Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition & 'Inside

[Hardrock69]

Highly recognized former chief economist in Labor Department now doubts official 9/11 story, claiming suspicious facts and evidence cover-up indicate government foul play and possible criminal implications.
June 12, 2005

By Greg Szymanski

A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

"If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an 'inside job' and a government attack on America would be compelling," said Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, a former member of the Bush team who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, TX.

Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it's 'next to impossible' that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.

"It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7," said Reynolds this week from his offices at Texas A&M. "If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either. The government's collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings.

"More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. Meanwhile, the job of scientists, engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering analysis of 9/11 right."

However, Reynolds said "getting it right in today's security state' remains challenging because he claims explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.

Critics claim the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and the recent 9/11 Commission has failed to address the major evidence contradicting the official version of 9/11.

Some facts demonstrating the flaws in the government jet fuel theory include:

-- Photos showing people walking around in the hole in the North Tower where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel supposedly was burning..

--When the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower's flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes, making it relatively easy to contain and control without a total collapse.

--The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating, indicating without added explosive devices the firs could have been easily controlled.

--FDNY fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order.

--Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible."


-- Fire had never before caused steel-frame buildings to collapse except for the three buildings on 9/11, nor has fire collapsed any steel high rise since 9/11.

-- The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were relatively small.

-- WTC-7 was unharmed by an airplane and had only minor fires on the seventh and twelfth floors of this 47-story steel building yet it collapsed in less than 10 seconds.

-- WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams.

-- In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC leaseholder, told the fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 that. "may be the smartest thing to do is pull it," slang for demolish it.

-- It's difficult if not impossible for hydrocarbon fires like those fed by jet fuel (kerosene) to raise the temperature of steel close to melting.

Despite the numerous holes in the government story, the Bush administration has brushed aside or basically ignored any and all critics. Mainstream experts, speaking for the administration, offer a theory essentially arguing that an airplane impact weakened each structure and an intense fire thermally weakened structural components, causing buckling failures while allowing the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.

One who supports the official account is Thomas Eager, professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT. He argues that the collapse occurred by the extreme heat from the fires, causing the loss of loading-bearing capacity on the structural frame.

Eagar points out the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it "lost 80 percent of its strength," or around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Critics claim his theory is flawed since the fires did not appear to be intense and widespread enough to reach such high temperatures.

Other experts supporting the official story claim the impact of the airplanes, not the heat, weakened the entire structural system of the towers, but critics contend the beams on floors 94-98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system.

Further complicating the matter, hard evidence to fully substantiate either theory since evidence is lacking due to FEMA's quick removal of the structural steel before it could be analyzed. Even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis, FEMA had it destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place.

And even more doubt is cast over why FEMA acted so swiftly since coincidentally officials had arrived the day before the 9/11 attacks at New York's Pier 29 to conduct a war game exercise, named "Tripod II."

Besides FEMA's quick removal of the debris, authorities considered the steel quite valuable as New York City officials had every debris truck tracked on GPS and even fired one truck driver who took an unauthorized lunch break.

In a detailed analysis just released supporting the controlled demolition theory, Reynolds presents a compelling case.


"First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not," said Reynolds. "These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened.

"On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia's Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that 'beams and girders sagged and twisted, but despite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.' Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC."


After considering both sides of the 9/11 debate and after thoroughly sifting through all the available material, Reynolds concludes the government story regarding all four plane crashes on 9/11 remains highly suspect.

"In fact, the government has failed to produce significant wreckage from any of the four alleged airliners that fateful day. The familiar photo of the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania shows no fuselage, engine or anything recognizable as a plane, just a smoking hole in the ground," said Reynolds. "Photographers reportedly were not allowed near the hole. Neither the FBI nor the National Transportation Safety Board have investigated or produced any report on the alleged airliner crashes."

For more informative articles, go to www.arcticbeacon.com.


http://www.arcticbeacon.com/articles...8131/27302.htm

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by Hardrock69
A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush's first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is 'bogus,' saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.

There's a little green man running around inside of his head.


That's about the 25th time for one of these nutball threads.

[FORD]

**Insert standard Busheep denials here.....**

[Nickdfresh]

Okay, I'll be a BUSHEEP today. As PENN & TELLER would say, BULLSHIT!

Did You Know?

1. Most structural engineers were surprised when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

2. Engineers believe that part of the reason why the towers remained standing as long as they did after impact was because of redundancy in their design: The weight of upper floors pushing down on columns lost in the impact was transferred to other columns nearby that were left intact.

3. Only four people escaped either tower from above the floors where the planes struck, using what appears to have been the only stairwell not destroyed or blocked by the impacts: Stairway A in the South Tower.

4. One of those survivors recalled that when struck by United 175, the South Tower swayed in one direction for seven to ten seconds before swinging back and stabilizing.


5. The World Trade Center was designed to withstand hurricane-force winds.

6. It was also designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, though engineers apparently did not take into consideration the plane's fuel load.


