Excerpts from Mounting Evidence
Chapter 22: “Building
What?” The Strange Fall of WTC-7
by Dr. Paul W. Rea
© 2011 Do not sell, distribute, or publish without author's permission
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© 2011 Do not sell, distribute, or publish without author's permission
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When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
In September 2009, Judge Edward Lehner was hearing arguments on whether to allow New Yorkers to vote on a proposal to investigate the attacks on the World Trade Center. Sponsored by NYC CAN, the petition included the signatures of 52,000 residents (Villager 8/4/09). When Judge Lehner remarked that the 9/11 Commission had already completed an investigation, the group’s attorney, Dennis McMahon, replied that the Commission had left many questions unanswered. “One of the biggest questions,” the lawyer noted, “is why did Building 7 come down?” Puzzled, Judge Lehner asked “Building what?” McMahon informed the judge that a third World Trade Center skyscraper, Building 7, also came down on 9/11.
A Little-Known Event
Such public ignorance is widespread. One national poll found that 43 percent of Americans weren’t aware that three buildings had fallen (Zogby Intl. 5/24/06); of this number, only a small percentage had any idea about the circumstances. Even among those who were more knowledgeable, the disintegration of this third skyscraper has remained an enigma.
WTC-7’s relative obscurity is itself puzzling. This high-rise building wasn’t hit by an airliner, and at 47 stories it would have stood as the tallest skyscraper in 30 states. When New York Times reporter James Glanz characterized the fall of WTC-7 as “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01), he was factoring in media environment right after 9/11. But it wasn’t just a tsunami of shocking news that has caused WTC-7 to go underreported; it also posed big challenges to the Official Story.
The fall of WTC-7 should have been a bigger story because the circumstances of its demise were anything but “normal.” While the standard narrative says the skyscraper disintegrated because of fire damage, this seemingly simple hypothesis introduces more ambiguity than it dispels. Was fire really a sufficient cause, especially when one recalls that, before 9/11, no steel-framed high rise had ever come down because of fire?
The WTC-7 Fires: Location, Time, Fuel, Size, and Damage
The fire reports ranged widely. While no one has talked about a towering inferno or even a huge conflagration, Fire Capt. Brenda Berkman did affirm “fire on every floor” (S. Hagan and M. Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 213). But perceptions do differ, even among professionals, and it would be easy to confuse a lot of smoke with a lot of fire. Mark Jacobson, a journalist who’d reported large fires, recalled “the whole building wasn’t on fire”; instead, he wrote, “there was a lot of fire coming out of a few floors” (NY Magazine 3/37/06). The photographic record also supports the conclusion that the building experienced medium to hot fires on a few floors.
Even those promoting the hypothesis of destruction from fire damage have come in way under Capt. Berkman’s estimate. According to NIST, itself a prime defender of this theory, fires burned on only ten of the building’s 47 floors—and only on six did they grow and burn out of control (NCSTAR1A p. xxxvi). Moreover, officials with Consolidated Edison (Con Ed) of New York who entered WTC-7 said “there was a fire, but they did not think the building would collapse” (http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00174.pdf). Thus Con Ed personnel apparently felt the building was safe to enter, reporting only “a fire,” not the “large fires” claimed by many proponents of the fire theory.
It was the Fire Department, then, that predicted the building was going to collapse. Granted, a walkthrough is not an inspection of a tall building. But if in fact the fires were small, on what basis did building security personnel and the FDNY chiefs make a different determination?
When Did Fires in WTC-7 First Become Visible?
The question of when the fires first broke out is also controversial. The standard analysis of WTC-7 asserts that when the North Tower came down at 10:28, flying debris ignited the fires. Although WTC-7 stood 325 feet away, tremendous mushrooming explosions at the top of the Tower propelled large chunks of metal, some of them likely superheated, hundreds of feet outward (www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgN080yySe0).
For the first two or three hours, the blazes were scattered and not immediately visible. NIST also acknowledged that the first photographs or videos of WTC-7 fires were taken at about 12:10 a.m., and that two other photos were taken at 12:28. This meant, as David Ray Griffin has noted, that the first fires were photographed between one and two hours after the flying debris hit the building (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 160-61). These times pose a plausibility challenge to the standard narrative; they ask us “to believe,” remarked Griffin, “that, although the fires were supposedly started near the building’s south and southwest faces, and hence near the windows, they remained invisible from outside the building for all that time.” And “the fact that fires first became visible on the eleventh and twelfth floors at 2:00 [also] makes it very difficult to believe NIST’s claim that the fires began at 10:28” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 160-61).
Did Fires Start Even Before the North Tower Fell?
Although some of the fires apparently started later than claimed, others may have actually started earlier—up to an hour before the North Tower came down, supposedly starting all the WTC-7 fires. Although structural engineer Matthys Levy supported the Official Story about the Towers, he too indicated “the initial fires started around 9:30 in the morning, so the building was allowed to burn for eight hours” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 168-69). About this same time, City staffers Michael Hess and Barry Jennings also reported smoke on the eighth floor when they were forced to wait for rescue there. “It was dark,” Jennings told BBC. “It was also hot--very hot” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQY-ksiuwKU). So the fires may have started up to an hour before the first Tower came down.
These incongruities led physical chemist Dr. Frank H. Greening to remark that one of the most important problems with the official account “is the question of where and how fires started in the building” (wtc.nist.gov/comments08). The official account depends on fires burning long enough and hot enough to cause a floor beam to expand and break a column loose, leading to “sudden and global collapse.” Thus it’s not surprising that proponents of the Official Story speculated about what might have fueled such hot, long-burning fires.
Early Fuel-Oil Hypotheses
Early speculation claimed the impact of debris ignited thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in fire-resistant containers. Three small storage tanks located on floors five, seven, and eight were fed from “larger tanks near ground level” (NYT 3/20/02). In addition, FEMA reported one 6,000-gallon tank between floors two and three, plus one 6,000-gallon and two 12,000-gallon tanks under a loading dock (Report 2002).However, FEMA later found the latter subterranean containers intact, still containing 20,000 gallons of oil (www.wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm).
Most photos show fires in only a few windows, primarily on the seventh and twelfth floors. The seventh had an oil tank, but the twelfth did not. Since fires broke out on floors where no storage tanks were located but not on all the floors where tanks were present, it’s reasonable to conclude that diesel wasn’t the major fuel for most of the fires. If oil had been a major source, some fires would have grown much larger on floors with storage tanks.
FEMA Looks Toward Other Causes for Fires
FEMA, the first federal agency to investigate, was rightly skeptical about the fuel-oil hypothesis. Its investigators reported that “on the north face, photographs and videos show that the fires were located on approximately the seventh, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth floors.” However, many photos and videos also show little fire or smoke on the north side, leading some to speculate that the fires remained mostly on the southern side of the building, where the debris had hit. From this evidence, FEMA theorized that these blazes might have somehow warped the steel on the southern side to the point where the whole building collapsed.
But if this scenario were correct, then why didn’t WTC-7 sag, list, or topple toward its south side? In one of its most useful observations, FEMA concluded “the facade came straight down, suggesting an internal collapse.… The building imploded, with collapse initiating at an interior location” (www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf).
Although the FEMA investigation was under funded, poorly managed, denied access to most of the physical evidence, and sometimes self-contradictory, FEMA did draw valid conclusions. Its 2002 WTC Building Performance Study allowed that even its best guess, even its “best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence” (FEMA Report Appendix C). Nevertheless, most officials and media commentators clung to an improbable story: after the building’s sprinkler system failed and additional water was not available, the fires spread, fueled by diesel oil, and eventually burned so hot they caused the steel support structure to weaken, resulting in a collapse. This scenario was highly improbable, as even NIST would later acknowledge.
How Much Damage Did the Debris Inflict?
Observers have also disagreed about how much WTC-7 was damaged by debris blown outward from the North Tower. Some witnesses and many proponents of a damage-plus-fire hypothesis have claimed very substantial damage. EMT Mercedes Rivera said that the building “had no face and it was ready to collapse” (Hagan and Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 29). It’s highly unlikely, though, that WTC-7 received damage anywhere near a “great gash scooped deeply,” as Popular Mechanics once claimed (Pop. Mech. 3/05). The photo and video record just doesn’t show any structural damage of this magnitude.
Although NIST initially promoted the notion that the south side of WTC-7 was scooped out, it ultimately conceded that structural damage had no part in the collapse initiation (Final Report). If serious structural damage—whether caused by large fires or flying debris or some combination of the two—was the main cause for the demise of WTC-7, then why would the building have stood looking just fine—without significant slumping, sagging, or listing—and then suddenly drop straight down?
Early Evacuation and Explosions at WTC-7
WTC-7’s twenty-third floor housed Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s new command center, the Office for Emergency Management (OEM), which had cost the city $13 million. After the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., the mayor, an aide, and two bodyguards drove down to the WTC (W. Barrett and D. Collins Grand Illusion pp. 3-5). According to his testimony, Giuliani was still in the car when the second plane hit. When he met with Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, the commissioner told him they’d already evacuated WTC-7 and were setting up a command center at 75 Barclay Street. Then Giuliani dashed over to FDNY Chief Peter Ganci’s command post on West Street (Comm. Hearing 5/19/04). Because several OEM officials and their deputies had gone the North Tower lobby, not to the OEM, the command center was dysfunctional from the outset. New Yorkers had scoffed at the mayor’s decision to locate his command center in the World Trade Center, long the top target for terrorists. Later they were vindicated when Giuliani chose to abandon his new emergency-management center before its first big emergency(Barrett and Collins Grand Illusion pp. 31, 34).
While it’s not clear whether the departure from Giuliani’s command center came before or after 9:03, when the second airliner hit, some office workers have reported that WTC-7 itself was evacuated before that time (Ft. Detrick Standard 10/18/01). Since most people—both in the city and around the country—had not realized that the Towers were under attack until the second impact, one does wonder who initiated the evacuation order for the OEM and why they might have deemed it necessary.
Stranded Aides Make Unsettling Reports
Despite the evacuation order and the police presence that must have accompanied it, the mayor’s staffers did enter the WTC-7 just after 9:00. Michael Hess, corporation counsel for the city and a close friend of Giuliani; and Barry Jennings, the Director of Emergency Services for the City Housing Authority, made it up to the OEM (Independent [UK] 9/13/01). Expecting to find Giuliani at the command center, they were amazed to find “everybody was gone.” Since evacuations take time, these reports imply an evacuation order was given before 9:03.
Puzzled, Jennings called other staffers, one of whom told him “to leave and leave right away.” A superior also commanded him to “get out of there now.” But the elevators didn’t work because the power had gone out (BBC 9/6/08). Do these warnings suggest foreknowledge that “seven is coming down,” or do they convey caution about a possible third hit on a building that housed many government offices, including the SEC, DoD, and CIA?
In characteristic fashion, the 9/11 Commission claimed that the OEM wasn’t fully evacuated until after 9:30: “After the South Tower was hit [at 9:03], OEM senior leadership decided to remain in its ‘bunker’ and continue conducting operations, even though all civilians had been evacuated from 7 WTC” (Report p. 305). This contradicted Giuliani’s claim that he arrived at the improvised command center on 75 Barclay St. before 9:30 (ABC 9/11/01). In an apparent attempt to make Giuliani look good, the Commission’s Report overrode his testimony, much as it had done with Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Mayor’s Staffers Report Explosions and Smoke
After receiving orders to leave the building, Hess and Jennings reportedly headed down the stairs until they got to the sixth floor. There, according to Jennings, “the landing that we were standing on gave way” because of a “big explosion” from below. They retreated to the eighth floor, broke a window, and called to firefighters for help: “They came twice. Why? I was trapped in there when both buildings [Towers] came down. All this time I was hearing explosions” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxUj6UgPODo). Hess largely corroborated Jennings’s story, adding “we were trapped on the eighth floor with smoke, thick smoke, all around us, for about an hour and a half (www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfiLbXMa64).
