THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
The collapse of both World Trade Center towers--and the smaller WTC 7 a few
hours later--initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies
have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire
as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation
hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who contend that all three buildings
were wired with explosives in advance and razed in a series of controlled
demolitions.
Widespread Damage
CLAIM: The first hijacked plane crashed through the 94th to the 98th floors
of the World Trade Center's 110-story North Tower; the second jet slammed
into the 78th to the 84th floors of the 110-story South Tower. The impact
and ensuing fires disrupted elevator service in both buildings. Plus, the
lobbies of both buildings were visibly damaged before the towers collapsed.
"There is NO WAY the impact of the jet caused such widespread damage 80
stories below," claims a posting on the San Diego Independent Media Center
Web site (sandiego.indymedia.org). "It is OBVIOUS and irrefutable that OTHER
EXPLOSIVES (... such as concussion bombs) HAD ALREADY BEEN DETONATED in the
lower levels of tower one at the same time as the plane crash."
FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary report by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), a major study will be released in spring 2005 by
the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the
U.S. Department of Commerce. NIST shared its initial findings with PM and
made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.
The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility
shafts at the North Tower's core, creating a conduit for burning jet
fuel--and fiery destruction throughout the building. "It's very hard to
document where the fuel went," says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a
combustion expert, "but if it's atomized and combustible and gets to an
ignition source, it'll go off."
Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the
elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard
first-person testimony that "some elevators slammed right down" to the
ground floor. "The doors cracked open on the lobby floor and flames came out
and people died," says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the
University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar observation was made in
the French documentary "9/11," by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet
entered the North Tower lobby, minutes after the first aircraft struck, he
saw victims on fire, a scene he found too horrific to film.
"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net.
"The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of
structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The
posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel
(2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their
steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their
structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have
never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy
fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A
Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent
and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both
ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete
cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior
engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction.
"And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes
that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked
off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the
metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a
professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one
of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says
that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting
inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings,
including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of
fire hit 1832°F.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for
maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was
the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat
transfer that eventually brought them down."
Puffs Of Dust
CLAIM: As each tower collapsed, clearly visible puffs of dust and debris
were ejected from the sides of the buildings. An advertisement in The New
York Times for the book Painful Questions: An Analysis Of The September 11th
Attack made this claim: "The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings
are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions."
Numerous conspiracy theorists cite Van Romero, an explosives expert and vice
president of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, who was
quoted on 9/11 by the Albuquerque Journal as saying "there were some
explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse."
The article continues, "Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled
those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures."
FACT: Once each tower began to collapse, the weight of all the floors above
the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing force on the highest intact
floor. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail,
transmitting the forces to the floor below, allowing the collapse to
progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call
the process "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin,
according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and
a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) team that worked
on the FEMA report.
Like all office buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As
they pancaked, all that air--along with the concrete and other debris
pulverized by the force of the collapse--was ejected with enormous energy.
"When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to
shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST lead investigator Shyam
Sunder tells PM. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a
controlled demolition, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that
leads to that perception."
Demolition expert Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque
Journal became fodder for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in saying
that I thought it was explosives that brought down the building," he tells
PM. "I only said that that's what it looked like."
Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the
collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22,
2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line." But
emperors-clothes.com saw something else: "The paymaster of Romero's research
institute is the Pentagon. Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to
bear, forcing Romero to retract his original statement." Romero responds:
"Conspiracy theorists came out saying that the government got to me. That is
the farthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck
for three years."
Seismic Spikes
CLAIM: Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded the
events of 9/11. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of
the collapses, well before falling debris struck the earth," reports the Web
site WhatReallyHappened.com.
A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a Web site run by radio talk show host Alex
Jones, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable
proof that massive explosions brought down" the towers. The Web site says
its findings are supported by two seismologists at the observatory,
Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Each "sharp spike of short duration,"
says Prisonplanet.com, was consistent with a "demolition-style implosion."
FACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions
brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our
work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the
seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well
as the later collapse of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to
display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute
time span.
On that graph, the 8- and 10-second collapses appear--misleadingly--as a
pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data
(Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves--blue for
the South Tower, red for the North Tower--start small and then escalate as
the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.
WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers fell, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed.
According to 911review.org: "The video clearly shows that it was not a
collapse subsequent to a fire, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst
the Internet investigators, the jury is in on this one."
FACT: Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which
said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With
the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the
working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris
than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that
there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's
Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the
bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the
building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented
damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe
structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact
proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of
WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the
failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the
entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or
"kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared
into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on
itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west
side in a diagonal collapse.
According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure:
In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying
exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each
floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just
one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a
vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation:
First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer
loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face
apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to
columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing
capacities.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no
firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed
by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators.
Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the
fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized
line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized
line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that
burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's
unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
New Pacifica Working Group
http://www.egroups.com/group/NewPacifica
'Save Our Stations!'
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