7. Each plane that hit the Twin Towers released an estimated 10,000 gallons of flaming jet fuel into the buildings.

8. Temperatures of the fuel fire may have reached 2,000°F.

9. Though no evidence has turned up that the fires burned hot enough to melt any of the steel, eventually the steel lost 80 percent of its strength because of the intensity of the fire.

10. While there are signs that the fire melted aluminum from the fuselage or wings of at least one of the planes, there is no evidence that the aluminum burned.

11. Many structural engineers feel the weak link in the chain within the towers was the angle clips that held the floor trusses between the interior and exterior steel columns.

12. The angle clips were smaller pieces of steel than the columns and therefore gave out first.

13. Each floor was designed to support approximately 1,300 tons beyond its own weight, but when one or more gave way in the intense fire of the impact zone, the combined weight of higher floors crashing down reached into the tens of thousands of tons.

14. Each tower weighed about 500,000 tons.

15. There was no chance of either tower tipping over, for a 500,000-ton building has too much inertia to fall any way except virtually straight down.

16. Each 208-foot-wide building would had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out beyond its base.

17. Each building collapsed in about ten seconds, hitting the ground with an estimated speed of about 125 miles per hour.

18. The collapse was a near free-fall. With no restraint, the collapse would have taken eight seconds and would have impacted at about 185 miles per hour.

19. The reason the 110-story towers collapsed into a rubble pile only a few stories high was that they were about 95 percent air.

20. The roughly 300,000 tons of steel from the World Trade Center is fully recyclable and represents just a single day's production by the U.S. steel industry.

Sources

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all sources are NOVA/WGBH.

7. "Towers Fell as Intense Fire Beat Defenses, Report Says," by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, The New York Times, 3/29/02, p. A14.
8. Ibid, p. A1.
13. "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation," by Thomas W. Eagar and Christopher Musso, JOM: The Journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society, December 2001, available at http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM...agar-0112.html
15. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
20. Ibid.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/dyk.html

[FORD]

So why did they "pull" Building 7?

[Nickdfresh]

The Collapse: An Engineer's Perspective

It wasn't until Dr. Thomas Eagar saw Building 7 of the World Trade Center implode late on the afternoon of September 11th that he understood what had transpired structurally earlier that day as the Twin Towers disintegrated. A professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Eagar went on to write an influential paper in the journal of the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society entitled "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation" (JOM, December 2001). In this interview, Eagar explains the structural failure, what can be done within existing skyscrapers to improve safety, and what he believes the most likely terrorist targets of the future may be.


NOVA: After the planes struck and you saw those raging fires, did you think the towers would collapse?

Eagar: No. In fact, I was surprised. So were most structural engineers. The only people I know who weren't surprised were a few people who've designed high-rise buildings.

NOVA: But you weren't surprised that they withstood the initial impacts, is that correct?

Eagar: That's right. All buildings and most bridges have what we call redundant design. If one component breaks, the whole thing will not come crashing down. I once worked on a high-rise in New York, for example, that had a nine-foot-high beam that had a crack all the way through one of the main beams in the basement. This was along the approach to the George Washington Bridge. They shored it up and kept traffic from using that area.

Some people were concerned the building would fall down. The structural engineers knew it wouldn't, because the whole thing had an egg-crate-like construction. Or you can think of it as a net. If you lose one string on a net, yes, the net is weakened but the rest of the net still works.

Traditional design
WTC design Earlier skyscrapers (top) had columns spaced evenly across every floor. The World Trade Center (bottom) broke with tradition by having columns only in the central core and along the exterior walls.
That's essentially how the World Trade Center absorbed an airplane coming into it. It was somewhat like the way a net absorbs a baseball being thrown against it. If you lose a couple of the columns, that's not the end of the world. It will still stand up.

NOVA: The World Trade Center was also designed to take a major wind load hitting from the side.

Eagar: Yes. A skyscraper is a long, thin, vertical structure, but if you turned it sideways, it would be like a diving board, and you could bend it on the end. The wind load is trying to bend it like a diving board. It sways back and forth. If you've been on the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago or the Empire State Building on a windy day, you can actually feel it. When I was a student, I visited the observation deck of the Sears Tower, and I went into the restroom there, and I could see the water sloshing in the toilet bowl, because the wind load was causing the whole building to wave in the breeze.

NOVA: Are skyscrapers designed that way, to be a little flexible?

Eagar: Absolutely. Now, there are different ways to design things. For example, Boeing designs their aircraft wings to flap in the breeze, while McDonnell Douglas used to design a very rigid wing that would not flex as much. You can design it both ways. There are trade-offs, and there are advantages to both ways.



"Most buildings are designed to sway in the breeze."
Most buildings are designed to sway in the breeze. In fact, one of the big concerns in the early design of the World Trade Center, since it was going to be the tallest building in the world at the time, was that it not sway too much and make people sick. You can get seasick in one of these tall buildings from the wind loads. So they had to do some things to make them stiff enough that people wouldn't get sick, but not so rigid that it could snap if it got too big a load. If something's flexible, it can give; think of a willow tree. If you have a strong wind, you want the building, like the tree, to bend rather than break.