Giuliani claimed the sounds of explosions and the smoke hadn’t come from within WTC-7; instead, they’d come from the stricken Towers. But the power outage surely didn’t come from another building, and since WTC-7’s windows remained intact, it was highly unlikely that the reported smoke and heat had come from one of the Towers. Although the fires at WTC-7 were reportedly ignited when the North Tower came down at 10:28, this was an hour after the staffers reported that an explosion blew away the stairwell. Griffin points out that “the testimony of Michael Hess and Barry Jennings was threatening to the official account of WTC-7, according to which its collapse was not caused or even aided by explosives” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 85-92). While Hess changed his testimony, Jennings continued to contradict the standard account.
This challenge may have contributed to an odd coincidence. On August 19, 2008, just two days before the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was due to release the draft of its Final Report on WTC-7, Jennings died after spending several days in a hospital. Filmmaker Dylan Avery, who was among the last to interview Jennings, hired a well-regarded private investigator to look into Jennings’s death. Within 24 hours, Avery received a terse message back: “Due to some of the information I have uncovered, I have determined that this is a job for the police. I have refunded your credit card. Please do not contact me again about this individual” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 98-99).
Reports of Later Explosions
There were also reports of explosions in the late afternoon, as WTC-7 came down at 5:21 p.m. Reporter Peter Demarco of the New York Daily News recalled, “there was a rumble. The building’s top row of windows popped out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray” (C. Bull and S. Erman At Ground Zero p. 97).
Beyond Demarco, NYPD officer Craig Bartmer also reported “I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down.… There’s a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions … all of a sudden I looked up, and … the thing started peeling in on itself.… I started running … and the whole time you’re hearing ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.’” Another eyewitness, a New York University medical student who’d served as an emergency medic that day, provided a similar account: “we heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder… it looked like there was a shock wave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out.… About a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that” (www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).
Likely Foreknowledge WTC-7 Would Come Down
As reported in the previous chapter, Mayor Giuliani told Peter Jennings he’d received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse(NBC 9/11/01). But Mayor Giuliani was hardly the only one who apparently had foreknowledge.
On July 24, 2001, just six weeks before 9/11, a private consortium headed by Silverstein Properties acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center complex. The price? A cool $3.2 billion. Larry Silverstein, the new owner, took out insurance policies that included special provisions for loss due to terrorist attacks. In the wake of the 9/11 debacle, these details initially received little media scrutiny, even in an otherwise politically savvy town like New York.
A year after the unprecedented collapses of the three skyscrapers, the mystery surrounding WTC-7 took a new twist. Larry Silverstein seemingly revealed he’d thought it best to demolish one of his own properties. “I remember getting a call from the fire department commander telling me that they weren’t sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life: maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse” (PBS “America Rebuilds” 9/02).
While one can fully appreciate Mr. Silverstein’s concern for loss of life, the building in question had already been evacuated for several hours and the fire department had already pulled back. No one had fought the fires. Mr. Silverstein implied that soon after he’d decided to “pull it,” he watched his 47-story skyscraper dissolve into a neat pile of rubble. Later, Silverstein Properties insisted in a formal statement that its owner only meant to “pull” “the contingent of firefighters” (Letter to NIST 3/24/06). However, since “pull” is an industry term for “demolish,” it’s difficult to imagine what “pull it” might have meant other than “demolish it.” And because of the preparations necessary for a demolition, it’s hard to see how Silverstein simply decided to finish off a property that, because of fire damage, had possibly lost its value.
Questions Surround Highly Favorable Insurance Settlement
Since the insurance policies on the WTC included coverage against terrorist attacks, Silverstein successfully received a settlement not just for his losses, but based on “two occurrences” of terrorism, for twice the value of the lost property. This meant that Silverstein sought to collect $7 billion (NYT 9/30/02). In December 2004, a federal jury awarded “only” $4.6 billion in damages to Silverstein. It did seem true that in just three and a half years, the real estate magnate had realized a huge profit on his investment (Forbes 12/06/04). But to be fair, that wasn’t all profit. Silverstein continued to owe the Port Authority $100 million a year for rent, had lost $300 million a year in rent revenues, and had to rebuild the WTC(NYT 03/27/08).
Even with these requirements, how did the apparently outsized insurance settlement come about? How could someone collect on a property he’d approved for demolition? Attorney Bill Veale has remarked that “you are dancing with one of the most perplexing conundrums of 9/11.” Veale made an important legal distinction: “Silverstein never made a statement of intent to demolish. He made, legally, what is called an ‘admission,’ a statement that can be used against him, but is less than a confession” (Pers. Corresp.). Still, the case for planned demolition, it does seem, would have been a fairly easy one to make, so one has to wonder why the insurer’s attorneys didn’t argue it.
Answering this conundrum will likely merit the attention of a full and genuine inquiry into “Building What?”
Questions Surrounding the Apparent Foreknowledge
Skeptics have sometimes been too quick to conclude that Silverstein’s statement solves the mystery of WTC-7. In reality, though, it underscores more questions than it answers.
Why did the fire department decide not to fight the fires? The answer, at least after 10:28, might be that flying debris had inflicted major structural damage to the building, as the various chiefs reported. Several regular firefighters claimed the building was leaning (www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnYBX6QT0R4).Once the fires and structural damage were observed, firefighters were reportedly pulled back because the building was considered dangerous, whether because of structural damage or the possibility of explosives inside, and because no water was available after the Towers water mains ruptured. Nevertheless, many firefighters reported frustration when they were ordered to stand back and not fight the fires (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/attack/wtc7.html).
After receiving reports of explosions at the Twin Towers, the fire department may have suspected that explosives might also be present in WTC-7. If these reports reached the middle and higher levels of the FDNY, the commanders may have decided that it would be irresponsible to risk entering a building which might contain explosives. But of course they couldn’t say this publicly because of its implications regarding the demise of all three buildings. So the top officials may have felt it necessary to rely on exaggerations of the size of the fires and the degree of the damage inflicted on WTC-7.
It should be emphasized that seeming foreknowledge of an event is not the same as involvement in its planning. In a hierarchical organization like a fire department, predictive statements can be made and passed along without discussion, especially in a catastrophic emergency.
First Responder Testimonials of Foreboding or Foreknowledge
Dozens of first responders and firefighters have agreed that they were ordered not to fight the fires in WTC-7 and were told the building was coming down. Researcher Matt Everett has compiled these statements (http://911blogger.com/node/6195).
First responder Indira Singh, a volunteer EMT, recalled “there was another panic around 4 o’clock because they were bringing the building down and people seemed to know this ahead of time” (Pacifica KPFA Radio 4/27/05). Fire Capt. Brenda Berkman stated that “we no sooner got going on something there when a chief came along and said, ‘Everybody’s got to leave the area. We’re afraid Seven WTC is going to fall down” (Hagan and Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 213). This comes as close to a recollection of actually fighting fires in the building as any in the testimonials. While the higher-ups claimed that they couldn’t get water to WTC-7, this alleged problem doesn’t appear in statements made by the people who would have fought the fires.
While only a few of the firefighters questioned the orders, some did murmur, wondering what was going on: Deputy Fire Chief Nick Visconti recalled that “World Trade Center 7 was burning and I was thinking to myself, how come they're not trying to put this fire out? … At some point, [FDNY Assistant Chief] Frank Fellini said, now we’ve got hundreds of guys out there.… He said to me, Nick, you’ve got to get those people out of there.… One comment was, oh, that building is never coming down, it didn’t get hit by a plane, why isn’t somebody in there putting the fire out?” (Firehouse 8/02).
As one reads these statements, questions arise once again: Who made the decision that the fires couldn’t be fought and the building couldn’t be saved? When was that decision first made? And at that time, what was the basis for making it? These too are tough questions to answer.
However, a New York Times story may offer some help: “By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away from [WTC-7] for safety reasons” (NYT 11/29/01). Yet since most observers have claimed that the fires in the building were not visible for an hour or even two after 11:30, NIST stated that “visual evidence of fires in the building was not available until around noon” (NIST NCSTAR1A p. 18). Thus it’s difficult to understand why anyone would make the decision not to fight the fires so early on. Perhaps Chief Fellini inspected the interior of the building or otherwise worked from information not available to most observers. His concern for firefighters’ safety was commendable.
Networks Also Anticipate Fall of WTC-7
Moments after the building came down, MSNBC’s Brian Williams asked David Restuccio, an FDNY lieutenant, about the fall of the skyscraper: “You guys knew this was coming all day?” Lt. Restuccio replied “we had heard reports that the building was unstable, and that it would eventually need to come down on its own, or it would be taken down. I would imagine it came down on its own.” Lt. Restuccio didn’t explain what he meant by “it would be taken down,” nor did anyone at the network ask (MSNBC 9/11/01). While one can understand why an FDNY lieutenant would report what he did, one does have to wonder where in the chain of command the terminal prognosis about the building might have originated.
Adding to suspicions that prominent individuals did seem to have foreknowledge, fully four major news outlets anticipated the disintegration of WTC-7. A Fox News Channel 5 crew was all set up to film well before the 47-story building ever began to drop (Fox 9/11/01). CNN aired a story about the “collapse” of WTC-7 over an hour before it happened. About 4:10, CNN announced that WTC-7 “was incredibly structurally damaged” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=58h0LjdMry0). On what basis did Fox make that determination?
Then, fully 23 minutes before the building actually came down, BBC reporter Jane Standley announced that WTC-7 had fallen while in the video it still stood serenely behind her. She explained that “this was not a result of a new attack; it was because the building had been weakened during this morning’s attacks” (BBC 9/11/01). Next, and no less laughably, MSNBC got into the act. With the building visible behind her, the network’s Ashleigh Banfield announced “that is the building that is going to go down next … there’s no way they can stabilize it.” Startled by an explosion, Banfield turned toward WTC-7, which was still fully standing, and cried out “Oh my God! This is it!” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg). Banfield’s outcry indicated that she’d been informed beforehand that the building would be coming down. No one asked the question: since no plane had hit this skyscraper and its fires were far smaller than those in the Towers, how could anyone seem so sure of its demise?
Instant Media Imprinting of the Official Story
Much as CNN told viewers that the building was “incredibly structurally damaged,” other networks reported on “the building that is going down next … we heard earlier that it was structurally unstable.” Still others described the demise of WTC-7 as “part of the ancillary damage from the other two,” ruined by falling debris from the Twin Towers. Thus major mass-media outlets—including Fox, CNN, BBC, and NBC, and MSNBC (twice)—had begun to introduce and even inculcate an official narrative before the last WTC building had come down (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg). The twist, though, was that NIST quietly changed the story in 2006 when it finally discarded structural damage as a factor in the fall of WTC-7.
Scientifically Embarrassing FEMA and NIST Reports
As the discussion so far has shown, WTC-7 became the subject of government investigations—and both, considered as science, were national disasters.
