Deep in a government warehouse in Springfield sits a massive threat image X-ray machine that was used in Portland, Maine, the day two of the 9/11 hijackers checked in for their flights to Boston. Beside it lies what Transportation Security Administration employees called the “Sniffer,” a vapor machine, about the size of a handheld vacuum, that the agency used in its early days to detect explosives.
Technology has evolved, and so has the agency born out of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Today, smaller airport scanners show 3D versions of what’s inside carry-on baggage. Dogs hunt for explosives, and passengers’ hands are randomly swabbed for bomb-making chemicals.
The nation’s worst attack led to the standardization of airport security and the creation of the TSA, once part of the federal Department of Transportation and now part of Homeland Security.
“They told us we would only need to hire 30,000 employees that first year. We hired 60,000, and it was the largest mobilization of the civilian workforce since World War II,” says archivist Caroline Argrave, one of four people who researches and documents TSA’s history and heritage. The agency has some artifacts in storage and others on permanent display in Mission Hall at its Springfield headquarters.
Because TSA is such a young agency, Argrave and the others have a distinct research advantage as they compile historical information or search for data for TSA’s library that opened last year to employees and those researching aviation security.
“Not only is it easy for us to really come in at the ground level and understand the breadth and width of this agency, but the vast majority of people who were here on day one are still with us, or if they’re not with the agency are still alive and are available to us as resources,” she says. “We do a lot of oral history projects and reach out to them to get that really important fact base and memory-based recollections from them to preserve here in the archive.”
More to See
Take a virtual tour of TSA’s Mission Hall exhibit at tsa.gov/history
See more of what’s behind the scenes at TSA’s archive at youtube.com/tsa
Feature image by Emily Campos
This story originally ran in our September issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
