The Mystery of World Trade Center Tower 7

On May 19 my wife Genara and I went to join the demonstrators in Rio Rancho expressing their opposition to the Iraq War on its fifth anniversary.  I took my digital camera and took some pictures, but there is something awry with my camera and the pictures did not come out.   

As far as the demonstration is concerned, it was organized by MoveOn and there were about 30 of us standing on the four corners of Highway 528 and Southern Boulevard waving our signs.  A guy driving a red sports car rolled his window down and shouted angrily that I was a communist and that I should go to China.  Other than a few similar negative expressions, the vast majority of the people driving by showed their support for our cause by honking their horns (one banner said "Honk if You Want to Impeach Bush/Cheney") and giving us thumbs up.  It is clear that public sentiment against Bush and his wars are very high.  At the end of the vigil we stood in a circle and gave our personal messages as to why we were there.  In all, it was an inspirational and hopeful event.

At the demonstration I met Dennis Holloway, a licensed architect who is a member of  a group called Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth with some 30o members.  As a general rule, I am very leery of conspiracy theorists.  But Holloway disarmed me with his intelligence and cheerful demeanor.  He gave me the web address for his group and suggested I look at it, which I did.

The important thing about AE911Truth is that the members of the group look at the scientific and engineering aspects of the collapses of the Twin Towers (WTC1 and WTC2) at the World Trade Center.  Instead of speculating about political plots, these architects and engineers look at the hard physical evidence.  There was another building that collapsed that day - Tower Number 7  (WTC7), which was 110 yards from WTC1, and it is the collapse of Tower 7 on which I wish to concentrate in this posting.

There is a wealth of information on the AE911Truth website: videos, radio and television interviews, articles and links.  After perusing the site and a variety of its features, I am persuaded that WTC7 could very well have been brought down by a controlled demolition.  If it can be proved without a shadow of a doubt that this is indeed the case, the implications are enormous, alarming and monstrous.  I urge you to visit the site and other related sites and make up your own mind. 

It is clear that a more thorough investigation of the collapses of WTC7 (and of WTC1 and WTC2) is in order.  Let us see how the system responds to the increasing number of voices asking for more official information and explanations.

Posted by Richard Griego

For your ease of information, I have copied a synopsis of the facts about the collapse of Tower 7 taken from ae911truth.org:

1.	Rapid onset of “collapse”
2.	Sounds of explosions at ground floor - a full second prior to collapse (heard by hundreds of firemen and media reporters)
3.	Symmetrical “collapse” – through the path of greatest resistance – at nearly free-fall speed — the columns gave no resistance
4.	“Collapses” into its own footprint – with the steel skeleton broken up for shipment
5.	Massive volume of expanding pyroclastic dust clouds
6.	Tons of molten Metal found by CDI (Demolition Contractor) in basement (What could have produced all of that molten metal?)
7.	Chemical signature of Thermate (high tech incendiary) found in slag, solidified molten metal, and dust samples by Physics professor Steven Jones, PhD.
8.	FEMA finds rapid oxidation and intergranular melting on structural steel samples
9.	Expert corroboration from the top European Controlled Demolition professional
10.	Fore-knowledge of “collapse” by media, NYPD, FDNY
And exhibited none of the characteristics of destruction by fire, i.e.
1.	Slow onset with large visible deformations
2.	Asymmetrical collapse which follows the path of least resistance (laws of conservation of momentum would cause a falling, to the side most damaged by the fires)
3.	Evidence of fire temperatures capable of softening steel
4.	High-rise buildings with much larger, hotter, and longer lasting fires have never “collapsed”.

The following more complete article is also from the website:

Sunday, February 05, 2006

The Destruction of WTC 7 
by Vesa Raiskila

World Trade Center 7 was the third skyscraper destroyed on September 11 2001. It was not hit by a plane. The picture on the left shows WTC 7 after the collapse of the Twin Towers, smoldering on the background.

The final investigation report on its collapse has been postponed several times. At this moment, on the 28th of February 2008 – almost 6.5 years after the destruction – it still has not been published.