NOVA: Brian Clark, one of only four people to get out from above where United 175 hit the South Tower, says that when the plane struck, the building swayed for a full seven to 10 seconds in one direction before settling back, and he thought it was going over.

Eagar: That estimate of seven to ten seconds is probably correct, because often big buildings are designed to be stiff enough that the period to go one way and back the other way is 15 or 20 seconds, or even 30 seconds. That keeps people from getting sick.

Pancaking Upper floors pancaked down onto lower floors, causing a domino effect that left each building in ruins within ten seconds.
NOVA: The Twin Towers collapsed essentially straight down. Was there any chance they could have tipped over?

Eagar: It's really not possible in this case. In our normal experience, we deal with small things, say, a glass of water, that might tip over, and we don't realize how far something has to tip proportional to its base. The base of the World Trade Center was 208 feet on a side, and that means it would have had to have tipped at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out beyond its base. That would have been a tremendous amount of bending. In a building that is mostly air, as the World Trade Center was, there would have been buckling columns, and it would have come straight down before it ever tipped over.

Have you ever seen the demolition of buildings? They blow them up, and they implode. Well, I once asked demolition experts, "How do you get it to implode and not fall outward?" They said, "Oh, it's really how you time and place the explosives." I always accepted that answer, until the World Trade Center, when I thought about it myself. And that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is, there's no other way for them to go but down. They're too big. With anything that massive -- each of the World Trade Center towers weighed half a million tons -- there's nothing that can exert a big enough force to push it sideways.


Impact Even traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, the planes that struck the World Trade Center did not have enough force to knock the towers over.
NOVA: I think some people were surprised when they saw this massive 110-story building collapse into a rubble pile only a few stories tall.

Eagar: Well, like most buildings, the World Trade Center was mostly air. It looked like a huge building if you walked inside, but it was just like this room we're in. The walls are a very small fraction of the total room. The World Trade Center collapse proved that with a 110-story building, if 95 percent of it's air, as was the case here, you're only going to have about five stories of rubble at the bottom after it falls.

NOVA: You've said that the fire is the most misunderstood part of the World Trade Center collapse. Why?

Eagar: The problem is that most people, even some engineers, talk about temperature and heat as if they're identical. In fact, scientifically, they're only related to each other. Temperature tells me the intensity of the heat -- is it 100 degrees, 200 degrees, 300 degrees? The heat tells me how big the thing is that gets hot. I mean, I could boil a cup of water to make a cup of tea, or I could boil ten gallons of water to cook a bunch of lobsters. So it takes a lot more energy to cook the lobsters -- heat is related to energy. That's the difference: We call the intensity of heat the temperature, and the amount of heat the energy.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html

NOVA: So with the World Trade Center fire, the heat was much greater than might have been expected in a typical fire?

Eagar: Right. We had all this extra fuel from the aircraft. Now, there have been fires in skyscrapers before. The Hotel Meridien in Philadelphia had a fire, but it didn't do this kind of damage. The real damage in the World Trade Center resulted from the size of the fire. Each floor was about an acre, and the fire covered the whole floor within a few seconds. Ordinarily, it would take a lot longer. If, say, I have an acre of property, and I start a brushfire in one corner, it might take an hour, even with a good wind, to go from one corner and start burning the other corner.

That's what the designers of the World Trade Center were designing for -- a fire that starts in a wastepaper basket, for instance. By the time it gets to the far corner of the building, it has already burned up all the fuel that was back at the point of origin. So the beams where it started have already started to cool down and regain their strength before you start to weaken the ones on the other side.

On September 11th, the whole floor was damaged all at once, and that's really the cause of the World Trade Center collapse. There was so much fuel spread so quickly that the entire floor got weakened all at once, whereas in a normal fire, people should not think that if there's a fire in a high-rise building that the building will come crashing down. This was a very unusual situation, in which someone dumped 10,000 gallons of jet fuel in an instant.

NOVA: How high did the temperatures get, and what did that do to the steel columns?

Eagar: The maximum temperature would have been 1,600°F or 1,700°F. It's impossible to generate temperatures much above that in most cases with just normal fuel, in pure air. In fact, I think the World Trade Center fire was probably only 1,200°F or 1,300°F.

Investigations of fires in other buildings with steel have shown that fires don't usually even melt the aluminum, which melts around 1,200°F. Most fires don't get above 900°F to 1,100°F. The World Trade Center fire did melt some of the aluminum in the aircraft and hence it probably got to 1,300°F or 1,400°F. But that's all it would have taken to trigger the collapse, according to my analysis.

NOVA: You've pointed out that structural steel loses about half its strength at 1,200°F, yet even a 50 percent loss of strength is insufficient, by itself, to explain the collapse.

Eagar: Well, normally the biggest load on this building was the wind load, trying to push it sideways and make it vibrate like a flag in the breeze. The World Trade Center building was designed to withstand a hurricane of about 140 miles an hour, but September 11th wasn't a windy day, so the major loads it was designed for were not on it at the time.


