Review Committee
Sarah Chaplin, Architect and Urban Development Consultant, Former Head of School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University, London
Dr. Mohibullah Durrani, Professor of Engineering and Physics, Montgomery College, Maryland
Richard Gage, AIA, Founder and CEO of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Dr. Robert Korol, Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering, McMaster University, Ontario
Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Retired Professor of Religious Studies and Peace Studies, McMaster University, Ontario Robert McCoy, Architect
Dr. Oswald Rendon-Herrero, P.E., Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mississippi State University
Author
Ted Walter, Director of Strategy and Development, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
Technical Editor
Chris Sarns
Contributing Writers
Craig McKee
Chris Sarns
Andrew Steele
BEYOND MISINFORMATION
What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth
2342 Shattuck Avenue Suite 189 Berkeley, CA 94704
3
The Destruction of
W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2
This chapter provides an overview of the evidence regarding the structural
behavior of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 during their destruction. The features of their
behavior that will be examined include the onset of collapse, the downward
acceleration of the upper sections, the manner in which the buildings’
materials were destroyed, the high velocity bursts of debris (“demolition
squibs”) seen during collapse, and eyewitness accounts of the destruction.
In the last chapter, we examined the official investigations
conducted by F.E.M.A and N.I.S.T and found that
instead of starting with the most likely hypothesis —
which we have established as controlled demolition
— investigators started with the hypothesis of fire-induced
failure. They then clung to that hypothesis to
the end, considering and rejecting various versions
of it over several years, and, in the case of F.E.M.A’s
W.T.C 7 investigation, acknowledging that their best
hypothesis had only a low probability of occurrence.
We will now examine the evidence regarding the
structural behavior of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 during their
destruction (W.T.C 7 will be covered in the next chapter)
and evaluate whether it is more consistent with the
hypothesis of fire-induced failure advanced by N.I.S.T
or with the hypothesis of controlled demolition. To
guide our evaluation of these competing hypotheses,
we now turn to a third principle that is fundamental
to the scientific method. David Ray Griffin describes
it as follows: “None of the relevant evidence should
be ignored.”1
This principle is of central importance
in evaluating the official hypothesis.
For, as we will see below, N.I.S.T ignored a large amount
of the relevant evidence by stopping its analysis at
the point of “collapse initiation.” Instead of providing
an explanation for what actually happened — the
observed behavior of the buildings during their destruction
— N.I.S.T limited the scope of its investigation to determining what
could have happened
to initiate the collapses.
After that point,
N.I.S.T asserted that
global (total) collapse
became inevitable.
N.I.S.T clearly described
its approach in a footnote
on page 82 of its
final report:
The focus of the Investigation was on the sequence
of events from the instant of aircraft
impact to the initiation of collapse for each
tower. For brevity in this report, this sequence
is referred to as the “probable collapse sequence,”
although it includes little analysis of
the structural behavior of the tower after the
conditions for collapse initiation were reached
and collapse became inevitable.
Sudden Onset
As discussed in Chapter 1, one of the features of
controlled demolition is the sudden onset of collapse;
whereas one of the features of fire-induced
failure is that the onset of collapse is gradual, with
randomly distributed, visible deformations appearing
prior to the collapse. According to the authors
of Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel, “A steel structure,
generally speaking, does not collapse suddenly
when attacked by fire. There are unmistakable
warning signs, namely, large deformations.”2
By most accounts, the onset of collapse of W.T.C 1
and W.T.C 2 was sudden. As described by researchers
Frank Legge and Anthony Szamboti in the paper
9/11 and the Twin Towers: Sudden Collapse Initiation
was Impossible, “A slow, protracted, and sagging
collapse was not observed…. As observed in the
videos…the upper sections suddenly start to fall and
disintegrate.”
N.I.S.T’s probable collapse sequence, however, portrays
the onset as being not sudden in two ways:
1. N.I.S.T claimed that the bowing of exterior columns
began several minutes before the collapses
initiated.3
However, the observed bowing, which
occurred only on a portion of one wall in each
building, does not amount to the kind of “unmistakable
warning signs” or “large deformations”
that would be expected to precede fire-induced
failure. If the inward bowing had been significant
enough to affect the structure, it should have
been much more pronounced, in which case
N.I.S.T’s hypothesis of inward bowing exterior columns
would have become a leading hypothesis
much earlier than it did.