This steel-framed skyscraper, completed in 1987, was located 110 meters (350 feet) away from the closest of the Twin Towers ("WTC 1" on the map below). The building's tenants included the CIA, the Internal Revenue Service, several banks, the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, and the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. A large number of records of ongoing investigations of Enron and other companies were destroyed with WTC 7.

No airplane hit WTC 7, but its south facade was damaged by debris ejected from the North Tower, which collapsed at 10.30 am. There is conflicting information about the amount of damage. For example, in the pictures shown in a preliminary official report the southwest corner is badly damaged, whereas in the photograph taken by Aman Zafar in the afternoon the same corner is intact – see my photo comparison. The building was reported on fire at 4.10 pm by CNN, although the fires seem to have started several hours earlier. The fires, whose origin is unknown, appeared on a number of floors, and the building collapsed at 5.20 pm.

A high-resolution video of the collapse is available here. The slow-motion video animation below shows the totality and symmetry of the destruction.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, speculated that office fires caused the collapse of the building. It, however, acknowledged in its report in May 2002: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. [...] the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence." Later in 2002, Larry Silverstein, the owner of WTC 7, gave in the America Rebuilds TV program a famous "pull it" statement that has commonly been interpreted as meaning that the building was professionally demolished.

Did WTC 7 collapse as a result of office fires, or was it demolished with explosives? The answer can be sought by examining the way in which the building collapsed.

Collapse Speed

As one can observe from the videos of WTC 7's collapse, shortly following the destruction of its penthouse structures, the building fell to the ground in 6.5 seconds. This is a phenomenally short time: a stone dropped from the top of the building would have reached the ground (covering a distance of 174 meters) in 5.95 seconds – if there were no air resistance! However, in principle the distance analyzed should be that from the top of the building to the top of the debris pile, not to the ground. As the exact height of the debris pile is not documented, it is more useful to examine the early stages of the collapse, during which the debris pile does not need to be taken into account.

According to the video analysis presented in the 9-11 Eyewitness documentary, starting from the state of rest, WTC 7 fell 100 meters in 4.5 seconds. This results in an acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, corresponding to a free fall.

To verify this, I examined the fall of a corner of the building in one collapse video using Blaze Media Pro video editing software. The corner fell 56 meters (=the distance between the Start and End lines in the animation below) in 3.47 seconds. This results in an acceleration of 9.3 m/s2, which corresponds to a very low resistance factor of the structural supports: only 5 percent of the force of gravity of the building's falling upper section.

I also measured an acceleration of 8.5 m/s2 for the middle part of the wide facade in the picture, which means that the force of resistance of the structural supports was 13 percent of the force of gravity of the falling upper section (see the calculation in more detail here).

My measurements therefore support the conclusion presented in 9-11 Eyewitness that the skyscraper fell virtually unimpeded. The lack of structural resistance seems to be explainable only by the destruction of the structural supports through the use of explosives. WTC 7 dropped rather than collapsed. It came down as if only air had separated the roof of the building from the street below.

WTC 7 fell on average 7 floors per second (47 / 6.5). One second after the onset of the collapse, the speed of descent was almost 10 meters/second; after two seconds, almost 20 meters/second; and at the end, about 60 meters/second (over 200 kilometers/hour). According to the analysis of Frank Legge (Ph.D.), the rate of descent of WTC 7 closely matches the rate of gravitational free fall, which – combined with the uniformity of the descent throughout the breadth and length of the building – is irrefutable evidence of controlled demolition.

Heikki Kurttila, a Finnish Doctor of Engineering and accident researcher, has made detailed calculations about the collapse speed of WTC 7. He concludes that the short collapse time and low structural resistance "strongly suggest controlled demolition". Kurttila notes that an apple dropped from the height of WTC 7's roof would have taken about 0.5 seconds longer to reach the ground than it took the skyscraper to be completely destroyed.

Structural Features of the Collapse

A striking feature in the collapse of WTC 7 is symmetry. The collapse progressed evenly throughout the building, and the debris piled up almost completely within the foundations of the building (see the picture below).