After the American Society of Civil Engineers had assembled a team of volunteers, FEMA took over and led the investigation. Handicapped by insufficient funding, a small staff (many of them volunteers), and a lack of access to both witnesses and evidence, FEMA’s 2002 WTC Building Performance Study was by its own admission inconclusive.
FEMA’s work was doomed from the outset. In the months following the attacks, FEMA investigators, backed by civil engineers, operated under ridiculous limitations. Except for one brief walkthrough tour of Ground Zero, the FEMA team had to work from small samples of wreckage. Only about one percent of the structural steel was available for them to examine. Astoundingly, more than three months after 9/11 the investigators hadn’t even received the blueprints for the buildings (NYT 12/25/01). The hasty disposal of wreckage and the destruction of evidence were inexcusable. WTC-7 had been evacuated, so bodies of victims weren’t a concern. Its disintegration, however, was of keen interest to architecture, engineering and insurance professionals.
When the cleanup routine blatantly ignored FBI crime-scene protocol, it moved into violations of federal law. Surely, the Bureau itself must have known that it was enabling a completely unprofessional and demonstrably illegal disturbance of the site. In complete contrast to what went on at Ground Zero, former FBI Director Louis Freeh described what FBI protocol seeks to avoid: “Crime scenes can grow stale in a hurry. Evidence is lost, or it decays beyond useful capacity. Well-meaning efforts to clear the site of a human disaster can destroy vital information about angles of impact, the size of an explosion, and the nature of the explosive materials themselves” (Freeh My FBI p. 4). Did the FBI really want to solve the crime of the century, or did it prefer to issue a list of nineteen Islamic names and, in effect, declare the case closed?
As noted earlier, FEMA did have the humility to admit that even its best guess had “only a low probability of occurrence” (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm). And FEMA did discard some scientifically untenable theories. Within hours of the tragedy, Stanford Professor Steven Block had rushed to compare the airliner attacks to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, claiming “you don’t design buildings to withstand nuclear attacks.” Prof. Block was among the first academics to falsely claim that the fires actually melted the structural steel (www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/block911.html). Others would follow.
FEMA, however, enlisted MIT engineering professor Thomas Eagar, who talked much better physics. Prof. Eagar challenged the idea, advanced by several other experts (including some on PBS) that the fires had melted the steel support beams. Since temperatures must approach 2,800°F to melt steel, and since only a special device such as an oxyacetylene torch will sustain those temperatures, the meltdown theory was easy to debunk. Once Professor Eagar pointed out that the maximum temperature from open hydrocarbon fires is 1,700°F, the belief that fires fueled by kerosene, paper, and office furniture could melt the steel became untenable (PBS “NOVA” 4/30/02).
But to replace the discredited melted-steel theory, FEMA fell back on a softened-steel hypothesis and also popularized the “domino” or “pancaking” theory to explain the collapses. According to FEMA, fires weakened the structural steel so that floors dropped upon those below, “pancaking” all the way down. This was a hypothesis that the 9/11 Commission would later appropriate—making it a centerpiece of the Official Story—but also one that a legion of critics would deconstruct.
Even if the Towers had “pancaked,” this would have been an inadequate explanation for the demise of WTC-7, a very different building that wasn’t hit by an airliner. Rather than pursuing the building’s disintegration as the unique event it was, FEMA displayed little interest in visiting the WTC-7 site, neglected to ask anyone to take photos, and failed to interview cleanup workers. So far as researchers can tell, FEMA didn’t even ask whether the building’s massive (22” x 22”) transfer trusses were broken or still standing.
The “Deepest Mystery”: The “Swiss-Cheese” Steel
FEMA’s researchers made some startling discoveries, but their assumptions kept them from drawing the logical conclusions. Within a few months of 9/11, three professors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) had issued their report about a remarkably deformed piece of steel from Building 7.
This “Swiss-cheese” specimen came from a thick I-beam whose “steel flanges had been reduced from an inch thick to paper thin” (www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2001/10/03_grou.html). In places this fragment was “extremely thin,” indicating that the steel had melted away even though no fire in any of the buildings was hot enough to melt steel outright. Both this thinning and the holes suggested that some of the steel “had vaporized, partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures.” To compound the riddle, the WPI researchers found that iron atoms in the steel had combined with sulfur to form compounds causing the steel to melt at lower temperatures (WPI Transformations Sp. 02). Despite evidence that some of the steel had vaporized and partly evaporated at extraordinarily high temperatures, the researchers were unwilling or unable to determine the source of the sulfur.
The Worcester Polytechnic findings made it clear that “this Swiss cheese appearance [had] shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending—but not holes.” These cavities, some as large as a silver dollar, were caused by a “eutectic mixture” containing iron, oxygen and sulfur that could lower the melting point, causing “inter-granular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese” (WPI Transformations Sp. 02). Perplexed by the presence of sulfur as well as the piece itself, New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton characterized this piece of ruined steel as “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” (NYT 2/2/02).
FEMA’s Report also revealed that the WTC steel appeared to have encountered “severe high-temperature erosion” and been “rapidly corroded by sulfidation.” Investigators were puzzled because “the severe corrosion and subsequent erosion … are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified” (FEMA WTC Building Performance Study Appendix C).
Some researchers speculated that the sulfur might have come from gypsum found in building materials. In the years that followed, scientists—including Dr. Steven Jones—had called on government investigators to conduct experiments to see whether the sulfur could have come from inside the buildings—especially from drywall. When investigators refused to run the tests, freelance experimenters such as engineer Jonathan Cole ran them—and proved that the reactive sulfur came from neither the building materials nor the aluminum nor the jet fuel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvQDFV1HINw&feature=player_embedded#!). All this made sense, since the calcium sulfate in drywall is inert; that’s why they use it for fireproofing.
FEMA was equally puzzled by the three collapses, asserting “the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each Tower could not be definitively determined.” While FEMA did have the integrity to admit that none of its theories made much sense, it also kicked the can of worms down the road. Although the phrase “sequence of events leading to the collapse” sounded innocuous enough, NIST investigators would later find this before-the-tumble focus useful for their own purposes.
Losses at WTC-7 Are Under Acknowledged
FEMA took criticism from many directions. Media critic Scott Loughrey cited not only FEMA’s nonchalance about WTC-7’s demise but a curious silence among the tenants of the building. What kind of society, he wondered, treats such an unprecedented disaster as though it were an everyday event? In addition to the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), tenants at WTC-7 included the CIA, the IRS, the Defense Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, few heads of these departments were at all vocal in demanding to know why the building had collapsed (http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LOU308A.html).
Beyond life and private property, the press scarcely noticed how the losses of public property affected the legal system. Few in the news media raised any outcry when it became evident that thousands of SEC documents crucial to ongoing federal cases against WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Enron were lost. SEC investigations also included huge corporate banking firms such as Citicorp and others spun off from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (National Law Review 9/17/01), otherwise known as “the Bank for Crooks and Criminals Incorporated.” After BCCI closed in 1991, the network was largely rebuilt by the bin Ladens (Wash. Post 2/17/01). American and British governments had known all about the bank but had allowed it to operate for many years, in part because the CIA and Pakistani ISI had major accounts with BCCI (P. Thompson Terror Timeline p. 242).
Underreactions can be revealing, however. They bring to mind Sherlock Holmes puffing on his pipe and thinking it odd that the guard dog had failed to bark at the intruder.
NIST: A Pattern of Evasion, Denial, and Dishonesty
Possibly taking a cue from the fact that FEMA had thrown up its hands, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) repeatedly delayed its report on WTC-7. NIST initially promised to cover WTC-7 along with the Towers in its Report of late 2004, but devoted only 56 pages to it. When the full Report finally came out in 2005, WTC-7 received only 42 pages. Next, NIST promised to complete a separate report on WTC-7 in 2006; then it promised a draft report for early 2007. But the draft didn’t appear until August 2008, and the Final Report came out three months later, just after the elections. Explaining WTC-7 to an increasingly skeptical public wasn’t a challenge NIST’s investigators approached with great enthusiasm.
Understandably, for NIST faced big problems. Since no modern steel-framed high-rise had ever before come down mainly due to fire, NIST’s investigators had much to explain. NIST faced two challenges the Towers didn’t pose: WTC-7 didn’t suffer structural damage from an airplane, and no jet fuel could have ignited fires.
The Breakaway Column Theory
Attempting to assemble a scenario, NIST offered an elaborate theory: as fire-induced thermal expansion of steel beams on the thirteenth floor expanded, they broke a girder loose from a major interior support, column 79 (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 150-55). This scenario not only sounds quirky, it also, in describing WTC-7 as a house of cards, overlooks the principle of redundancy in structural engineering: i.e., if one support should fail, others pick up its load (http://www.nd.edu/~tallbldg/rr_panel.htm). As the previous chapter demonstrated, notable redundancy was built into the WTC.
The building’s external support system of closely spaced columns tied together with welded spandrel plates was exceptionally resilient. Structural engineers had raved about the design. The exterior structure tied the columns together in a very solid matrix. Like the Trade Towers, WTC-7 was built to withstand extreme challenges (Glanz and Lipton City in the Sky pp. 133-36).
Rather than building on FEMA’s findings and doing the research it recommended, NIST moved into abstraction, computer modeling, and just plain bad science. To avoid troubling truths, the investigators consistently denied evidence, manipulated data, and made things up, making a travesty of the scientific method (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 13-31). So when NIST refused to do serious scientific investigation, independent researchers once again undertook the task.
Better Sleuthing Through Chemistry and Physics
By 2006, drawing on the work of the RJ Lee group, analysts led by chemist Kevin Ryan and physicist Steven Jones moved into analysis of the signature WTC dust. Making effective use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Ryan and his team discovered that soon after the buildings came down, the EPA had monitored “volatile organic chemicals” (VOCs) rising from lingering fires around Ground Zero. Once the researchers had obtained the EPA’s long-suppressed reports, they learned that these toxic VOCs were measured “at levels thousands of times higher than seen in other structure fires.” This suggested “extremely violent but short-lived fire events.”Something burning in the debris had continued to emit toxic chemicals for several months (K. Ryan The Environmentalist 8/08).
Looking into Self-Sustaining Combustion
Trying to find out why the debris could burn for so long, the researchers considered “chemical energetic materials which provide their own fuel and oxidant and are not deterred by water, dust, or chemical suppressants.” This took them into “nanoenergetics,” the study of ways to manipulate the flow of energy between molecules, and finally into “nanothermites,” the explosives which contain finely particulate iron and aluminum. Nanoparticles, because they have such a great surface-to-volume ratio, can react very rapidly (www.technologyreview.com/computing/14105/page1).
Using spectrographic and electron-microscope technology, these researchers began finding both aluminosilicate and iron-rich microspheres (formed from droplets of molten metal) in the dust. For these particles to have formed, temperatures had to reach at least 2652ºF and 2800ºF respectively (Jones J. of 9/11 Studies 1/08). While the nanoenergetics/nanothermite hypothesis doesn’t answer all questions, it does help explain the very long-burning, intensely hot fires at Ground Zero (Knight Ridder 5/29/02).