"You can't explain the collapse just in terms of temperature."
As a result, the World Trade Center, at the time each airplane hit it, was only loaded to about 20 percent of its capacity. That means it had to lose five times its capacity either due to temperature or buckling -- the temperature weakening the steel, the buckling changing the strength of a member because it's bent rather than straight. You can't explain the collapse just in terms of temperature, and you can't explain it just in terms of buckling. It was a combination.

NOVA: So can you give a sequence of events that likely took place in the structural failure?

Eagar: Well, first you had the impact of the plane, of course, and then this spreading of the fireball all the way across within seconds. Then you had a hot fire, but it wasn't an absolutely uniform fire everywhere. You had a wind blowing, so the smoke was going one way more than another way, which means the heat was going one way more than another way. That caused some of the beams to distort, even at fairly low temperatures. You can permanently distort the beams with a temperature difference of only about 300°F.

NOVA: You mean one part of a beam is 300°F hotter than another part of the same beam?

Eagar: Exactly. If there was one part of the building in which a beam had a temperature difference of 300°F, then that beam would have become permanently distorted at relatively low temperatures. So instead of being nice and straight, it had a gentle curve. If you press down on a soda straw, you know that if it's perfectly straight, it will support a lot more load than if you start to put a little sideways bend in it. That's what happened in terms of the beams. They were weakened because they were bent by the fire.

But the steel still had plenty of strength, until it reached temperatures of 1,100°F to 1,300°F. In this range, the steel started losing a lot of strength, and the bending became greater. Eventually the steel lost 80 percent of its strength, because of this fire that consumed the whole floor.

If it had only occurred in one little corner, such as a trashcan caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down. The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect. Once you started to get angle clips to fail in one area, it put extra load on other angle clips, and then it unzipped around the building on that floor in a matter of seconds.


Collapse Watch an animation of the floor trusses giving way, followed by the buckling of the outer columns.

QuickTime | RealVideo: 56K/ ISDN+
NOVA: Many other engineers also feel the weak link was these angle clips, which held the floor trusses between the inner core of columns and the exterior columns. Is that simply because they were much smaller pieces of steel?

Eagar: Exactly. That's the easiest way to look at it. If you look at the whole structure, they are the smallest piece of steel. As everything begins to distort, the smallest piece is going to become the weak link in the chain. They were plenty strong for holding up one truss, but when you lost several trusses, the trusses adjacent to those had to hold two or three times what they were expected to hold.

Those angle clips probably had two or three or four times the strength that they originally needed. They didn't have the same factor-of-five safety as the columns did, but they still had plenty of safety factor to have people and equipment on those floors. It was not that the angle clips were inadequately designed; it was just that there were so many of them that the engineers were able to design them with less safety factor. In a very unusual loading situation like this, they became the weak link.

NOVA: I've read that the collapse was a near free-fall.

Eagar: Yes. That's because the forces, it's been estimated, were anywhere from 10 to 100 times greater than an individual floor could support. First of all, you had 10 or 20 floors above that came crashing down. That's about 10 or 20 times the weight you'd ever expect on one angle clip. There's also the impact force, that is, if something hits very hard, there's a bigger force than if you lower it down very gently.

NOVA: Miraculously, a number of firefighters survived inside Tower One. They were on the third or fourth floor in a stairwell, and immediately after the collapse they looked up and saw blue sky above their heads -- their part of the stairwell survived. How is that possible, with all the force of that 500,000-ton building coming down?


"They were very, very fortunate that they happened to be in an area that was somewhat shielded."
Eagar: Well, you have to understand the stairwells were reinforced areas of the building. The stairwells were in the central core, which had more steel than the outer areas, which were big open floors. So that extra steel formed a little cage to protect them. It's still amazing, though.

Now, there could have been someone two floors below who could have been completely crushed. It just depends on how the steel buckled. If you take that soda straw again, and you push it sideways, it will develop a buckle at some location, probably somewhere in the middle third. Well, if you happen to be where the buckling occurs, that area is going to get smashed, but if you're, say, below where the buckling occurred, basically the whole thing can push sideways. They were very, very fortunate that they happened to be in an area that was somewhat shielded and protected by all the extra steel in the central core.

I read one of those people's statements in the paper the other day, and he said that if they'd been in the lobby, they'd be gone. I was in the lobby of the World Trade Center years ago, and it was some three or four stories tall. What was going to buckle? Well, the lobby had the longest columns, so they were going to buckle. Those firefighters were just above that, so they were protected by the buckling underneath, within this sort of steel cage.

In fact, that's how they design automobiles for crashworthiness. They try to design the passenger compartment to be a cage, and the hood and trunk are supposed to deform and absorb the energy so that you're protected by this little cage of steel that hopefully won't deform.


Plane approaching Engineers have found evidence that the aluminum of the planes' fuselages and wings may have melted, but there is no evidence that it burned.
NOVA: There's a theory that the aluminum of the planes caught fire.