The symmetry of WTC 7's descent means that all of its steel supports – 25 central and 58 peripheral columns – were destroyed almost simultaneously. Any asymmetry in the damage to structures would have led to asymmetrical collapse. By contrast, a fully symmetrical collapse without controlled use of explosives would not have followed the principle of least resistance. Local fires and structural damage here and there could not have weakened all the central and peripheral support structures in a way that would have caused all of them to give in at the same moment. The simultaneity of the destruction of support structures throughout the building can, however, be explained by controlled demolition.

A controlled demolition is also suggested by the drop of the center of the skyscraper moments before the surrounding structures started to fall, as well as by the fact that the outer walls were pulled inwards. In a controlled demolition the collapse is caused by first destroying the weight-carrying core of a building, which "pulls" the exterior walls inwards ("implosion"). Although the lowest floor with fires was reportedly the sixth floor, the building seems to have undergone a traditional demolition, beginning from the bottom floor. An emergency worker who witnessed the collapse of WTC 7 was interviewed on 9/11. He described hearing what sounded like a "clap of thunder", followed by what looked like "a shockwave ripping through the building", with windows busting out, and "about a second later the bottom floor caved out and the [rest of] the building followed after that". The videos showing the collapse support his description.

At least one high-resolution video of the collapse of WTC 7 clearly shows one more characteristic of controlled demolition: streamers of dust emerging out of the building.

A Dutch demolition expert Danny Jowenko (right), who owns a demolition company and has been in the business for almost 30 years, concluded in September 2006 that WTC 7 "is controlled demolition. [...] A team of experts did this. This is professional work, without any doubt."

Hugo Bachmann, a Swiss professor emeritus for structural design and construction, said in Tages-Anzeiger : "In my opinion WTC 7 was with great probability brought down by controlled demolition done by experts". In addition, Jörg Schneider, another Swiss Professor emeritus for structural design and construction, interprets the existing videos as indices that "WTC 7 was with great probability brought down by explosives".

Fire Endurance of Steel

Steel is very fire-resistant material. In tests conducted by Chorus Construction in several countries, the fire endurance of steel-framed parking garages was examined by feeding fires with hydrocarbon fuel. Steel beams and pillars heated to a maximum of 360 degrees Celsius, and the breaking of steel was not even close. In Cardington fire endurance tests, modelled on conditions in real buildings, unprotected steel was subjected to temperatures of up to 1100 degrees Celsius (2012 F), but there was no collapse. In the Windsor Building in Madrid, an almost 24-hour intensive fire did not collapse the building. Moreover, the fires in WTC 7 were insignificant compared to fires in Windsor Building and all other skyscraper fires. The latest case is the all-engulfing fire in Al Nasr Tower in 2006. Fires have never collapsed a single steel-framed highrise to the ground.

In the picture of WTC 7 to the right, the fires are limited to small areas, almost all windows are intact, and no red heat indicative of temperatures capable of softening steel is visible. The situation is largely the same in other photographs taken of the building in late afternoon. In some videos, such as this, a fair amount of smoke can be seen emanating from the southern facade (some of the smoke appears to be rising from the remains of the twin towers), and several windows were broken on a few floors in the southern wall. In any case, WTC 5, which was badly damaged by the collapse of the North Tower next to it, burned much more powerfully: all its floors were covered by a sea of flames and all windows were broken. However, this building, despite the fact that it had weaker support structures than WTC 7, did not collapse into a debris pile, but remained standing.

Characteristics of the Debris

The debris of WTC 7 was extremely hot weeks after the collapse of the building. Thermal imaging by NASA showed that the top of the debris pile had a temperature of 730 degrees Celsius five days after the collapse. Deeper, and immediately after the destruction, temperatures were probably considerably higher. Residual temperatures like this cannot be explained by office fires or by an ordinary, gravity-driven collapse. When the potential energy of a building experiencing an ordinary gravitational collapse turns into thermal energy, the result is only a few degrees' average increase in temperature.

