Healing the Landscape: Reforestation at the Flight 93 Memorial

A pine seedling in its new home—one of over 30,000 planted so far at the Flight 93 Memorial.

Trees have long been planted as memorials to people and events. They bring a sense of permanence in a time of loss. Throughout their lives trees provide oxygen, prevent soil erosion, and filter the air. In one national memorial they also bring people together to heal both hearts and land.

When United Flight 93 crashed outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 2001, the plane came down on a former surface mine. That site, where the forty passengers and crew fought back against terrorists trying to take the plane to Washington, DC, became their final resting place. The families of those who died banded together as the Families of Flight 93 and vowed to build a memorial so that their loved ones’ last, brave acts would never be forgotten.

The Flight 93 National Memorial Act, passed by the US Congress in 2002, allowed plans to move forward for the memorial. Over the next nine years the Flight 93 Task Force, the Families of Flight 93, the Flight 93 Commission, the National Park Foundation, and the National Park Service would work to develop the memorial project. After an international design competition with over 1,500 entries, Paul Murdoch Architects and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects were selected to carry out a design that includes a Memorial Plaza, a Visitors’ Center Complex, a Tower of Voices, and the Forty Memorial Groves, which will be forty groves of forty trees to commemorate each person on that flight.

Construction is moving along well. By 2011 the Memorial Plaza and the Ring Road, along with the major earthmoving for the managed landscape, were in place, in time for the memorial’s dedication ceremony. The Visitors’ Center Complex is slated to be completed by 2015, with the Tower of Voices also in the future. The Forty Memorial Groves were planted in 2012.

Keith Newlin, National Park Service deputy superintendent for the western region, speaks with Penn State Altoona faculty and staff before the tree planting begins.

An important but less obvious part of the plan includes reforestation of 250 acres of reclaimed minelands. According to Keith Newlin, National Park Service deputy superintendent for the western region, the reforestation “is a key element” of the design. It was the architect’s intent that the trees would not only serve as a windbreak for the Forty Memorial Groves, he says, but also provide a contrast that visitors would feel as they enter the memorial. “When you’re coming in the entrance, you see brownfield, restored forest, brownfield, restored forest—this contrast demonstrates the healing on the landscape. It is also to give you the conflict between native forest and designed landscape as the visitor gets closer and closer to the impact site.”

Reforesting that much acreage even on good soil takes a lot of planning and preparation. Reforesting a mine site comes with its own issues. “We needed to restore 250 acres of native forest,” Newlin says. “We wrestled with how we were going to do that. We didn’t have that technical support.” But thanks to a dedicated group of people committed to planting native hardwood trees on old mine sites, that situation would soon change.

Penn State Altoona’s chancellor, Dr. Lori Bechtel-Wherry, keeps the hole open with the dibble bar while OSMRE director Joe Pizarchik plants a seedling.

Joe Pizarchik (’79, Penn State Altoona 1975–77) had been involved in the Flight 93 Memorial while he was the mining bureau director for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection. Now director of the US Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), Pizarchik knows the history of reclaiming mine sites. He says, “In Appalachia there are approximately a million acres of previously forested land that had been mined and reclaimed and are now essentially grasslands. A large portion of the Flight 93 Memorial site was reclaimed using the conventional approach of compacting the soil and immediately planting it with nonnative grasses.

“They also planted some pine and locust trees, which were not native to the area and not what the SMCRA [Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977] statute calls for. An exception that was written into the federal regulations in the early 1980s allows mine operators to reclaim the land with nonnative species. The belief was that nonnative grasses quickly planted would prevent erosion and trees would come through natural succession. The grasses prevented erosion but were so aggressive that any trees that could survive the tightly compacted soil then could not compete with the grasses and either were choked out or are in a state of arrested development; natural tree succession did not occur. In addition, the grasses provide a thick mat for rodent habitat, and rodents girdle the seedlings.”

Penn State Altoona student Ashley Wilmont digs a hole with a dibble bar for the seedling that fellow student Catie Kilgus is holding.

It became obvious that reclamation using soil compaction and nonnative species wasn’t environmentally successful and so in 2004 the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI) was created. Pizarchik acknowledges the group effort it took: “Professors, foresters, OSMRE, and representatives from the states came together at OSMRE’s initiative and began working to reforest more mine sites with native hardwood trees. We had many academics participate, including Dr. Jim Burger from Virginia Tech and Dr. Don Graves now retired from the University of Kentucky, just to name two. Both of those professors are now on ARRI’s Science Team.”

The ARRI team knew that in order for hardwood trees to succeed, both the grasses and the compacted soil needed to be addressed. Pizarchik explains: “ARRI members decided they needed sound science to form the foundation for successful reforestation. They looked at existing research and figured out what information they needed to fill in the gaps. Part of what ARRI learned is that for these trees to get established on conventionally reclaimed mines, the nonnative grasses had to be knocked back and the compacted soil had to be loosened. The best method is to use a bulldozer to rip the soil with a ripping claw at about eight- or ten-foot centers—sort of like tic-tac-toe. It loosens the soil and allows it to absorb a whole lot of moisture. By doing it in the fall, the soil can settle, which means fewer air pockets, allowing a better growing medium in the spring. A herbicide is also applied in the fall to kill the nonnative grasses. Then in the spring volunteers can plant trees.”