Eagar: Yes, a number of people have tried to reinforce that theory. Now, the aluminum of the planes would have burned just like a flare. Flares are made out of aluminum and magnesium, so are fireworks, and they burn hot enough to melt steel in certain cases.

However, they have had people sorting through the steel from the World Trade Center, and no one has reported finding melted steel, which means that we didn't have that aluminum flare. In any case, burning aluminum would have been white-hot, about 4,000°F, and someone would have seen it even through that dense black smoke.

Of course, aluminum can burn. That's what demolished the [British destroyer] Sheffield in the Falklands War [when it was struck by an Argentinian missile]. It wasn't the Exocet missile that destroyed the superstructure of the Sheffield. The missile wasn't big enough, just like the plane wasn't big enough to bring down the World Trade Center. That Exocet missile did damage the Sheffield, but what doomed the Sheffield was the aluminum superstructure caught fire and burned. So you suddenly had something like 1,000 or 10,000 times as much fuel as you had in that Exocet missile.

Now, this is not a type of fire we have to worry about in buildings. We don't have anywhere close to those types of conditions. And we didn't have those in the World Trade Center, in my opinion.

NOVA: How soon will a definitive report of the causes of the collapse be released?

Eagar: Well, there's some very sophisticated analysis that various people in the government, at universities, and at structural engineering firms are doing to understand it. Most of those people have not yet published any conclusions. To do a good job of research on something like this can typically take one to two years. I don't expect to see any conclusive reports probably until about the first anniversary of the attack.


"There will still be people worrying about this ten years from now."
There are different levels of analysis. You can do the back-of-the-envelope, which was what I and other people did early on. But to do the full analysis will take much longer. I suspect there will still be people worrying about this ten years from now.

NOVA: In your back-of-the-envelope analysis, you concluded the World Trade Center was not defectively designed, but not everyone apparently accepts that conclusion.

Eagar: A lot of people said, Well, the building failed. That's true, but nothing is indestructible. The question is, why did it fail? In this case, as I've explained, it was the fire covering the whole floor in a few seconds that made this different from any other fire that anyone had ever designed for.

If people say, Well, couldn't we have designed it for this, I say, Yes, we could have. We could build buildings that could survive a jet running into them with a full fuel load. In fact, the military does. But they're bunkers. We build these things for the President and the rest of the 150 leaders of the country to go to as a secure area. You can do that, but your building costs go up by a factor of about 100. Well, do we want to have 100 times fewer homes for people to live in? Do we want to have 100 times fewer roads?

If we were to harden everything against a terrorist attack, we'd push ourselves back into the first half of the 19th century in terms of living style. Now, some people might consider that an improvement, but not everybody, so society has some important tradeoffs here. There's got to be some middle ground where we can make things more secure but not destroy our standard of living.

NOVA: Anything we should do now to retrofit existing skyscrapers like the Sears Tower?

Eagar: Well, one of the things that's really important and is relatively inexpensive is a public communication system. I've been in high-rises when the fire alarm goes off, and everyone looks around the room and decides, Should we just continue meeting and ignore the fire alarm, or should we evacuate? Fortunately, in most cases -- and I've had to be the person in a few of those cases -- people say, Look, it's a fire alarm. We don't know if it's real. Evacuate. So you need better public-address systems to inform people that this is not a test, this is not a false alarm, you'd better get out of the building.


Stairwell Better communications systems may have allowed more people to escape the towers before they collapsed, Eagar believes. For instance, if more people had known that Stairway A in the South Tower, shown here in green, had survived the impact, more people may have gotten out before the building collapsed.
Survivors from the World Trade Center have said that some people took four or five minutes to figure out there was something more than just some false alarm. Other people started moving immediately. Obviously, the quicker people started to move, the better chance they had of reaching safety.

NOVA: How about improving the fire safety of the building or putting in extra stairwells?

Eagar: These are very difficult things to redesign into current buildings. They can and will be added to future buildings. The simplest thing is the communication system. And better training of firefighters. Those things will definitely be done.

If you look at the World Trade Center disaster, it would have been greatly minimized if the safety personnel had been aware of the danger they were in. They didn't realize it was going to collapse. As I said earlier, there are only a few engineers in the country who had ever designed skyscrapers like this who would have realized, but they couldn't communicate within that first hour with the people at ground zero. Nobody could call to New York City at that time.

So better communication. The military's known that for years. They've invested tremendous amounts of money in better communications. That's been one of the differences in having fewer lives lost on the American side in recent wars. We've got much better C3I -- Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence. They've spent billions of dollars, and it's saved thousands and thousands of lives in the military. We can do that on the civilian side as well for these big structures, though, in my opinion, skyscrapers are not the problem anymore.


"A terrorist is not going to attack the things you expect him to attack."
NOVA: What is?