Also pertinent was the data that Dr. Jones obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request: the full results of an earlier but suppressed USGS study. Jones and his colleagues found that the USGS had discovered far more than their published results let on: in the dust they’d found a microsphere rich in molybdenum, an uncommon element. Since the melting point for metallic molybdenum is an amazing 4753ºF, the presence of this microsphere implied that combustion in the buildings had generated temperatures over three times those reached by even the hottest hydrocarbon/office fires (Jones J. of 9/11 Studies 1/08). Whereas office fires peaking at 1400ºF obviously don’t generate the 2700ºF needed to melt steel, nanothermite reaches 4500ºF or more.
International Scientific Analysis of the Red/Gray Chips
Since scientists improve their credibility when they work in teams and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, this was the way to go. This time, Prof. Niels Harrit, a chemist at the University of Copenhagen, was the lead researcher, backed by Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and six others.
Also present in the WTC dust were microscopic two-sided, red/gray chips. So the question seemed simple enough: What were these chips found in the WTC dust made of, and what might they reveal about what went on during the buildings’ ultimate moments? The methods were impressively scientific; researchers worked from several samples of WTC dust gathered in different places, and “controlled” their experiment by testing the dust from conventional demolitions as well. Using state-of-the-art instrumentation, the researchers found that while the gray sides of the chips consisted of rhomboidal crystals with “high iron and oxygen content” along with carbon, the red sides were comprised mainly of “aluminum, iron, oxygen, silicon and carbon.” When heated to about 830ºF, this red side burned intensely, pointing to the presence of “highly energetic thermitic material” in the dust (Open Chemical Physics Journal 1/09).
While the researchers were less certain about the gray side of the chips, they found compelling evidence that the red side was unreacted nanothermite, an explosive. Later, larger fragments of unignited thermite were discovered in the dust. Professor Harrit was careful, however, not to dismiss other possibilities: “we found nanothermite in the rubble; we are not saying that only nanothermite was used” (Open Chemical Physics Journal 1/09). This was an important qualifier, since thermite lacks sulfur—and sulfur, after all, was the mystery element that puzzled the Worcester Polytechnic researchers, as they noted in FEMA’s Report.
Most of the criticism of the nanothermite paper has focused on surrounding issues, not the science itself. So although the Open Chemical Physics Journal wasn’t the most prestigious in its field, it was juried. Enhanced by the use of high-tech instruments, the design and methodology seem logically tight and sufficiently solid. It’s the study itself that counts most; the nanothermite paper has made an important contribution. If other researchers haven’t yet replicated its experiments, thereby validating its results, that’s not the fault of those who did the original work.
In summary, evidence of strange substances has been found by government investigators, environmental firms, academics, and three different sets of independent scientists. According to Griffin, all of their research has shown that destruction of the steel must have involved “extremely high temperatures” that hydrocarbon fires simply could not have produced (Griffin Mysterious Collapse p. 45).
NIST Delivers Draft Report: David Confronts Government Goliath
After repeatedly missing deadlines to complete its report on WTC-7, the Draft for Public Comment finally appeared in August 2008. Making no mention of NIST’s four-year delay, Shyam Sunder, the agency’s lead investigator for its WTC projects, announced with bravado that “the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC-7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives.” The corporate media trumpeted Sunder’s pronouncement (AP 9/21/08). Three times in this Draft Report, NIST insisted that its findings were “consistent with physical principles.”
Soon enough, though, Sunder and NIST had to eat humble pie. High school physics teacher David Chandler was fond of quipping “two planes, three buildings: do the math.” But Chandler was dead serious about Building 7, and he’d done the math. He’d made a video, “WTC-7 in Freefall” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I), which furnished evidence of the building’s observable near-free-fall for 2.5 seconds, implying that after it dropped behind another building, it completed its fall in 6.6 seconds. Chandler might have cited Yogi Berra, who famously remarked “you can observe a lot just by watching.”
At the public hearing, Chandler pointed out that video evidence showed WTC-7 coming down at a near free-fall speed and that, if one accepted NIST’s theory of successive column failure, this speed was hardly consistent with “physical principles.” Chandler asked why, when videos show the top of WTC-7 dropping at near free-fall speed, NIST was claiming a fall speed 40 percent slower than that. “How,” he asked, “can such a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?” It was almost painful to watch Sunder stumble around. NIST’s leader lectured on universal gravity (which “applies to everybody; every—all bodies on, uh, on, uh, on this particular—on this planet, not just, uh, in Ground Zero”) rather than dealing with the evidence of near free-fall speed of WTC-7 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDvNS9iMjzA&p=206C1F5EDFC83824).
Soon after the August events, videos of both the “Questions and Answers” and “Technical Briefing” sessions were removed from NIST’s website.
NIST Comes Up with Entirely New Theory
Responding to the sharp critique it had encountered at its August meetings, NIST released a Final Report that revealed more about NIST than about WTC-7. Come November, NIST presented a whole new theory for the fall of WTC-7. This one involved three stages: a slow initial descent, a freefall descent for 2.25 seconds, and a decreasing velocity as the building met with “resistance from the structure below” (Final Report p. 607). This was inventive, but was it science or science fiction? NIST also had removed its claim that its findings were “consistent with physical principles.”
It was NIST’s first stage, that of slow initial descent, that most bothered Chandler, Jones, and other scientific skeptics. Referring to the photographic record, Chandler pointed out that virtually no movement was observed during NIST’s first stage; that NIST was working from an artificially early start time set to agree with a computer model and that its first stage contradicted the videographic evidence, which showed the building starting to fall suddenly and then dropping precipitously, accelerating like those balls Galileo dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I).
Perhaps NIST tossed a bone to its critics, hoping that they’d be so hungry for some concession that they’d quit howling about the contradictions. Yet when NIST acknowledged free-fall speed, however briefly, it tacitly admitted that its theory of successive collapse could not be true. Put another way, in a free-fall descent all 82 columns had to fail simultaneously, and this was just the opposite of NIST’s fire-damage theory, which involved much slower progressive collapse of the columns. Thus when NIST affirmed near free-fall speed, even for a moment, it came very close to implicitly acknowledging that WTC-7 was intentionally demolished.
Revisiting the Primary Characteristics of Planned Demolition
Adapted from the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations (Sect. 18.3.2), here are the characteristics of planned demolition:
In the aftermath of WTC-7’s destruction, additional signs of demolition were evident:
Beyond Just Criteria for Demolition
Thunder-like rumbles were heard just before the penthouse began to disintegrate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg), and its disintegration was virtually complete several seconds before the whole building started to descend. The early sag in the penthouse parallels the early drop of the broadcast antenna on top of the North Tower. Kinks in the roof occur when charges have shattered the inner structure of the building, which is an essential task of controlled demolition so the building will implode on itself, avoiding damage to surrounding structures. Thus kinks are one of the surest signs of implosion—and therefore, like near free-fall speed and near perfect symmetry during disintegration, of planned demolition.
At WTC-7, though, the evidence extends beyond the physical and forensic. When one considers the scattered fires, the limited accessibility of fuel to stoke them, and the apparent foreknowledge by officials, first responders, and media figures, one has to raise the issue of access to the building. Unlike the Towers, WTC-7 wasn’t undergoing elevator renovations. Since both physical phenomena and human behavior require explanation, questions about them would be standard fare on Crime Scene Investigation. They’ll no doubt be pursued in a well-funded investigation, but in the meantime they’ll continue to engage excellent independent researchers.
Since no opportunity for access comparable to the ACE Elevator renovation is known to have gone on at WTC-7, the question of how someone could have planted explosives can provoke a “whistleblower objection.” Journalist Robert Parry has underscored the absence of anyone among dozens of technicians who must have worked, possibly over several weeks, to “wire” the buildings (Consortium News 1/5/11). Chemist Kevin Ryan retorted that “demolition of a building does not require wiring each of the floors” and that contemporary technology relies instead on remote detonators. Moreover, Ryan pointed out that “claiming that a deceptive demolition event could not happen because those who placed the charges have not come forward to boast of their handiwork is absurd. Who’s going to admit killing nearly 3,000 people? … are you asking that all investigators throw out their evidence until they get a confession?” (Consortium/blogspot).
Since the whistleblower objection to the demolition hypothesis is a valid one to raise, the debate will receive more coverage in the Conclusion.
Why Is Building 7 So Little Known?
It’s fun to smile at a judge’s ignorance of “building what?” but lack of awareness about WTC-7 is no laughing matter. When one asks why this ignorance has existed, four reasons come to mind. One is circumstantial—that the fall of this very tall building was literally overshadowed by the fall of two much taller, more iconic ones. Clearly the scale of the death and destruction, the symbolic absence from the skyline, and the psychological trauma, were all far greater for the Towers. James Glanz seemed to have these factors in mind when he wrote that WTC-7 “was a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01). In the fall of 2001, Americans didn’t want to deal with mysteries. New Yorkers were dealing with the stench of death and a smoldering “pile”; they didn’t need to hear about a “smoking gun.”
Despite the relevance of these factors, they don’t tell the full story. It’s also true that information about WTC-7 was deliberately suppressed, as Griffin has suggested. Recall that immediately after 9/11, American TV networks played horrific clips of the Towers being hit by planes, set afire, and falling down. While they played and replayed these, they rarely if ever aired footage of the fires or fall of WTC-7. Moreover, the Commission’s Report didn’t so much as mention that a third building had come down. Plus NIST’s reports, some of which were supposed to include coverage of Building 7, were repeatedly delayed, further diminishing public interest (www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).
Above all, though, WTC-7 has likely been the most completely ignored and thoroughly suppressed of the buildings because it poses a special challenge to the Official Story. Since it wasn’t hit by a hijacked airliner, since its fires were smaller, and since its fall most clearly exhibits the hallmarks of controlled demolition, it’s more difficult to explain, let alone to blame on al Qaeda hijackers.
Creative Attempts to Raise Public Awareness
For some time, Richard Gage and others at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have highlighted the fact that real scientific investigation “casts grave doubt upon the media stories and the official report by the 9/11 Commission, FEMA, and NIST.” In 2010, the group dramatically called attention to the fact that a third building had come down by adding a third searchlight beam to the two generated by the city at the WTC site (www.ae911truth.org). In the fall of that year, “Building What?,” a newer group led by dedicated family members of 9/11 victims, ran very effective TV ads that led to an appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show (http://buildingwhat.org).
With WTC-7 as the entering wedge, the 9/11 truth movement is pressing forward, ever closer to its goal of a new investigation. And much as the WTC buildings offer a scientifically solid way into other facets of the 9/11 issue, a fuller understanding of that issue offers a way into understanding many other related areas: civil rights, media mythmaking, power and the press, access to government information, the role of intelligence agencies, and the consequences of American foreign policy.
Just as we’ve spent significant time unraveling a cloak of secrecy, we’ll also weave a layered tapestry of new meaning. The Conclusion suggests places to start.
Back to Excerpts
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
In September 2009, Judge Edward Lehner was hearing arguments on whether to allow New Yorkers to vote on a proposal to investigate the attacks on the World Trade Center. Sponsored by NYC CAN, the petition included the signatures of 52,000 residents (Villager 8/4/09). When Judge Lehner remarked that the 9/11 Commission had already completed an investigation, the group’s attorney, Dennis McMahon, replied that the Commission had left many questions unanswered. “One of the biggest questions,” the lawyer noted, “is why did Building 7 come down?” Puzzled, Judge Lehner asked “Building what?” McMahon informed the judge that a third World Trade Center skyscraper, Building 7, also came down on 9/11.