According to several reports, molten metal (also suggested by this video footage) was found under the debris pile of WTC buildings. To melt structural steel, temperatures exceeding 1500 degrees Celsius are required. Such temperatures are never achieved in office fires. In addition to molten metal, partly evaporated steel beams were found in the debris of WTC 7. As professor Jonathan Barnett pointed out in a New York Times interview, the fires in the building could not have produced temperatures capable of evaporating steel. However, the use of explosives like thermite can produce temperatures (even 3000 degrees Celsius) that can melt and even evaporate steel.

FEMA's investigators were not allowed to work in the collapse zone itself. They were allowed to examine the debris of WTC skyscrapers only in landfill areas used as temporary storage for the steel debris before its recycling. By May 2005, when FEMA finished its preliminary report calling for further investigation, all the steel debris had been sold and shipped into the Far East. Only 156 pieces of steel were chosen for futher analysis, of which a ridiculous total of 4 were from WTC 7. Even these no longer seem to exist.

As WTC 7 was evacuated over six hours before its destruction, there were no grounds for the rapid removal and recycling of the steel debris. Quite the contrary: as WTC 7 was one of the three greatest building disasters in recorded history (the other two being the North and South Towers), the debris of the building should have been meticulously examined. Many individuals and publications, such as the Fire Engineering Magazine, protested strongly, but in vain, against the rapid destruction of the evidence.

Witness statements

Craig Bartmer, a NYPD officer, states that he saw WTC 7 come down and heard a number of explosions in rapid succession. He is convinced that the skyscraper was brought down with explosives. Barry Jennings, an official of the New York City, has given a detailed statement of an explosion in WTC 7. As a result of the explosion, he and his colleague were trapped inside the building for over an hour. Several rescue personnel have also come forward saying they were told that the building would be brought down by means of explosives. Such a statement can be heard in this excerpt of Italian TV's documentary, in which one can also hear explosions from WTC 7: in one scene, a loud explosion is shown startling first responders, while a police officer says "the building is about to blow up". Interestingly, a news report on a Finnish TV channel on September 12, 2001, stated that the authorities brought Building 7 down with explosives, allegedly due to the apparent danger of collapse.

Final Words

Was WTC 7 destroyed as a result of controlled demolition? Everyone can draw their own conclusions from the way in which the building was destroyed and the temperatures produced in the destruction.

If and when the building was demolished, it must have been wired with explosives before September 11th. An operation of that magnitude could not have been accomplished during a couple of chaotic hours. This is why the official hypotheses have not touched on the most obvious explanation for the collapse of the skyscraper. It is revealing that the 9/11 Commission, which published its report in 2004, does not mention in a single sentence the destruction of the third skyscraper resulting from the terrorist attack in New York.

FEMA's work has been continued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has postponed its report on WTC 7 several times. According to the latest timetable, the report will be published in August 2008. NIST is now saying that it is also investigating the hypothesis that explosions initiated the collapse. However, the institute appears to be excluding the floors below 8 from the investigation – a rather interesting restriction, considering that the collapse seems to have started on the lowest floors.

Interviewed in the March 2006 issue of New York Magazine, Dr S. Shyam Sunder, NIST lead investigator, summed up the ongoing state of the investigation as follows:

NIST did have "some preliminary hypotheses" on 7 WTC, Dr. Sunder said. "We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors." Then Dr. Sunder paused. "But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7."

Comments

[Miriam Adams]

Thanks for this posting!.....I have been a supporter of the 911 press for truth movement for several years....believing as
Presented that there had to have been a pre 9-11 demolition set for all three buildings...asbestos issues ...suits, etc
Were so key, that GWBush even mentioned "frivolous asbestos suits" in the middle of his SOTU speech in ?2002?
Or 03...I was KEYED into that particular issue because I'd been trying to do some research on what corporations were
Fighting/resisting suits for workers with mesothelioma....when I heard Bush throw in the idea of eliminating liability to
Monsanto, Halliburton Dow and the others in that state of the union speech...I knew there was major collaboration
Going on....collusion .....but doubt we'll be witness to the truth via forensic and scientific investigations....this was
The Reichstag event of the US...in my opinion...too many serious unanswered questions...and asking who benefitted?
What followed...makes getting the information about Cheney's secret energy meeting documents released even more
Important and relevent...salud!
Good Easter...
Miriam