It was a beautiful fall morning in the nation’s capital. I was in a meeting in the secretary’s suite on the sixth floor of the Department of the Interior, a few blocks from the White House. That side of the building looks out over the Mall and provides a direct line of sight to the Pentagon across the Potomac.

The shockwave of exploding American Airlines Flight 77 rumbled Interior. It sounded like a bomb, but that idea was too implausible to be true. Still, I got out of my seat in the midst of the meeting to look out of the window, where I saw the rising black plume that had been Flight 77. The dots started to connect between the earlier staff reports of a plane or planes hitting the World Trade Center and what I had just experienced.

I was the department’s solicitor (general counsel) at the time. I cancelled the meeting and ran a few doors down to the secretary’s office, where the grim news was confirmed followed by rumors and reports of other aircraft on final approach to the White House.

Now I was in a full sprint back to my office. I emptied the offices of personnel and grabbed my continuity of operations plan, or COOP, that offered a rational response to every conceivable disaster. Unfortunately, the disaster planners had not conceived of something like this.

My duty was to get to an undisclosed location outside of the District where a skeleton crew would continue the business of the Interior Department’s headquarters and assist however it could. At the top of our list were the critical national infrastructures under Interior’s domain, such as Hoover Dam, and the nation’s historical icons, such as the Statue of Liberty.

A quick look out my sixth-floor window confirmed the massive gridlock below as everyone was trying to get somewhere else, fast. Driving was out of the question. Joined by my senior COOP advisor and with two water bottles in hand, I started the five-mile walk home to get our other car.

Once we walked onto the Roosevelt Bridge headed into Virginia, traffic was moving. A colleague from the White House staff spotted me and gave us a ride to my house. My family had moved into our rental house 10 days earlier. Amidst moving boxes, I explained to my wife that I had to leave for a secret location for an undetermined amount of time while she was left behind to explain the unexplainable to our 9- and 7-year-olds.

My colleague and I drove to a predetermined suburban location and then relocated with additional colleagues to a second, more serviceable site in another state. Once there, it became quickly evident that my job, defined as it was by the rule of law, had little to offer in the context of this grotesque act of lawlessness. It was equally apparent that I could do as much or more back at my office than I could in a remote hideout. I was back home before the next dawn and back at Interior that morning.

A lasting impression from that fateful morning was how well-prepared the federal government actually was to cope with disaster in Washington. On Sept. 10, I had disaster plans sitting on my office bookshelf, ready for use. I had immediate access to a senior career employee of my office whose job it was to understand those plans and how they meshed with Interior’s operations and those of other agencies. Those plans and personnel served us very well in the fretful and confused hours and days that followed 9:37 a.m.

Are we safer today? Yes, as evidenced by the lack of successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the last decade and the deaths of known terrorists. No, as evidenced by the unending effort of rogue regimes to perfect and deliver nuclear weapons.

I worry about what my kids’ next “9/11” will be and how it will affect their future. I am saddened that they will never know the capital’s landmarks as I did — places of accessible beauty and not armed islands in a sea of bollards. I would prefer not having to keep a flashlight in my 14th-floor office if I need to find my way down a dark and smoky stairwell.

But I sleep a lot better knowing that the federal government is staffed with dedicated and vigilant career public servants and political appointees who are standing watch on our collective behalf.