A Little-Known Event
Such public ignorance is widespread. One national poll found that 43 percent of Americans weren’t aware that three buildings had fallen (Zogby Intl. 5/24/06); of this number, only a small percentage had any idea about the circumstances. Even among those who were more knowledgeable, the disintegration of this third skyscraper has remained an enigma.
WTC-7’s relative obscurity is itself puzzling. This high-rise building wasn’t hit by an airliner, and at 47 stories it would have stood as the tallest skyscraper in 30 states. When New York Times reporter James Glanz characterized the fall of WTC-7 as “a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01), he was factoring in media environment right after 9/11. But it wasn’t just a tsunami of shocking news that has caused WTC-7 to go underreported; it also posed big challenges to the Official Story.
The fall of WTC-7 should have been a bigger story because the circumstances of its demise were anything but “normal.” While the standard narrative says the skyscraper disintegrated because of fire damage, this seemingly simple hypothesis introduces more ambiguity than it dispels. Was fire really a sufficient cause, especially when one recalls that, before 9/11, no steel-framed high rise had ever come down because of fire?
The WTC-7 Fires: Location, Time, Fuel, Size, and Damage
The fire reports ranged widely. While no one has talked about a towering inferno or even a huge conflagration, Fire Capt. Brenda Berkman did affirm “fire on every floor” (S. Hagan and M. Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 213). But perceptions do differ, even among professionals, and it would be easy to confuse a lot of smoke with a lot of fire. Mark Jacobson, a journalist who’d reported large fires, recalled “the whole building wasn’t on fire”; instead, he wrote, “there was a lot of fire coming out of a few floors” (NY Magazine 3/37/06). The photographic record also supports the conclusion that the building experienced medium to hot fires on a few floors.
Even those promoting the hypothesis of destruction from fire damage have come in way under Capt. Berkman’s estimate. According to NIST, itself a prime defender of this theory, fires burned on only ten of the building’s 47 floors—and only on six did they grow and burn out of control (NCSTAR1A p. xxxvi). Moreover, officials with Consolidated Edison (Con Ed) of New York who entered WTC-7 said “there was a fire, but they did not think the building would collapse” (http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00174.pdf). Thus Con Ed personnel apparently felt the building was safe to enter, reporting only “a fire,” not the “large fires” claimed by many proponents of the fire theory.
It was the Fire Department, then, that predicted the building was going to collapse. Granted, a walkthrough is not an inspection of a tall building. But if in fact the fires were small, on what basis did building security personnel and the FDNY chiefs make a different determination?
When Did Fires in WTC-7 First Become Visible?
The question of when the fires first broke out is also controversial. The standard analysis of WTC-7 asserts that when the North Tower came down at 10:28, flying debris ignited the fires. Although WTC-7 stood 325 feet away, tremendous mushrooming explosions at the top of the Tower propelled large chunks of metal, some of them likely superheated, hundreds of feet outward (www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgN080yySe0).
For the first two or three hours, the blazes were scattered and not immediately visible. NIST also acknowledged that the first photographs or videos of WTC-7 fires were taken at about 12:10 a.m., and that two other photos were taken at 12:28. This meant, as David Ray Griffin has noted, that the first fires were photographed between one and two hours after the flying debris hit the building (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 160-61). These times pose a plausibility challenge to the standard narrative; they ask us “to believe,” remarked Griffin, “that, although the fires were supposedly started near the building’s south and southwest faces, and hence near the windows, they remained invisible from outside the building for all that time.” And “the fact that fires first became visible on the eleventh and twelfth floors at 2:00 [also] makes it very difficult to believe NIST’s claim that the fires began at 10:28” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 160-61).
Did Fires Start Even Before the North Tower Fell?
Although some of the fires apparently started later than claimed, others may have actually started earlier—up to an hour before the North Tower came down, supposedly starting all the WTC-7 fires. Although structural engineer Matthys Levy supported the Official Story about the Towers, he too indicated “the initial fires started around 9:30 in the morning, so the building was allowed to burn for eight hours” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 168-69). About this same time, City staffers Michael Hess and Barry Jennings also reported smoke on the eighth floor when they were forced to wait for rescue there. “It was dark,” Jennings told BBC. “It was also hot--very hot” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQY-ksiuwKU). So the fires may have started up to an hour before the first Tower came down.
These incongruities led physical chemist Dr. Frank H. Greening to remark that one of the most important problems with the official account “is the question of where and how fires started in the building” (wtc.nist.gov/comments08). The official account depends on fires burning long enough and hot enough to cause a floor beam to expand and break a column loose, leading to “sudden and global collapse.” Thus it’s not surprising that proponents of the Official Story speculated about what might have fueled such hot, long-burning fires.
Early Fuel-Oil Hypotheses
Early speculation claimed the impact of debris ignited thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored in fire-resistant containers. Three small storage tanks located on floors five, seven, and eight were fed from “larger tanks near ground level” (NYT 3/20/02). In addition, FEMA reported one 6,000-gallon tank between floors two and three, plus one 6,000-gallon and two 12,000-gallon tanks under a loading dock (Report 2002).However, FEMA later found the latter subterranean containers intact, still containing 20,000 gallons of oil (www.wtc7.net/articles/FEMA/WTC_ch5.htm).
Most photos show fires in only a few windows, primarily on the seventh and twelfth floors. The seventh had an oil tank, but the twelfth did not. Since fires broke out on floors where no storage tanks were located but not on all the floors where tanks were present, it’s reasonable to conclude that diesel wasn’t the major fuel for most of the fires. If oil had been a major source, some fires would have grown much larger on floors with storage tanks.
FEMA Looks Toward Other Causes for Fires
FEMA, the first federal agency to investigate, was rightly skeptical about the fuel-oil hypothesis. Its investigators reported that “on the north face, photographs and videos show that the fires were located on approximately the seventh, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth floors.” However, many photos and videos also show little fire or smoke on the north side, leading some to speculate that the fires remained mostly on the southern side of the building, where the debris had hit. From this evidence, FEMA theorized that these blazes might have somehow warped the steel on the southern side to the point where the whole building collapsed.
But if this scenario were correct, then why didn’t WTC-7 sag, list, or topple toward its south side? In one of its most useful observations, FEMA concluded “the facade came straight down, suggesting an internal collapse.… The building imploded, with collapse initiating at an interior location” (www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf).
Although the FEMA investigation was under funded, poorly managed, denied access to most of the physical evidence, and sometimes self-contradictory, FEMA did draw valid conclusions. Its 2002 WTC Building Performance Study allowed that even its best guess, even its “best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence” (FEMA Report Appendix C). Nevertheless, most officials and media commentators clung to an improbable story: after the building’s sprinkler system failed and additional water was not available, the fires spread, fueled by diesel oil, and eventually burned so hot they caused the steel support structure to weaken, resulting in a collapse. This scenario was highly improbable, as even NIST would later acknowledge.
How Much Damage Did the Debris Inflict?
Observers have also disagreed about how much WTC-7 was damaged by debris blown outward from the North Tower. Some witnesses and many proponents of a damage-plus-fire hypothesis have claimed very substantial damage. EMT Mercedes Rivera said that the building “had no face and it was ready to collapse” (Hagan and Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 29). It’s highly unlikely, though, that WTC-7 received damage anywhere near a “great gash scooped deeply,” as Popular Mechanics once claimed (Pop. Mech. 3/05). The photo and video record just doesn’t show any structural damage of this magnitude.
Although NIST initially promoted the notion that the south side of WTC-7 was scooped out, it ultimately conceded that structural damage had no part in the collapse initiation (Final Report). If serious structural damage—whether caused by large fires or flying debris or some combination of the two—was the main cause for the demise of WTC-7, then why would the building have stood looking just fine—without significant slumping, sagging, or listing—and then suddenly drop straight down?
Early Evacuation and Explosions at WTC-7
WTC-7’s twenty-third floor housed Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s new command center, the Office for Emergency Management (OEM), which had cost the city $13 million. After the first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., the mayor, an aide, and two bodyguards drove down to the WTC (W. Barrett and D. Collins Grand Illusion pp. 3-5). According to his testimony, Giuliani was still in the car when the second plane hit. When he met with Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, the commissioner told him they’d already evacuated WTC-7 and were setting up a command center at 75 Barclay Street. Then Giuliani dashed over to FDNY Chief Peter Ganci’s command post on West Street (Comm. Hearing 5/19/04). Because several OEM officials and their deputies had gone the North Tower lobby, not to the OEM, the command center was dysfunctional from the outset. New Yorkers had scoffed at the mayor’s decision to locate his command center in the World Trade Center, long the top target for terrorists. Later they were vindicated when Giuliani chose to abandon his new emergency-management center before its first big emergency(Barrett and Collins Grand Illusion pp. 31, 34).
While it’s not clear whether the departure from Giuliani’s command center came before or after 9:03, when the second airliner hit, some office workers have reported that WTC-7 itself was evacuated before that time (Ft. Detrick Standard 10/18/01). Since most people—both in the city and around the country—had not realized that the Towers were under attack until the second impact, one does wonder who initiated the evacuation order for the OEM and why they might have deemed it necessary.
Stranded Aides Make Unsettling Reports
Despite the evacuation order and the police presence that must have accompanied it, the mayor’s staffers did enter the WTC-7 just after 9:00. Michael Hess, corporation counsel for the city and a close friend of Giuliani; and Barry Jennings, the Director of Emergency Services for the City Housing Authority, made it up to the OEM (Independent [UK] 9/13/01). Expecting to find Giuliani at the command center, they were amazed to find “everybody was gone.” Since evacuations take time, these reports imply an evacuation order was given before 9:03.
Puzzled, Jennings called other staffers, one of whom told him “to leave and leave right away.” A superior also commanded him to “get out of there now.” But the elevators didn’t work because the power had gone out (BBC 9/6/08). Do these warnings suggest foreknowledge that “seven is coming down,” or do they convey caution about a possible third hit on a building that housed many government offices, including the SEC, DoD, and CIA?
In characteristic fashion, the 9/11 Commission claimed that the OEM wasn’t fully evacuated until after 9:30: “After the South Tower was hit [at 9:03], OEM senior leadership decided to remain in its ‘bunker’ and continue conducting operations, even though all civilians had been evacuated from 7 WTC” (Report p. 305). This contradicted Giuliani’s claim that he arrived at the improvised command center on 75 Barclay St. before 9:30 (ABC 9/11/01). In an apparent attempt to make Giuliani look good, the Commission’s Report overrode his testimony, much as it had done with Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Mayor’s Staffers Report Explosions and Smoke
After receiving orders to leave the building, Hess and Jennings reportedly headed down the stairs until they got to the sixth floor. There, according to Jennings, “the landing that we were standing on gave way” because of a “big explosion” from below. They retreated to the eighth floor, broke a window, and called to firefighters for help: “They came twice. Why? I was trapped in there when both buildings [Towers] came down. All this time I was hearing explosions” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxUj6UgPODo). Hess largely corroborated Jennings’s story, adding “we were trapped on the eighth floor with smoke, thick smoke, all around us, for about an hour and a half (www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfiLbXMa64).
Giuliani claimed the sounds of explosions and the smoke hadn’t come from within WTC-7; instead, they’d come from the stricken Towers. But the power outage surely didn’t come from another building, and since WTC-7’s windows remained intact, it was highly unlikely that the reported smoke and heat had come from one of the Towers. Although the fires at WTC-7 were reportedly ignited when the North Tower came down at 10:28, this was an hour after the staffers reported that an explosion blew away the stairwell. Griffin points out that “the testimony of Michael Hess and Barry Jennings was threatening to the official account of WTC-7, according to which its collapse was not caused or even aided by explosives” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 85-92). While Hess changed his testimony, Jennings continued to contradict the standard account.
