J. Mel Poole, Superintendent, Catoctin Mountain Park
Interviewed by Mark Schoepfle, Ph.D., Cultural Anthropologist
December 17, 2001 at Catoctin Mountain Park

MARK SCHOEPFLE: … on the day that this occurred, on the 11th of September, could we start at the very beginning -- when [were you] immediately aware of what had happened?

MEL POOLE: Okay. Let me give you the where, first, because that probably is interesting in and of itself.

I was in a meeting about three miles south of the park with the local Tourism Council [Frederick County, MD]. So there was a pretty good cross-section of the community that I was with at that time… As that meeting started, they made the announcement that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. And the interesting assumption in the room was that it was a small plane. So we -- at that point, they set up a TV for us to watch what was going on -- saw the second plane that went in. We saw the damage from the first plane and then we saw the second plane go in on TV. And … after the second plane went in, it was obvious that I think that was the shift between it being a plane crash, a plane gone awry, and some kind of terrorism event.

So, we did that. It was shortly after that -- we watched the south tower, the side that came down first. We watched that. And then the next thing that we heard was that there had been a plane crash at Camp David. And, at that point in time, the room kind of turned to me like, what's going on?

So in the particular place I was in, there was no cell phone coverage… I went to get a hard line. As I picked up the phone, the entire trunk system for this area went down. There's a message display on the phone that tells you the status of the phone. And it was not just that the line was busy, that there was too much traffic; the trunk went down, which is like the main line that all the other lines feed into.

MARK SCHOEPFLE: Wow!

MEL POOLE: So, at that point in time, I went out, got in the car, got on the [Park] radio, and said, "Have you heard anything?", talking to the Chief Ranger. And he said no. And I said, "Well, I think it's probably time that we meet up because we're going to get the media onslaught, whether this is true or not." So…he told the other EMS coordinators what had happened…And then we started moving towards the visitor center. I agreed to meet him there because that was sort of the closest point for us to get together.

I went back into the tourism meeting. And those people were visibly shaken at that point in time. It had turned from an event that was some place away to something that was happening literally .. where they were…so they were very upset. They wanted to know what information I had. And I told them I did not have anything, but I felt like that they were all safe where they were -- but I had to go into a meeting. And it was kind of awkward for me because, at that time, I was the interim President of the Tourism Council. … So, anyway, I left the meeting. … And I came down to the Visitor Center. And as I'm driving down, the Administrative Officer came up on the phone and said, "We're being deluged with calls here [Park headquarters]. What do you want us to tell them?" … Literally, every line we had was lit and rolling over at that point. And I said, "Just tell them that it's an unconfirmed report at this point in time. We don't have anything." So I got to the Visitor Center and -

MEL POOLE: Yeah. So I got to the Visitor Center. And the Chief Ranger and I hit the door at just about the same time. And he said Secret Service had requested a closure [and] an expanded security presence … And now it's fairly regular for us, … but during that time it was only when we had an additional head of state beyond the President that we would do something like that. And so … the other person who was standing in our Visitor Center , oddly enough, … was a ranger [Tim Fabian] from the State Park. … We work fairly closely with [Cunningham Falls] the State Park System here just because the state park was actually part of the original [federal] park back in the ['30s]. And just being across the road, you know, we're neighbors and we work like neighbors, clearly. So [Ranger Fabian] was in the Visitor Center and he said, "You tell us what you need."

At that point in time, we were trying to close the road. We … keep a standard barricade package down there. But we were scrambling to get that up. And we were short on people because we were trying to get people out on patrol. So, basically, the State Park actually put their cruiser in the road to hold it while we got the barricades set up and begin to deal with that. We feel good [about] the way that we work with the State anyway, but that was just an example of where the boundary lines kind of started to blur for us I guess.

MARK SCHOEPFLE: Go ahead.

MEL POOLE: And then I guess the next thing that happened was that we got [the] closure in place. We … had to close essentially both ends of Park Central Road [at the same time]. So we got that closure in place and then that basically sealed up the center part of the park. And at that point in time I [drove] back [to headquarters]. … I walked through the door and the person who was working the front desk said, "Your wife called, and your sister called, and your parents called. And they want to know if you're okay." And so that was sort of what was happening across the park at that point in time, lots of phone calls from families. I mean people as far away as California were calling to check on people that they knew here. [And] I got a phone call out to my wife and I said, "Call the family and tell them I'm okay." And then the next call was from [the U.S.] Secret Service. They just wanted to confirm that they had not heard of [any] plane crash [at Camp David]. … And I guess my feeling at that point in time was that I needed to [contact the media] to try to begin to dispel that rumor that was out there. … I did probably two or three television standups, a couple of radio stations, two local newspapers. All that kind of evolved from about 11:00 to about -- for the rest of the afternoon. And the idea was just to get the message out that there had been no plane crash [at Camp David] and that a senior official was saying it; it wasn't a public information officer or somebody way down in the organization… I wanted to not speak [about] Camp David [which is supposed to come from the White House Press Office], but I could speak [indirectly about] Camp David by saying there's no plane crash [in] Catoctin Mountain Park … because Camp David is within the park. So that's kind of the way that evolved. …

