by L. Reichard White, Lew Rockwell:
“For the third time today, it’s reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before when a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down …” –well-known CBS news anchor Dan Rather
The extraordinary claim that fire was the ultimate cause of the complete progressive collapse of three skyscrapers on September 11, 2001 is the flimsy foundation upon which the Police State is being constructed. How realistic is that claim?
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Ever since a B-25 hit the Empire State Building on the morning of July 28, 1945, high-rises have been designed to withstand the impact of airliners similar to the ones that hit the Twin Towers on 9/11.
Even unprepared, the Empire State Building, hit on Sat. morning, was back in service in two days.
In the case of the Twin Towers, based on a study definitively described in City in the Sky as “the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure,” this plane-strike resistant design is verified by Towers head structural engineer John Skilling like this – – –
Concerned because of a case where an airplane hit the Empire State Building, Skilling’s people did an analysis that showed the towers would withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. …According to Skilling, “There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,” he said. “The building structure would still be there.” –Seattle Times, Feb. 27, 1993
This is further verified by Chief NIST 9/11 Investigator Dr. Shyam Sunder in The New York Times like this:
“The newly disclosed documents, from the 1960’s, show that the Port Authority considered aircraft moving at 600 m.p.h., slightly faster and therefore more destructive than the ones that did hit the towers.”
In the video clip below, Twin Towers project manager Frank D. Martini summed it up this way: “It would be like sticking a pencil through mosquito netting.” Martini claimed the towers could withstand several airliner impacts without serious danger of failure.
Towers would survive plane impacts
Towers Project Manager Frank D. Martini
As predicted — and thus verifying the above design assumptions — each tower returned to a stable configuration within approximately four minutes after the planes struck. The South Tower remained standing for 56 minutes after the plane hit and the North Tower for 102 minutes.
Since neither tower collapsed till well after the plane impacts, it’s clear that the collapses must have been the result of something other than structural damage.
In fact, our skyscrapers are incredibly durable. For example, there was the Feb. 26, 1993 1,336-pound bomb attack on the North Tower. It blew a 98 foot hole through four basement pylons — and killed 6 and injured 1,042. But the Tower didn’t collapse and was back in service in short order.
However, the fact that structural damage was not the cause of collapse on 9/11 is most clear in the case of the least well-known — some say “hidden in plain sight” — of the three, Building 7 (WTC7). NIST, charged by Congress with the official investigation, summarizes the role of structural damage in Building 7’s collapse like this:
“Other than initiating the fires in WTC 7, the damage from the debris from WTC 1 had little effect on initiating the collapse of WTC 7. The building withstood debris impact damage that resulted in seven exterior columns being severed …This was near the west side of the south face of the building and was far removed from the buckled column that initiated the collapse. …” –NIST NCSTAR 1A, WTC Investigation… xxxvii… xxxvii
So if these three collapses weren’t the result of structural damage, what was the cause?
At first glance, it seems reasonable to suppose that fire must have been that cause, especially since it was present in all three cases — and NIST’s Dr. Sunder specifically claims fire for Building 7 this way:
“We really have a new kind of progressive collapse that we have discovered here, which is a fire-induced progressive collapse. In fact, we have shown FOR THE FIRST TIME that fire can induce a progressive collapse.” –WTC Building 7 Chief Investigator Dr. Shyam Sunder
However, things aren’t that simple.
Dr. Sunder’s claim of a “first time” is the first clue. It points out that such a fire-induced progressive collapse had never happened before in the entire 117 year history of high-rises at that time. That makes Dr. Sunder’s fire-induced claim unprecedented (without a precedent) and thus by definition, extraordinary.
And there’s another clue: On Feb. 14, 1975, the North Tower had a serious fire burn out of control for about three hours and spread to an estimated 65% of floor eleven without doing any structural damage (two to three times as long as the fires burned in the Towers on 9/11) — and the building was open for business the next day.