This challenge may have contributed to an odd coincidence. On August 19, 2008, just two days before the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was due to release the draft of its Final Report on WTC-7, Jennings died after spending several days in a hospital. Filmmaker Dylan Avery, who was among the last to interview Jennings, hired a well-regarded private investigator to look into Jennings’s death. Within 24 hours, Avery received a terse message back: “Due to some of the information I have uncovered, I have determined that this is a job for the police. I have refunded your credit card. Please do not contact me again about this individual” (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 98-99).
Reports of Later Explosions
There were also reports of explosions in the late afternoon, as WTC-7 came down at 5:21 p.m. Reporter Peter Demarco of the New York Daily News recalled, “there was a rumble. The building’s top row of windows popped out. Then all the windows on the thirty-ninth floor popped out. Then the thirty-eighth floor. Pop! Pop! Pop! was all you heard until the building sunk into a rising cloud of gray” (C. Bull and S. Erman At Ground Zero p. 97).
Beyond Demarco, NYPD officer Craig Bartmer also reported “I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down.… There’s a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions … all of a sudden I looked up, and … the thing started peeling in on itself.… I started running … and the whole time you’re hearing ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.’” Another eyewitness, a New York University medical student who’d served as an emergency medic that day, provided a similar account: “we heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder… it looked like there was a shock wave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out.… About a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that” (www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).
Likely Foreknowledge WTC-7 Would Come Down
As reported in the previous chapter, Mayor Giuliani told Peter Jennings he’d received word that the World Trade Center was going to collapse(NBC 9/11/01). But Mayor Giuliani was hardly the only one who apparently had foreknowledge.
On July 24, 2001, just six weeks before 9/11, a private consortium headed by Silverstein Properties acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center complex. The price? A cool $3.2 billion. Larry Silverstein, the new owner, took out insurance policies that included special provisions for loss due to terrorist attacks. In the wake of the 9/11 debacle, these details initially received little media scrutiny, even in an otherwise politically savvy town like New York.
A year after the unprecedented collapses of the three skyscrapers, the mystery surrounding WTC-7 took a new twist. Larry Silverstein seemingly revealed he’d thought it best to demolish one of his own properties. “I remember getting a call from the fire department commander telling me that they weren’t sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life: maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse” (PBS “America Rebuilds” 9/02).
While one can fully appreciate Mr. Silverstein’s concern for loss of life, the building in question had already been evacuated for several hours and the fire department had already pulled back. No one had fought the fires. Mr. Silverstein implied that soon after he’d decided to “pull it,” he watched his 47-story skyscraper dissolve into a neat pile of rubble. Later, Silverstein Properties insisted in a formal statement that its owner only meant to “pull” “the contingent of firefighters” (Letter to NIST 3/24/06). However, since “pull” is an industry term for “demolish,” it’s difficult to imagine what “pull it” might have meant other than “demolish it.” And because of the preparations necessary for a demolition, it’s hard to see how Silverstein simply decided to finish off a property that, because of fire damage, had possibly lost its value.
Questions Surround Highly Favorable Insurance Settlement
Since the insurance policies on the WTC included coverage against terrorist attacks, Silverstein successfully received a settlement not just for his losses, but based on “two occurrences” of terrorism, for twice the value of the lost property. This meant that Silverstein sought to collect $7 billion (NYT 9/30/02). In December 2004, a federal jury awarded “only” $4.6 billion in damages to Silverstein. It did seem true that in just three and a half years, the real estate magnate had realized a huge profit on his investment (Forbes 12/06/04). But to be fair, that wasn’t all profit. Silverstein continued to owe the Port Authority $100 million a year for rent, had lost $300 million a year in rent revenues, and had to rebuild the WTC(NYT 03/27/08).
Even with these requirements, how did the apparently outsized insurance settlement come about? How could someone collect on a property he’d approved for demolition? Attorney Bill Veale has remarked that “you are dancing with one of the most perplexing conundrums of 9/11.” Veale made an important legal distinction: “Silverstein never made a statement of intent to demolish. He made, legally, what is called an ‘admission,’ a statement that can be used against him, but is less than a confession” (Pers. Corresp.). Still, the case for planned demolition, it does seem, would have been a fairly easy one to make, so one has to wonder why the insurer’s attorneys didn’t argue it.
Answering this conundrum will likely merit the attention of a full and genuine inquiry into “Building What?”
Questions Surrounding the Apparent Foreknowledge
Skeptics have sometimes been too quick to conclude that Silverstein’s statement solves the mystery of WTC-7. In reality, though, it underscores more questions than it answers.
Why did the fire department decide not to fight the fires? The answer, at least after 10:28, might be that flying debris had inflicted major structural damage to the building, as the various chiefs reported. Several regular firefighters claimed the building was leaning (www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnYBX6QT0R4).Once the fires and structural damage were observed, firefighters were reportedly pulled back because the building was considered dangerous, whether because of structural damage or the possibility of explosives inside, and because no water was available after the Towers water mains ruptured. Nevertheless, many firefighters reported frustration when they were ordered to stand back and not fight the fires (http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/attack/wtc7.html).
After receiving reports of explosions at the Twin Towers, the fire department may have suspected that explosives might also be present in WTC-7. If these reports reached the middle and higher levels of the FDNY, the commanders may have decided that it would be irresponsible to risk entering a building which might contain explosives. But of course they couldn’t say this publicly because of its implications regarding the demise of all three buildings. So the top officials may have felt it necessary to rely on exaggerations of the size of the fires and the degree of the damage inflicted on WTC-7.
It should be emphasized that seeming foreknowledge of an event is not the same as involvement in its planning. In a hierarchical organization like a fire department, predictive statements can be made and passed along without discussion, especially in a catastrophic emergency.
First Responder Testimonials of Foreboding or Foreknowledge
Dozens of first responders and firefighters have agreed that they were ordered not to fight the fires in WTC-7 and were told the building was coming down. Researcher Matt Everett has compiled these statements (http://911blogger.com/node/6195).
First responder Indira Singh, a volunteer EMT, recalled “there was another panic around 4 o’clock because they were bringing the building down and people seemed to know this ahead of time” (Pacifica KPFA Radio 4/27/05). Fire Capt. Brenda Berkman stated that “we no sooner got going on something there when a chief came along and said, ‘Everybody’s got to leave the area. We’re afraid Seven WTC is going to fall down” (Hagan and Carouba Women at Ground Zero p. 213). This comes as close to a recollection of actually fighting fires in the building as any in the testimonials. While the higher-ups claimed that they couldn’t get water to WTC-7, this alleged problem doesn’t appear in statements made by the people who would have fought the fires.
While only a few of the firefighters questioned the orders, some did murmur, wondering what was going on: Deputy Fire Chief Nick Visconti recalled that “World Trade Center 7 was burning and I was thinking to myself, how come they're not trying to put this fire out? … At some point, [FDNY Assistant Chief] Frank Fellini said, now we’ve got hundreds of guys out there.… He said to me, Nick, you’ve got to get those people out of there.… One comment was, oh, that building is never coming down, it didn’t get hit by a plane, why isn’t somebody in there putting the fire out?” (Firehouse 8/02).
As one reads these statements, questions arise once again: Who made the decision that the fires couldn’t be fought and the building couldn’t be saved? When was that decision first made? And at that time, what was the basis for making it? These too are tough questions to answer.
However, a New York Times story may offer some help: “By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away from [WTC-7] for safety reasons” (NYT 11/29/01). Yet since most observers have claimed that the fires in the building were not visible for an hour or even two after 11:30, NIST stated that “visual evidence of fires in the building was not available until around noon” (NIST NCSTAR1A p. 18). Thus it’s difficult to understand why anyone would make the decision not to fight the fires so early on. Perhaps Chief Fellini inspected the interior of the building or otherwise worked from information not available to most observers. His concern for firefighters’ safety was commendable.
Networks Also Anticipate Fall of WTC-7
Moments after the building came down, MSNBC’s Brian Williams asked David Restuccio, an FDNY lieutenant, about the fall of the skyscraper: “You guys knew this was coming all day?” Lt. Restuccio replied “we had heard reports that the building was unstable, and that it would eventually need to come down on its own, or it would be taken down. I would imagine it came down on its own.” Lt. Restuccio didn’t explain what he meant by “it would be taken down,” nor did anyone at the network ask (MSNBC 9/11/01). While one can understand why an FDNY lieutenant would report what he did, one does have to wonder where in the chain of command the terminal prognosis about the building might have originated.
Adding to suspicions that prominent individuals did seem to have foreknowledge, fully four major news outlets anticipated the disintegration of WTC-7. A Fox News Channel 5 crew was all set up to film well before the 47-story building ever began to drop (Fox 9/11/01). CNN aired a story about the “collapse” of WTC-7 over an hour before it happened. About 4:10, CNN announced that WTC-7 “was incredibly structurally damaged” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=58h0LjdMry0). On what basis did Fox make that determination?
Then, fully 23 minutes before the building actually came down, BBC reporter Jane Standley announced that WTC-7 had fallen while in the video it still stood serenely behind her. She explained that “this was not a result of a new attack; it was because the building had been weakened during this morning’s attacks” (BBC 9/11/01). Next, and no less laughably, MSNBC got into the act. With the building visible behind her, the network’s Ashleigh Banfield announced “that is the building that is going to go down next … there’s no way they can stabilize it.” Startled by an explosion, Banfield turned toward WTC-7, which was still fully standing, and cried out “Oh my God! This is it!” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg). Banfield’s outcry indicated that she’d been informed beforehand that the building would be coming down. No one asked the question: since no plane had hit this skyscraper and its fires were far smaller than those in the Towers, how could anyone seem so sure of its demise?
Instant Media Imprinting of the Official Story
Much as CNN told viewers that the building was “incredibly structurally damaged,” other networks reported on “the building that is going down next … we heard earlier that it was structurally unstable.” Still others described the demise of WTC-7 as “part of the ancillary damage from the other two,” ruined by falling debris from the Twin Towers. Thus major mass-media outlets—including Fox, CNN, BBC, and NBC, and MSNBC (twice)—had begun to introduce and even inculcate an official narrative before the last WTC building had come down (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg). The twist, though, was that NIST quietly changed the story in 2006 when it finally discarded structural damage as a factor in the fall of WTC-7.
Scientifically Embarrassing FEMA and NIST Reports
As the discussion so far has shown, WTC-7 became the subject of government investigations—and both, considered as science, were national disasters.
After the American Society of Civil Engineers had assembled a team of volunteers, FEMA took over and led the investigation. Handicapped by insufficient funding, a small staff (many of them volunteers), and a lack of access to both witnesses and evidence, FEMA’s 2002 WTC Building Performance Study was by its own admission inconclusive.
FEMA’s work was doomed from the outset. In the months following the attacks, FEMA investigators, backed by civil engineers, operated under ridiculous limitations. Except for one brief walkthrough tour of Ground Zero, the FEMA team had to work from small samples of wreckage. Only about one percent of the structural steel was available for them to examine. Astoundingly, more than three months after 9/11 the investigators hadn’t even received the blueprints for the buildings (NYT 12/25/01). The hasty disposal of wreckage and the destruction of evidence were inexcusable. WTC-7 had been evacuated, so bodies of victims weren’t a concern. Its disintegration, however, was of keen interest to architecture, engineering and insurance professionals.