…let me back up [and] give you one other interesting piece of information here. While we were at the Visitor Center, we had done a [closure of the Park]. After we did that, my next phone call was to the Regional Office [in Washington, D.C.] to tell them that we were closed. And when I got to the Regional Office I got a person who said, "Everybody is gone already. I'm the only one left." And … basically, it sounded like the entire city had been evacuated.

MARK SCHOEPFLE: That's putting it lightly.

MEL POOLE: Yeah. But it was interesting because we were trying to report up-line to our Regional Office and there was nobody there … to take the phone call, which was an interesting scenario, you know. So for the rest of the first couple of days, a lot of our communications basically shifted and ran through our [incident] communications center over in Sharpsburg because our immediate need was to get law enforcement resources on the scene to deal with the closures. …

So I'm kind of jumping all around in this story.

MARK SCHOEPFLE: No, fine. Fine.

MEL POOLE: I guess the next piece that happened is that I was here in the office. We were watching CNN. And … there was something like about three thousand airplanes in the air, as I recall, across the United States. And we were watching sort of the numbers dwindle on the screen. Because at that point in time, three thousand airplanes had become three thousand threats. 2,998 threats were left, I guess. And so we were watching the kind of countdown. It went from three thousand to two thousand to one thousand, and then we were down to about ten planes. And the uncertainty of the situation at that point in time was -- was just kind of making us all crazy.

You know, a couple of things kind of happened simultaneously. One is that this plane that was supposedly headed for us [Flight 93] … I didn't know where that plane was coming from. My guess was the flight path that we had on that plane was that it had originated either from the north or the west of us. And I guess what was hard about that was that the [Catoctin] high school is immediately to our north up there. And there are a fair number of kids in that high school…that's where those kids go to school if they go to school locally…including mine. And so the question becomes, do you get everyone out of the school, do you notify the school, how do you deal with that emotion level. I also had a personal responsibility as well as a professional responsibility, and no information to make those decisions at that point. So there was an hour of terror there that was pretty real for me. And I'm on the phone, and making phone calls, and trying to figure out, you know, do I call my wife and say go get my son out of school. Do I call those principals of the school and say, "Get everybody out of the school." And I didn't have any more information specifically -- I was getting most of my information [from] CNN at that point in time, [with] a little bit coming from the Secret Service. And, at that point in time, I was already trying to deal with the media and the Chief Ranger was dealing with the Secret Service. …

About the same time we got down to ten planes, the Chief Ranger walks in the door and made what probably will stay with me the rest of my career. He walked in and said, "The Secret Service has advised us that we now have fighter planes over the park." And you could hear them. I later found out that those planes had scrambled out of Langley Air Force Base and, initially, were [heading to Washington] and trying to deal with that situation, and they weren't able to do that. They kept coming north in anticipation of the Flight 93 plane coming from the [west]. And they got over us probably some time I guess around 11:00 that morning.

MARK SCHOEPFLE: I was going to ask, yeah.

MEL POOLE: And that changed the complexion of things and I guess it kind of settled things for me in my mind because I figured that if we had fighter cover over the park, and somebody was going to try to come at us, … we would be protected. The other thing that we had in our favor is we have an air space restriction here. So that air space restriction, it's not like they could have gotten in on top of us real fast without violating [the] air space restriction. And that would have been an opportunity for [the] fighters …. So, that kind of got my comfort factor [up]. I stopped worrying about the high school, kind of got focused on the media for the rest of the afternoon, and just trying to get the word out…Sometimes I guess the rumors are harder to fight than the facts. …

And so two days later, September the 13th, we [the park staff] had a meeting and a lot … got vented. And … a week or ten days later, we had a critical incident stress debriefing. And our emotions were still pretty high at that point in time. You know, the anger [was] pretty much gone. It's more the frustration and sadness I think more than anything else that set in at that point in time.

September 11, 2001 Oral History Documentation Project
National Capital Region, National Park Service

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