Fire burning at Pennsylvania memorial for 9/11 victims: official

(Reuters) - A major fire broke out on Friday at the Flight 93 National Memorial's headquarters complex in Pennsylvania, causing no reported injuries but extensive damage near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, crash of a hijacked airliner. The National Park Service said there was no damage to the memorial site itself, in a field where a United Airlines flight went down in one of four hijackings staged by al Qaeda militants on that day. The three-building complex is two miles (3.2 km) away from the crash site. The cause of the fire was under investigation, the service said in a statement. The 2,200-acre (890-hectare) memorial park near Shanksville, about 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Pittsburgh, features a wall of names that partially surrounds a field where the flight went down, killing all 44 people on board, including four hijackers. A visitors center is under construction and slated to open in late 2015. The fire did not affect the center, the service said. "Initial reports are of extensive damage to the complex," it said in a statement. "All employees and volunteers were safely evacuated." Seven fire companies responded to the alarm, a Somerset County dispatcher said. Television footage showed thick, black smoke billowing in the distance across a rolling field, with a construction crane at the unfinished center standing unaffected in the foreground. On the same day of the Flight 93 attack, hijacked airliners crashed into the Pentagon outside Washington and the World Trade Center in New York. Some 3,000 people were killed. (Reporting by Daniel Kelley in Philadelphia; Writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Scott Malone, Eric Beech and Mohammad Zargham)