When the cleanup routine blatantly ignored FBI crime-scene protocol, it moved into violations of federal law. Surely, the Bureau itself must have known that it was enabling a completely unprofessional and demonstrably illegal disturbance of the site. In complete contrast to what went on at Ground Zero, former FBI Director Louis Freeh described what FBI protocol seeks to avoid: “Crime scenes can grow stale in a hurry. Evidence is lost, or it decays beyond useful capacity. Well-meaning efforts to clear the site of a human disaster can destroy vital information about angles of impact, the size of an explosion, and the nature of the explosive materials themselves” (Freeh My FBI p. 4). Did the FBI really want to solve the crime of the century, or did it prefer to issue a list of nineteen Islamic names and, in effect, declare the case closed?
As noted earlier, FEMA did have the humility to admit that even its best guess had “only a low probability of occurrence” (www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm). And FEMA did discard some scientifically untenable theories. Within hours of the tragedy, Stanford Professor Steven Block had rushed to compare the airliner attacks to the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, claiming “you don’t design buildings to withstand nuclear attacks.” Prof. Block was among the first academics to falsely claim that the fires actually melted the structural steel (www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/block911.html). Others would follow.
FEMA, however, enlisted MIT engineering professor Thomas Eagar, who talked much better physics. Prof. Eagar challenged the idea, advanced by several other experts (including some on PBS) that the fires had melted the steel support beams. Since temperatures must approach 2,800°F to melt steel, and since only a special device such as an oxyacetylene torch will sustain those temperatures, the meltdown theory was easy to debunk. Once Professor Eagar pointed out that the maximum temperature from open hydrocarbon fires is 1,700°F, the belief that fires fueled by kerosene, paper, and office furniture could melt the steel became untenable (PBS “NOVA” 4/30/02).
But to replace the discredited melted-steel theory, FEMA fell back on a softened-steel hypothesis and also popularized the “domino” or “pancaking” theory to explain the collapses. According to FEMA, fires weakened the structural steel so that floors dropped upon those below, “pancaking” all the way down. This was a hypothesis that the 9/11 Commission would later appropriate—making it a centerpiece of the Official Story—but also one that a legion of critics would deconstruct.
Even if the Towers had “pancaked,” this would have been an inadequate explanation for the demise of WTC-7, a very different building that wasn’t hit by an airliner. Rather than pursuing the building’s disintegration as the unique event it was, FEMA displayed little interest in visiting the WTC-7 site, neglected to ask anyone to take photos, and failed to interview cleanup workers. So far as researchers can tell, FEMA didn’t even ask whether the building’s massive (22” x 22”) transfer trusses were broken or still standing.
The “Deepest Mystery”: The “Swiss-Cheese” Steel
FEMA’s researchers made some startling discoveries, but their assumptions kept them from drawing the logical conclusions. Within a few months of 9/11, three professors from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) had issued their report about a remarkably deformed piece of steel from Building 7.
This “Swiss-cheese” specimen came from a thick I-beam whose “steel flanges had been reduced from an inch thick to paper thin” (www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2001/10/03_grou.html). In places this fragment was “extremely thin,” indicating that the steel had melted away even though no fire in any of the buildings was hot enough to melt steel outright. Both this thinning and the holes suggested that some of the steel “had vaporized, partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures.” To compound the riddle, the WPI researchers found that iron atoms in the steel had combined with sulfur to form compounds causing the steel to melt at lower temperatures (WPI Transformations Sp. 02). Despite evidence that some of the steel had vaporized and partly evaporated at extraordinarily high temperatures, the researchers were unwilling or unable to determine the source of the sulfur.
The Worcester Polytechnic findings made it clear that “this Swiss cheese appearance [had] shocked all of the fire-wise professors, who expected to see distortion and bending—but not holes.” These cavities, some as large as a silver dollar, were caused by a “eutectic mixture” containing iron, oxygen and sulfur that could lower the melting point, causing “inter-granular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese” (WPI Transformations Sp. 02). Perplexed by the presence of sulfur as well as the piece itself, New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton characterized this piece of ruined steel as “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation” (NYT 2/2/02).
FEMA’s Report also revealed that the WTC steel appeared to have encountered “severe high-temperature erosion” and been “rapidly corroded by sulfidation.” Investigators were puzzled because “the severe corrosion and subsequent erosion … are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified” (FEMA WTC Building Performance Study Appendix C).
Some researchers speculated that the sulfur might have come from gypsum found in building materials. In the years that followed, scientists—including Dr. Steven Jones—had called on government investigators to conduct experiments to see whether the sulfur could have come from inside the buildings—especially from drywall. When investigators refused to run the tests, freelance experimenters such as engineer Jonathan Cole ran them—and proved that the reactive sulfur came from neither the building materials nor the aluminum nor the jet fuel (www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvQDFV1HINw&feature=player_embedded#!). All this made sense, since the calcium sulfate in drywall is inert; that’s why they use it for fireproofing.
FEMA was equally puzzled by the three collapses, asserting “the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each Tower could not be definitively determined.” While FEMA did have the integrity to admit that none of its theories made much sense, it also kicked the can of worms down the road. Although the phrase “sequence of events leading to the collapse” sounded innocuous enough, NIST investigators would later find this before-the-tumble focus useful for their own purposes.
Losses at WTC-7 Are Under Acknowledged
FEMA took criticism from many directions. Media critic Scott Loughrey cited not only FEMA’s nonchalance about WTC-7’s demise but a curious silence among the tenants of the building. What kind of society, he wondered, treats such an unprecedented disaster as though it were an everyday event? In addition to the mayor’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), tenants at WTC-7 included the CIA, the IRS, the Defense Department, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, few heads of these departments were at all vocal in demanding to know why the building had collapsed (http://globalresearch.ca/articles/LOU308A.html).
Beyond life and private property, the press scarcely noticed how the losses of public property affected the legal system. Few in the news media raised any outcry when it became evident that thousands of SEC documents crucial to ongoing federal cases against WorldCom, Global Crossing, and Enron were lost. SEC investigations also included huge corporate banking firms such as Citicorp and others spun off from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) (National Law Review 9/17/01), otherwise known as “the Bank for Crooks and Criminals Incorporated.” After BCCI closed in 1991, the network was largely rebuilt by the bin Ladens (Wash. Post 2/17/01). American and British governments had known all about the bank but had allowed it to operate for many years, in part because the CIA and Pakistani ISI had major accounts with BCCI (P. Thompson Terror Timeline p. 242).
Underreactions can be revealing, however. They bring to mind Sherlock Holmes puffing on his pipe and thinking it odd that the guard dog had failed to bark at the intruder.
NIST: A Pattern of Evasion, Denial, and Dishonesty
Possibly taking a cue from the fact that FEMA had thrown up its hands, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) repeatedly delayed its report on WTC-7. NIST initially promised to cover WTC-7 along with the Towers in its Report of late 2004, but devoted only 56 pages to it. When the full Report finally came out in 2005, WTC-7 received only 42 pages. Next, NIST promised to complete a separate report on WTC-7 in 2006; then it promised a draft report for early 2007. But the draft didn’t appear until August 2008, and the Final Report came out three months later, just after the elections. Explaining WTC-7 to an increasingly skeptical public wasn’t a challenge NIST’s investigators approached with great enthusiasm.
Understandably, for NIST faced big problems. Since no modern steel-framed high-rise had ever before come down mainly due to fire, NIST’s investigators had much to explain. NIST faced two challenges the Towers didn’t pose: WTC-7 didn’t suffer structural damage from an airplane, and no jet fuel could have ignited fires.
The Breakaway Column Theory
Attempting to assemble a scenario, NIST offered an elaborate theory: as fire-induced thermal expansion of steel beams on the thirteenth floor expanded, they broke a girder loose from a major interior support, column 79 (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 150-55). This scenario not only sounds quirky, it also, in describing WTC-7 as a house of cards, overlooks the principle of redundancy in structural engineering: i.e., if one support should fail, others pick up its load (http://www.nd.edu/~tallbldg/rr_panel.htm). As the previous chapter demonstrated, notable redundancy was built into the WTC.
The building’s external support system of closely spaced columns tied together with welded spandrel plates was exceptionally resilient. Structural engineers had raved about the design. The exterior structure tied the columns together in a very solid matrix. Like the Trade Towers, WTC-7 was built to withstand extreme challenges (Glanz and Lipton City in the Sky pp. 133-36).
Rather than building on FEMA’s findings and doing the research it recommended, NIST moved into abstraction, computer modeling, and just plain bad science. To avoid troubling truths, the investigators consistently denied evidence, manipulated data, and made things up, making a travesty of the scientific method (Griffin Mysterious Collapse pp. 13-31). So when NIST refused to do serious scientific investigation, independent researchers once again undertook the task.
Better Sleuthing Through Chemistry and Physics
By 2006, drawing on the work of the RJ Lee group, analysts led by chemist Kevin Ryan and physicist Steven Jones moved into analysis of the signature WTC dust. Making effective use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Ryan and his team discovered that soon after the buildings came down, the EPA had monitored “volatile organic chemicals” (VOCs) rising from lingering fires around Ground Zero. Once the researchers had obtained the EPA’s long-suppressed reports, they learned that these toxic VOCs were measured “at levels thousands of times higher than seen in other structure fires.” This suggested “extremely violent but short-lived fire events.”Something burning in the debris had continued to emit toxic chemicals for several months (K. Ryan The Environmentalist 8/08).
Looking into Self-Sustaining Combustion
Trying to find out why the debris could burn for so long, the researchers considered “chemical energetic materials which provide their own fuel and oxidant and are not deterred by water, dust, or chemical suppressants.” This took them into “nanoenergetics,” the study of ways to manipulate the flow of energy between molecules, and finally into “nanothermites,” the explosives which contain finely particulate iron and aluminum. Nanoparticles, because they have such a great surface-to-volume ratio, can react very rapidly (www.technologyreview.com/computing/14105/page1).
Using spectrographic and electron-microscope technology, these researchers began finding both aluminosilicate and iron-rich microspheres (formed from droplets of molten metal) in the dust. For these particles to have formed, temperatures had to reach at least 2652ºF and 2800ºF respectively (Jones J. of 9/11 Studies 1/08). While the nanoenergetics/nanothermite hypothesis doesn’t answer all questions, it does help explain the very long-burning, intensely hot fires at Ground Zero (Knight Ridder 5/29/02).
Also pertinent was the data that Dr. Jones obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request: the full results of an earlier but suppressed USGS study. Jones and his colleagues found that the USGS had discovered far more than their published results let on: in the dust they’d found a microsphere rich in molybdenum, an uncommon element. Since the melting point for metallic molybdenum is an amazing 4753ºF, the presence of this microsphere implied that combustion in the buildings had generated temperatures over three times those reached by even the hottest hydrocarbon/office fires (Jones J. of 9/11 Studies 1/08). Whereas office fires peaking at 1400ºF obviously don’t generate the 2700ºF needed to melt steel, nanothermite reaches 4500ºF or more.