Eagar: I think the terrorist danger will be other things. A terrorist is not going to attack the things you expect him to attack. The real problem is pipelines, electrical transmission, dams, nuclear plants, railroads. A terrorist's job is to scare people. He or she doesn't have to harm very many people. Anthrax is a perfect example. If someone could wipe out one electrical transmission line and cause a brownout in all of New York City or Los Angeles, there would be hysteria, if people realized it was a terrorist that did it.

Fortunately, we have enough redundancy -- the same type of redundancy we talk about structurally in the World Trade Center -- in our electrical distribution. We have that redundancy built in. I shouldn't say this, but this was how Enron was able to build up a business, because they could transfer their energy from wherever they were producing it into California, which was having problems, and make a fortune -- for a short period of time.

NOVA: Gas pipelines don't have redundancy built in, though.

Eagar: No, but one advantage of a gas pipeline is the damage you can do to it is relatively limited. You might be able to destroy several hundred yards of it, but that's not wiping out a whole city. The bigger problem with taking out a gas pipeline is if you do it in the middle of winter, and that gas pipeline is heating 20 percent of the homes in the Northeast. Then all of a sudden you have 20 percent less fuel, and everybody's going to have to turn the thermostat down, and you're going to terrorize 30 million people.

The lesson we have to learn about this kind of terrorism is we have to design flexible and redundant systems, so that we're not completely dependent on any one thing, whether it's a single gas pipeline bringing heat to a particular area or whatever.

Remember the energy crisis in 1973? That terrorized people. People were sitting in long lines at gas pumps. It takes five or 10 years for society to readjust to a problem like that. What happened in the energy crisis in 1973 was we had essentially all our eggs in one basket -- the oil basket. But by 1983, electric generating plants could flip a switch and change from oil to coal or gas, so no one could hold a gun to our head like they did before.

Thomas Eagar is Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT. He was recently nominated to serve on a National Research Council committee on homeland security. To see Eagar's article, "Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse? Science, Engineering, and Speculation," which was coauthored by MIT graduate student Christopher Musso, go to http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM...agar-0112.html

Interview conducted by Peter Tyson, editor in chief of NOVA Online

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse2.html

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by FORD
So why did they "pull" Building 7?

I don't know much about that. But that could be a cover-up...The diesel fuel tanks inside for the emergency center?

[knuckleboner]

ah...the ol' conspiracy vs. science argument.

(sorry, i think science has long since won this one...)

[Keeyth]

Busheep wake up! This is the thing that gets to me the most about 9/11:

#1. The name of the company first on the scene after the collapse of the towers? ...Controlled Demolition.

#2. Tower #1 gets hit with a direct hit, and all the fuel goes into the tower, Tower #2 gets clipped on the corner with 95% of the fuel going out into the air, yet it falls BEFORE tower #1????!?!????

#3 The tower clipped on the corner does not tip over, as it should, but falls in a beautiful symmetry... ...just as in a controlled demolition.

#4We've all seen how the real terrorists work. If they do something, they get on TV, they take credit for it, they make demands for what they want... ...Osama bin Laden forgot to make any demands OR take credit for it... ...Hmmmm...

#5. There are too many other things I could go on about that need to be explained logically that never have been but I have to get back to work...

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Keeyth
Busheep wake up! This is the thing that gets to me the most about 9/11:

#1. The name of the company first on the scene after the collapse of the towers? ...Controlled Demolition.

#2. Tower #1 gets hit with a direct hit, and all the fuel goes into the tower, Tower #2 gets clipped on the corner with 95% of the fuel going out into the air, yet it falls BEFORE tower #1????!?!????

#3 The tower clipped on the corner does not tip over, as it should, but falls in a beautiful symmetry... ...just as in a controlled demolition.

#4We've all seen how the real terrorists work. If they do something, they get on TV, they take credit for it, they make demands for what they want... ...Osama bin Laden forgot to make any demands OR take credit for it... ...Hmmmm...

#5. There are too many other things I could go on about that need to be explained logically that never have been but I have to get back to work...

Yeah, right....I guess the several thousand workers inside the towers could never have seen workers planting explosives all over the building...

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by Keeyth
Busheep wake up! This is the thing that gets to me the most about 9/11:

#1. The name of the company first on the scene after the collapse of the towers? ...Controlled Demolition.

#2. Tower #1 gets hit with a direct hit, and all the fuel goes into the tower, Tower #2 gets clipped on the corner with 95% of the fuel going out into the air, yet it falls BEFORE tower #1????!?!????

#3 The tower clipped on the corner does not tip over, as it should, but falls in a beautiful symmetry... ...just as in a controlled demolition.

#4We've all seen how the real terrorists work. If they do something, they get on TV, they take credit for it, they make demands for what they want... ...Osama bin Laden forgot to make any demands OR take credit for it... ...Hmmmm...

#5. There are too many other things I could go on about that need to be explained logically that never have been but I have to get back to work...

Finally out on parole, huh?

[Warham]

This theory is right up there with Eisenhower meeting aliens in 1954 at Edward's Air Force Base, and the hoaxed moon landing in 1969 where Armstrong stepped out on a soundstage in Nevada.

