compton, and firefighters Michael Cornell and Steve Devilbiss, cross-checked against Firehouse.com’s coverage of Vice President Biden’s 10th-anniversary remarks and WFMD’s Frederick County ceremony coverage; the Governor’s Office press release recognizing Anne Arundel County’s 2001 deployment; WMAR-2 News’s 20th-anniversary interview with Baltimore County firefighters Mark Gardner and Chris Wilhelm; WMDT’s Eastern Shore anniversary coverage featuring Salisbury Police Chief David Meienschein and Fire Chief Rob Frampton; and the CDC’s current World Trade Center Health Program enrollment statistics, its 2024-2025 Pentagon and Shanksville eligibility expansion announcements, and its June 2026 mortality-benefit study, all published on cdc.gov.
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