International Scientific Analysis of the Red/Gray Chips
Since scientists improve their credibility when they work in teams and publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, this was the way to go. This time, Prof. Niels Harrit, a chemist at the University of Copenhagen, was the lead researcher, backed by Steven Jones, Kevin Ryan, and six others.
Also present in the WTC dust were microscopic two-sided, red/gray chips. So the question seemed simple enough: What were these chips found in the WTC dust made of, and what might they reveal about what went on during the buildings’ ultimate moments? The methods were impressively scientific; researchers worked from several samples of WTC dust gathered in different places, and “controlled” their experiment by testing the dust from conventional demolitions as well. Using state-of-the-art instrumentation, the researchers found that while the gray sides of the chips consisted of rhomboidal crystals with “high iron and oxygen content” along with carbon, the red sides were comprised mainly of “aluminum, iron, oxygen, silicon and carbon.” When heated to about 830ºF, this red side burned intensely, pointing to the presence of “highly energetic thermitic material” in the dust (Open Chemical Physics Journal 1/09).
While the researchers were less certain about the gray side of the chips, they found compelling evidence that the red side was unreacted nanothermite, an explosive. Later, larger fragments of unignited thermite were discovered in the dust. Professor Harrit was careful, however, not to dismiss other possibilities: “we found nanothermite in the rubble; we are not saying that only nanothermite was used” (Open Chemical Physics Journal 1/09). This was an important qualifier, since thermite lacks sulfur—and sulfur, after all, was the mystery element that puzzled the Worcester Polytechnic researchers, as they noted in FEMA’s Report.
Most of the criticism of the nanothermite paper has focused on surrounding issues, not the science itself. So although the Open Chemical Physics Journal wasn’t the most prestigious in its field, it was juried. Enhanced by the use of high-tech instruments, the design and methodology seem logically tight and sufficiently solid. It’s the study itself that counts most; the nanothermite paper has made an important contribution. If other researchers haven’t yet replicated its experiments, thereby validating its results, that’s not the fault of those who did the original work.
In summary, evidence of strange substances has been found by government investigators, environmental firms, academics, and three different sets of independent scientists. According to Griffin, all of their research has shown that destruction of the steel must have involved “extremely high temperatures” that hydrocarbon fires simply could not have produced (Griffin Mysterious Collapse p. 45).
NIST Delivers Draft Report: David Confronts Government Goliath
After repeatedly missing deadlines to complete its report on WTC-7, the Draft for Public Comment finally appeared in August 2008. Making no mention of NIST’s four-year delay, Shyam Sunder, the agency’s lead investigator for its WTC projects, announced with bravado that “the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC-7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives.” The corporate media trumpeted Sunder’s pronouncement (AP 9/21/08). Three times in this Draft Report, NIST insisted that its findings were “consistent with physical principles.”
Soon enough, though, Sunder and NIST had to eat humble pie. High school physics teacher David Chandler was fond of quipping “two planes, three buildings: do the math.” But Chandler was dead serious about Building 7, and he’d done the math. He’d made a video, “WTC-7 in Freefall” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I), which furnished evidence of the building’s observable near-free-fall for 2.5 seconds, implying that after it dropped behind another building, it completed its fall in 6.6 seconds. Chandler might have cited Yogi Berra, who famously remarked “you can observe a lot just by watching.”
At the public hearing, Chandler pointed out that video evidence showed WTC-7 coming down at a near free-fall speed and that, if one accepted NIST’s theory of successive column failure, this speed was hardly consistent with “physical principles.” Chandler asked why, when videos show the top of WTC-7 dropping at near free-fall speed, NIST was claiming a fall speed 40 percent slower than that. “How,” he asked, “can such a publicly visible, easily measurable quantity be set aside?” It was almost painful to watch Sunder stumble around. NIST’s leader lectured on universal gravity (which “applies to everybody; every—all bodies on, uh, on, uh, on this particular—on this planet, not just, uh, in Ground Zero”) rather than dealing with the evidence of near free-fall speed of WTC-7 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDvNS9iMjzA&p=206C1F5EDFC83824).
Soon after the August events, videos of both the “Questions and Answers” and “Technical Briefing” sessions were removed from NIST’s website.
NIST Comes Up with Entirely New Theory
Responding to the sharp critique it had encountered at its August meetings, NIST released a Final Report that revealed more about NIST than about WTC-7. Come November, NIST presented a whole new theory for the fall of WTC-7. This one involved three stages: a slow initial descent, a freefall descent for 2.25 seconds, and a decreasing velocity as the building met with “resistance from the structure below” (Final Report p. 607). This was inventive, but was it science or science fiction? NIST also had removed its claim that its findings were “consistent with physical principles.”
It was NIST’s first stage, that of slow initial descent, that most bothered Chandler, Jones, and other scientific skeptics. Referring to the photographic record, Chandler pointed out that virtually no movement was observed during NIST’s first stage; that NIST was working from an artificially early start time set to agree with a computer model and that its first stage contradicted the videographic evidence, which showed the building starting to fall suddenly and then dropping precipitously, accelerating like those balls Galileo dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVCDpL4Ax7I).
Perhaps NIST tossed a bone to its critics, hoping that they’d be so hungry for some concession that they’d quit howling about the contradictions. Yet when NIST acknowledged free-fall speed, however briefly, it tacitly admitted that its theory of successive collapse could not be true. Put another way, in a free-fall descent all 82 columns had to fail simultaneously, and this was just the opposite of NIST’s fire-damage theory, which involved much slower progressive collapse of the columns. Thus when NIST affirmed near free-fall speed, even for a moment, it came very close to implicitly acknowledging that WTC-7 was intentionally demolished.
Revisiting the Primary Characteristics of Planned Demolition
Adapted from the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations (Sect. 18.3.2), here are the characteristics of planned demolition:
- The onset of the collapse was sudden.
- The building fell at near freefall velocity.
- The building dropped straight down and fell symmetrically.
- The building imploded and dropped mostly into its own footprint.
- The collapse was total, with very little left standing.
- Much of the nonmetallic material was pulverized, resulting in large dust clouds (Griffin Mysterious Collapse p. 28).
In the aftermath of WTC-7’s destruction, additional signs of demolition were evident:
- Hot spots of molten metal were reported by numerous highly qualified witnesses, including Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (Griffin Mysterious Collapse p. 36).
- FEMA found rapid oxidation and intergranular melting on structural steel samples.
- The chemical signature of the explosive thermite was found in solidified molten metal and dust samples.
- Ample evidence suggests foreknowledge of the “collapse” by the news media, city officials, NYPD, and FDNY (http://911blogger.com/node/6195).
- Eyewitnesses observed that the collapse started at the bottom, and sounds of explosions were heard at ground level just seconds before inception.
- Puffs of smoke called “squibs” shot out of the falling building in synchronization.
- A “kink” or slight dip in the roof was evident (www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BimVvEyk).
Beyond Just Criteria for Demolition
Thunder-like rumbles were heard just before the penthouse began to disintegrate (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhoNYj9_fg), and its disintegration was virtually complete several seconds before the whole building started to descend. The early sag in the penthouse parallels the early drop of the broadcast antenna on top of the North Tower. Kinks in the roof occur when charges have shattered the inner structure of the building, which is an essential task of controlled demolition so the building will implode on itself, avoiding damage to surrounding structures. Thus kinks are one of the surest signs of implosion—and therefore, like near free-fall speed and near perfect symmetry during disintegration, of planned demolition.
At WTC-7, though, the evidence extends beyond the physical and forensic. When one considers the scattered fires, the limited accessibility of fuel to stoke them, and the apparent foreknowledge by officials, first responders, and media figures, one has to raise the issue of access to the building. Unlike the Towers, WTC-7 wasn’t undergoing elevator renovations. Since both physical phenomena and human behavior require explanation, questions about them would be standard fare on Crime Scene Investigation. They’ll no doubt be pursued in a well-funded investigation, but in the meantime they’ll continue to engage excellent independent researchers.
Since no opportunity for access comparable to the ACE Elevator renovation is known to have gone on at WTC-7, the question of how someone could have planted explosives can provoke a “whistleblower objection.” Journalist Robert Parry has underscored the absence of anyone among dozens of technicians who must have worked, possibly over several weeks, to “wire” the buildings (Consortium News 1/5/11). Chemist Kevin Ryan retorted that “demolition of a building does not require wiring each of the floors” and that contemporary technology relies instead on remote detonators. Moreover, Ryan pointed out that “claiming that a deceptive demolition event could not happen because those who placed the charges have not come forward to boast of their handiwork is absurd. Who’s going to admit killing nearly 3,000 people? … are you asking that all investigators throw out their evidence until they get a confession?” (Consortium/blogspot).
Since the whistleblower objection to the demolition hypothesis is a valid one to raise, the debate will receive more coverage in the Conclusion.
Why Is Building 7 So Little Known?
It’s fun to smile at a judge’s ignorance of “building what?” but lack of awareness about WTC-7 is no laughing matter. When one asks why this ignorance has existed, four reasons come to mind. One is circumstantial—that the fall of this very tall building was literally overshadowed by the fall of two much taller, more iconic ones. Clearly the scale of the death and destruction, the symbolic absence from the skyline, and the psychological trauma, were all far greater for the Towers. James Glanz seemed to have these factors in mind when he wrote that WTC-7 “was a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world” (NYT 11/29/01). In the fall of 2001, Americans didn’t want to deal with mysteries. New Yorkers were dealing with the stench of death and a smoldering “pile”; they didn’t need to hear about a “smoking gun.”
Despite the relevance of these factors, they don’t tell the full story. It’s also true that information about WTC-7 was deliberately suppressed, as Griffin has suggested. Recall that immediately after 9/11, American TV networks played horrific clips of the Towers being hit by planes, set afire, and falling down. While they played and replayed these, they rarely if ever aired footage of the fires or fall of WTC-7. Moreover, the Commission’s Report didn’t so much as mention that a third building had come down. Plus NIST’s reports, some of which were supposed to include coverage of Building 7, were repeatedly delayed, further diminishing public interest (www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20100527162010811).
Above all, though, WTC-7 has likely been the most completely ignored and thoroughly suppressed of the buildings because it poses a special challenge to the Official Story. Since it wasn’t hit by a hijacked airliner, since its fires were smaller, and since its fall most clearly exhibits the hallmarks of controlled demolition, it’s more difficult to explain, let alone to blame on al Qaeda hijackers.
Creative Attempts to Raise Public Awareness
For some time, Richard Gage and others at Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth have highlighted the fact that real scientific investigation “casts grave doubt upon the media stories and the official report by the 9/11 Commission, FEMA, and NIST.” In 2010, the group dramatically called attention to the fact that a third building had come down by adding a third searchlight beam to the two generated by the city at the WTC site (www.ae911truth.org). In the fall of that year, “Building What?,” a newer group led by dedicated family members of 9/11 victims, ran very effective TV ads that led to an appearance on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show (http://buildingwhat.org).
With WTC-7 as the entering wedge, the 9/11 truth movement is pressing forward, ever closer to its goal of a new investigation. And much as the WTC buildings offer a scientifically solid way into other facets of the 9/11 issue, a fuller understanding of that issue offers a way into understanding many other related areas: civil rights, media mythmaking, power and the press, access to government information, the role of intelligence agencies, and the consequences of American foreign policy.
Just as we’ve spent significant time unraveling a cloak of secrecy, we’ll also weave a layered tapestry of new meaning. The Conclusion suggests places to start.
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