[Guitar Shark]

Originally posted by Warham
This theory is right up there with Eisenhower meeting aliens in 1954 at Edward's Air Force Base, and the hoaxed moon landing in 1969 where Armstrong stepped out on a soundstage in Nevada.

I think it's worse.

[FORD]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Yeah, right....I guess the several thousand workers inside the towers could never have seen workers planting explosives all over the building...

Just literally days (maybe a week or so) before 9-11-01) there was a "new sprinkler system" installed over the weekend in the WTC. It would have been very easy to install charges in the buildings using this as a "cover". With the work being done on the weekend, there would be far less people on the scene, and the installation of sprinklers was the perfect cover.

By Silverstein's own admission, he asked them to "pull" Building #7.

Yet there was no time for them to place the charges in that building on the day of the attack between the times when the towers collapsed and the time that building #7 was imploded (about 5:30 EST)

Furthermore, the power was cut to the entire WTC after the second plane hit.

Simply put, they could not have possibly wired WTC 7 on that day, in the dark, with professionally placed charges for the purpose of controlled demolition of the building.

Therefore, the charges must have existed in the building already.

And if WTC #7 was already pre-wired for a controlled demolition, then how is it a stretch to say that the towers themselves were also pre-wired?

[Guitar Shark]

FORD, I thought you agreed not to stop taking your medication.

[FORD]

Examine the evidence, counselor.

[diamondD]

You don't offer any evidence, just theories.

There's plenty of evidence that everything happened just as it's been reported, but you don't want to hear it.

[FORD]

Originally posted by diamondD
You don't offer any evidence, just theories.

There's plenty of evidence that everything happened just as it's been reported, but you don't want to hear it.

Like I said, they admitted WTC #7 was a controlled demolition.

So when was the building wired with charges? It could not possibly have been done on 9-11-01. Therefore it was done at an earlier date.

Those are the facts.

The towers themselves being wired with charges IS speculation, however it is LOGICAL speculation, as it wouldn't make sense to plant these charges in one building and not the others.

[diamondD]

No one admitted that #7 was a controlled demolition. Who says he said that? Do you have any proof? Or do you just want to believe it so bad that you can't see it any other way? He could have meant to pull the operation and get the people out. That's logical too.

Saying that the charges had to be put in before 9-11 and calling that "the facts" is hallucinatory grasping.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by FORD
Like I said, they admitted WTC #7 was a controlled demolition.

So when was the building wired with charges? It could not possibly have been done on 9-11-01. Therefore it was done at an earlier date.

Those are the facts.

The towers themselves being wired with charges IS speculation, however it is LOGICAL speculation, as it wouldn't make sense to plant these charges in one building and not the others.

So is the theory that the towers were rammed by Boeing 757 airliners, travleing at 400mph and that were nearly full of jet fuel. This caused a very intense fire that weakened the steel supports by up tp 80% thereby causing a failure in structural integrity, which led to a pancake effect collapse...

[Warham]

The whole conspiracy theory doesn't make a whit of sense when you look at all the evidence, AND read expert analysis by credible sources.

[diamondD]

Hey Dave, why are you so willing to take the word of someone who is obviously BCE? :confused:

A former chief economist has controlled demolition theories? Wow, I'm overwhelmed by the amount of authority he brings to the argument. I'll dismiss all the scientific evidence immediately.

[Keeyth]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
Finally out on parole, huh?

That was a good one, I'll give ya that. No, I've just been without a computer or a job in this wonderful Bush economy lately, but I've fixed that now. You know you missed me, BBB!

[Keeyth]

Originally posted by FORD
Like I said, they admitted WTC #7 was a controlled demolition.

So when was the building wired with charges? It could not possibly have been done on 9-11-01. Therefore it was done at an earlier date.

Those are the facts.

The towers themselves being wired with charges IS speculation, however it is LOGICAL speculation, as it wouldn't make sense to plant these charges in one building and not the others.

Glad to see you're still keeping up the fight FORD. It's nice to know there are still some people out there who won't allow themselves to be completely brainwashed by this friggin LIAR we have in the oval office...

[FORD]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
So is the theory that the towers were rammed by Boeing 757 airliners, travleing at 400mph and that were nearly full of jet fuel. This caused a very intense fire that weakened the steel supports by up tp 80% thereby causing a failure in structural integrity, which led to a pancake effect collapse...

We know for a fact that the second tower was hit with a large plane, probably a 757, because there is live footage of that happening, from every angle imaginable.

But the very same live footage also shows that the plane, failing to hit it's logical planned target in the center of the floor, instead pushed through the outside of the building, forcing most of the jet fuel to actually burn outside of the tower, as seen here....



Now, also notice that, by the time the second plane hit, the fire in the first tower had shrunk considerably. This is approximately 15 minutes after the first plane's impact



So if the majority of the jet fuel had burned within that short of a time span, how exactly would there be a means of keeping the steel frame hot enough to soften and twist over an hour later when the towers "collapsed"?

And if the majority of the jet fuel never went into the second tower at all, how is it even possible that its frame would melt first?