Volunteers spread out across the field to plant trees as part of the reforestation effort at the Flight 93 Memorial.

ARRI’s expertise in planting native trees on reclaimed mine sites was exactly what the Flight 93 Memorial needed for those 250 acres. “I had to get my ARRI guys out to the site to do some soil tests to determine whether trees could survive because if the soil was not appropriate quality you could not reforest the site,” Pizarchik says. “We had a meeting in the summer of 2011 with the National Park Foundation, OSMRE people, some officials from the National Park Service including Keith Newlin and Jeff Reinbold, and the American Chestnut Foundation. We started looking at the maps where they wanted to reforest. We walked the site and my staff collected soil samples.” The soil test confirmed that the soil could support trees and that trees would grow at the memorial.

At the same time that Pizarchik was working on the trees for the Flight 93 Memorial, he reconnected with Penn State Altoona when he was named a Penn State Alumni Fellow in 2010. As part of his Fellow responsibilities, Pizarchik returned to campus to speak to classes and met Dr. Carolyn Mahan, professor environmental studies. She says, “Joe told me about the reforestation initiative with mountaintop removal and said, ‘We are going to be applying this approach at Flight 93.’ I thought, ‘this is great for my environmental studies students.’ Joe invited me and my students to work on this event. We met with King Laughlin [of the National Park Foundation] and had a great experience. The very first year we had the tree planting and then a private tour [of the memorial’s water-treatment facilities] and then spent the afternoon talking to Joe about acid mine drainage.”

Mahan sees many lessons for her students in the building of the Flight 93 Memorial. “I had Joe come back to campus and talk about acid mine drainage issues at Flight 93 and how you problem solve in an interdisciplinary way. You think, ‘I have this problem. How do I solve this?’”

In addition to choking out trees, the lack of native vegetation provides opportunity for invasive species to take over, says Pizarchik. Keely Roen, senior instructor in wildlife technology at Penn State DuBois, has worked with her students to complete a survey of nonnative species at the memorial. Mahan and students at Penn State Altoona will take the information from that survey and make an interactive map where a person can click on a point, find out what nonnative species are found at that point, and find out what the best control measures are.

Dr. Laura Rotunno, English professor, digs into some rough ground as Dr. Doug Page, history instructor, stands ready with a bucket of seedlings.

Environmental studies students are not the only ones to participate in Flight 93 projects. Two Penn State Altoona faculty members, Dr. Laura Rotunno, associate professor of English, and history instructor Dr. Doug Page, have their students working on Flight 93’s Oral History Project. Rotunno’s freshman honors composition students and Page’s historiography class students are creating abstracts of the completed interviews, which number over 800. Barbara Black, Chief of Interpretation and Cultural Resources at the Flight 93 Memorial, is grateful for the assistance. She says, “Laura and Doug have been great partners in assisting the Oral History Project. . . . A simple abstract, synthesizing the pertinent information from a sometimes two-hour interview and well over 100 pages of transcript into just a few paragraphs, is not an easy thing to do! But without this a researcher has to read through the word-for-word transcript to determine if that interview is of value to them. A quick browse through an abstract can save much time.”

Mine drainage, oral histories, invasive species: all are a part of the Flight 93 Memorial project. But what about the reforestation? Pizarchik can rattle off the many steps needed to get to the actual planting of trees: “OSMRE expertise was brought in on getting the site ready, how to get the volunteers, how to bring in the people with tree-planting expertise to be team leaders, how to get donations of seedlings, how to bring the dibble bars and other equipment, and how to manage the seedlings in order to not subject them to conditions that would cause them to die, which means keeping roots moist and planting correctly so that the seedlings don’t get j-hooked. All that expertise was brought to bear.”

In the first tree planting, held over four days in April 2012, 600 volunteers, including a busload of faculty, students, and staff from Penn State Altoona, planted over 13,000 seedlings of over twenty native species such as white pine, red oak, and red maple. In 2013 over 15,000 seedlings were planted by volunteers, including another group from Penn State Altoona. Mahan expects the college’s participation with the Flight 93 Memorial to continue. “It’s local. In general, students get more engaged in local issues. And Joe’s an alum. That’s all why this project has been so exciting and important to me.”

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(Left to right) Dr. Lori Bechtel-Wherry, chancellor and dean at Penn State Altoona; Joe Pizarchik, OSMRE director; Jeff Reinbold, superintendent of National Parks of Western Pennsylvania; and Dr. Carolyn Mahan, professor of biology at Penn State Altoona.

ccording to Deputy Superintendent Newlin, 350,000 people visit the Flight 93 Memorial annually. Some most certainly will be former volunteers—and Penn State Altoona students—looking for the trees they planted. “It may take a little longer [to complete the planting with volunteers],” Newlin says,” but it’s a beautiful effort. People who plant those trees own those trees.” He also notes the amount of work left to be done: “We will plant thirty acres this year and then we’re going to move out toward the entrance. With seven years of tree planting plus dealing with the invasives and the exotics, there is plenty of room for volunteers.”

So much goes into building a national memorial or park that people never consider—the concept, design, and construction. And this particular memorial has its own unique issues across the landscape. Through their work here planting trees, identifying invasive species, and writing abstracts for the oral history project, Penn State Altoona faculty, staff, students, and alumni have been able to witness the process as they help heal the land and build a national memorial.

 —Therese Boyd, ’79

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