It simply does not add up.

[ODShowtime]

From the beginning, the Bush administration claimed that burning jet fuel caused the collapse of the towers. Although many independent investigators have disagreed, they have been hard pressed to disprove the government theory since most of the evidence was removed by FEMA prior to independent investigation.

Just the fact that this is the bush administration saying this is enough to believe it's not true. Who believes anything those jokers say anymore? They've been caught lying for profit repeatedly.

[Warham]

Oh, please!

Everybody knows Satan was behind the attacks...

[Warham]

...

[Warham]

...

[academic punk]

The sad thing is I can't even tell if Warham is being serious or ironic here...

[Satan]

Originally posted by Warham
Oh, please!

Everybody knows Satan was behind the attacks...

A ridiculous accusation....

While I certainly am an expert when it comes to fire and destruction, there's just one serious flaw in your theory.

I hate skyscrapers! I can't stand being that high off the ground.

Because it makes me homesick......

[Guitar Shark]

Hey Satan, quit holding back on us! Next time Dave goes running with you, let us know.

[Keeyth]

Originally posted by FORD

So if the majority of the jet fuel had burned within that short of a time span, how exactly would there be a means of keeping the steel frame hot enough to soften and twist over an hour later when the towers "collapsed"?

And if the majority of the jet fuel never went into the second tower at all, how is it even possible that its frame would melt first?

It simply does not add up.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by FORD

This is what I have been saying since 9/11. There is no way those two planes could have brought those buildings down.

Think about this: One of the pilots was so confident the buildings would come down, that he chose to hit the building only 25 floors from the top, even though he had a relatively clear shot at hitting the building almost down to the waterline.

Ownership of the WTC changed hands 11 weeks before the attacks, and that's how they were able to put the charges in place necessary to bring the buildings down.

Another telling point is the Israeli company that had offices on the lower floors of the WTC BROKE THEIR LEASE and moved out of the WTC 3 weeks before the attacks, after Israel repeatedly warned the US about the impending attacks.

The whole thing stinks. Bush knew he needed a Pearl Harbor in order for him to gain America's support to go over and finish Daddy's war, and he gave it to us. Worse yet, America fell for it.

[Nickdfresh]

Those "pilots" never thought they were going to bring the whole building down.

Bin LADEN indicated afterward that they only calculated collapsing the top floors, not the entire building.

[Nickdfresh]

[Keeyth]

Bin Laden never indicated anything. Or do you speak Saudi now? I don't buy that crappy back room tape for starters. We are being sold another diversion by Bush in that one.

However, you are right, NO ONE thought those buildings would come down, because those buildings were built specifically to withstand a plane hitting them. After that plane hit the Empire state building way back when, that was a priority when building the tallest (at the time) buildings in the world in '73. In a high wind, those buildings swayed less than three feet at the very top. A bomb went off in the basement in '93 and did NOTHING. You are gullible if you believe the bill of goods Bush sold you on 9-11. period.

[scamper]

I read that the government planted an infestation of super termites into the jets that were flown into the buildings. After the explosion these little creatures (who thrive on thousand degree temperatures) multiplied and ate their way through the steel beams, bringing down the towers. It was on the internet so it must be true.

[Sammy Hata]

All it took for the twin towers to collapse is the steels integrety to be compromised on 1 floor. When this happened, the weight of all the other floors above caused a major domino effect. Since all of the floors were designed almost exactly the same from the 2nd floor to the 110th this is why the buildings collapsed quickly and neatly and straight down.

[Sammy Hata]

Originally posted by Keeyth
Bin Laden never indicated anything. Or do you speak Saudi now? I don't buy that crappy back room tape for starters. We are being sold another diversion by Bush in that one.

However, you are right, NO ONE thought those buildings would come down, because those buildings were built specifically to withstand a plane hitting them. After that plane hit the Empire state building way back when, that was a priority when building the tallest (at the time) buildings in the world in '73. In a high wind, those buildings swayed less than three feet at the very top. A bomb went off in the basement in '93 and did NOTHING. You are gullible if you believe the bill of goods Bush sold you on 9-11. period.

Actually, the bomb desrtroyed 3 stories in the parking structure located in the basement of that building.It killed 6 and injured over 1,000 people with a bad fire.It didn't bring the building down, but it was far from nothing.


http://wwwrobinsdrumworks.com

[Keeyth]

Originally posted by Sammy Hata
Actually, the bomb desrtroyed 3 stories in the parking structure located in the basement of that building.It killed 6 and injured over 1,000 people with a bad fire.It didn't bring the building down, but it was far from nothing.


http://wwwrobinsdrumworks.com

Good point. It TOOK OUT THREE FLOORS and the building didn't come down. Even though it had the wieght of ALL of the rest of the tower on it, Three floors blown out did not make it fall!! Are you hearing yourself make my point for me?? There is NO WAY HAVING A COUPLE OF FLOORS THAT HIGH UP BLOWN OUT WOULD HAVE MADE THE BUILDINGS COLLAPSE.