2. N.I.S.T then claimed that the bowing walls buckled
and that instability subsequently spread to the
rest of the exterior columns. Yet there is no visual
evidence of either of these phenomena occurring
prior to the onset of collapse. Readers are left
to assume that this process was invisible and/or
that it all happened in a single instant as part of
the collapse initiation. According to Kevin Ryan,
a former laboratory manager at Underwriters
Laboratories, “instability spread would have
taken much more time and would not result in
uniform free fall [of the upper section onto the
lower structure for a distance of up to one story].”4
In addition, prior to any movement in the
area of the 95th floor, where inward bowing was
focused, the videos of W.T.C 1 show the collapse
initiating at the 98th floor, with a large amount of
smoke being ejected on all sides of the building.
The gradual process and series of structural failures that N.I.S.T claims occurred are not apparent in the videos, which instead show the sudden fall and disintegration of the upper sections.
According to N.I.S.T, once collapse initiated, W.T.C 1 and
W.T.C 2 fell in approximately 11 seconds and 9 seconds,
respectively,5
each coming down “essentially in
free fall.”6
To many observers, the speed of collapse
was the most striking feature of their destruction.
Yet, N.I.S.T’s explanation for why W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 collapsed “essentially in free fall” was limited to a half-page section of its 10,000-page report titled “Events Following Collapse Initiation.” In this section, N.I.S.T attempted to explain the speed and completeness of the collapses simply by saying:
The story immediately below the stories in which the columns failed was not able to arrest this initial movement as evidenced by videos from several vantage points.
The structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that through energy of deformation.
Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos.
However, N.I.S.T provided no calculations or modeling to support its claims. Instead it simply cited the videos as evidence. A Request for Correction to N.I.S.T’s report, filed under the Information Quality Act in 2007 by a group of scientists, an architect, and two 9/11 family members, argued that this was not scientifically valid: Here, N.I.S.T has not offered any explanation as to why (i.e. the technical cause of) the story below the collapse zone was not able to arrest the downward movement of the upper floors. The statement “as evidenced by the videos from several vantage points” is only an explanation of what occurred, but gives the reader absolutely no idea why it occurred. Basic principles of engineering (for example, the conservation of momentum principle) would dictate that the undamaged steel structure below the collapse zone would, at the very least, resist and slow the downward movement of the stories above. N.I.S.T’s use of the videos as evidence to explain why the lower structures failed to resist the fall of the upper sections was repeated by investigator John Gross in a talk he gave at the University of Texas in October 2006. In his talk, he actually refers to the video evidence as the reason why N.I.S.T did not need to perform analysis: “Once the collapse initiated, the video evidence is rather clear. It was not stopped by the floors below. So there was no calculation that we did to demonstrate what is clear from the videos.”7
But, as the Request for Correction pointed out, the inability of the lower structures to arrest the fall of the upper sections is what effectively claimed the lives of 421 first respondents and 118 occupants at or below the impact zones,8 and thus it deserved thorough explanation:
The families of the firefighters and W.T.C employees that were trapped in the stairwells when the entirety of the W.T.C Towers collapsed on top of them would surely appreciate an adequate explanation of why the lower structure failed to arrest or even resist the collapse of the upper floors.
In its reply, N.I.S.T stated: N.I.S.T carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of deflections and the number of failures occurring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution…. We were unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.
While N.I.S.T acknowledges being “unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse,” other researchers on both sides of the issue have analyzed the question extensively through methods other than computer modeling.
In January 2011, the A.S.C.E’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics published a paper by Dr. Zdenek Bazant and Jia-Liang Le titled Why the Observed Motion History of the World Trade Center Towers is Smooth. This paper was a response to The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the N.I.S.T-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis, a paper critiquing Bazant’s earlier work attempting to explain why the lower structures provided so little resistance to the upper sections. In the 2011 paper, Bazant and Le claimed that the deceleration of W.T.C 1’s upper section was “far too small to be perceptible,” thus accounting for why the observed motion is “smooth.”
Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical engineer and one of the authors of “The Missing Jolt,” and Richard Johns, a professor of Philosophy of Science, submitted a Discussion paper in May 2011 arguing that Bazant and Le used incorrect values for the resistance of the columns, for the lower structure’s floor mass, and for the upper section’s total mass. By simply correcting the values, Szamboti and Johns argued that Bazant and Le’s analysis actually proves that the deceleration of the upper section would be significant (if demolition were not involved), and that the collapse would arrest in about three seconds.10 While the Journal of Engineering Mechanics inexplicably rejected Szamboti and Johns’ Discussion paper as “out of scope,” Szamboti, Johns, and Dr. Gregory Szuladzinski, a world-renowned expert in structural mechanics, were able to publish a paper addressing Bazant and Le’s analysis in the International Journal of Protective Structures, titled Some Misunderstandings Related to the W.T.C Collapse Analysis.
Although it is customary for journals to publish Discussion
papers about previously published papers, Szamboti and
Johns’ Discussion paper responding to Bazant and Le’s “Why
the Observed Motion History of the World Trade Center Towers
Is Smooth” was never published by the Journal of Engineering
Mechanics, despite passing peer review.
Szamboti and Johns submitted their Discussion paper in May 2011. After a year they were told that their paper had been rejected by one peer reviewer (the second reviewer did not respond). Szamboti and Johns found the reviewer’s comments to be erroneous and submitted a rebuttal. The Journal then informed them that their paper had completed peer review and would only require editorial review.
Another year passed with no action. In May 2013, Szamboti and Johns contacted the Journal’s editors. Three months later, the editors informed Szamboti and Johns that their Discussion paper was “out of scope” for the Journal.
Szamboti and Johns appealed the matter to the A.S.C.E’s Engineering Mechanics Institute Board of Governors, the body that oversees the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. Without finding errors in Szamboti and Johns’ paper or explaining why it was appropriate to be deemed out of scope, the Board of Governors determined that Szamboti and Johns were treated fairly and stood by the Journal’s decision to reject the paper.
Later, Roger Ghanem, the President of the Board of Governors, told Szamboti: “While your paper may very well be within the scope of the Journal, the Board’s review of your case was concerned with whether or not the submission was treated fairly and in a manner that is consistent with the policies of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.”
Today, Bazant and Le’s paper is the sole piece of analysis upon which the official hypothesis’ explanation for the total collapse of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 rests. By rejecting Szamboti and Johns’ Discussion paper, the Journal of Engineering Mechanics has suppressed criticism of Bazant and Le’s paper within its walls. But the papers discussed herein, published elsewhere, argue compellingly that the constant acceleration and lack of observable deceleration, by themselves, constitute irrefutable evidence that explosives were used to destroy W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2.
There’s no concrete. There’s very little concrete. All you see is aluminum and steel. The concrete was pulverized. And I was down here on Tuesday, and it was like you were on a foreign planet. All over lower Manhattan — not just this site — from river to river, there was dust, powder two, three inches thick. The concrete was just pulverized.12
In addition, the buildings’ steel structures were almost
entirely dismembered. Aside from some of the exterior
walls at the base of each building still standing, virtually
all of their steel skeletons were broken up into
small pieces, with the core structures separated into
individual members and the exterior columns broken
up into three-story, prefabricated sections.
What can explain the near-total pulverization of approximately
8.8 million square feet of 5.5-inch-thick
lightweight concrete flooring and the near-total
dismemberment of 220 stories of steel structure?
N.I.S.T provides no explanation, and gravity alone
appears to be implausible. A simple analysis of
the approximate amount of energy required to
pulverize the concrete and dismember the steel
structures indicates that about 1,255 gigajoules of
energy would have been required, far exceeding the
estimated 508 gigajoules of gravitational potential
energy contained in the buildings.13
The near-total pulverization and dismemberment
of the structures becomes even more difficult to explain
when we consider that the collapses occurred
“essentially in free fall.” Near-total pulverization and
dismemberment would require a tremendous collision
of materials at each floor, and yet N.I.S.T claims
that the structure below “offered minimal resistance
to the falling building mass.” The official hypothesis
thus attempts to have it both ways: “minimal resistance,”
“free fall,” deceleration “far too small to be
perceptible” — and yet near-total pulverization and
dismemberment of the buildings’ concrete and steel.
But according to Dr. Steven Jones, a former physics
professor at Brigham Young University, “The paradox
is easily resolved by the explosive demolition hypothesis,
whereby explosives quickly remove lower-floor
material including steel support columns and allow
near free-fall-speed collapses.”14
In the popular five-minute video titled North Tower Exploding, produced by physics teacher David Chandler, he describes the observed explosive ejection of materials from W.T.C 1:
Under the canopy of falling debris, do you see the rapid sequence of explosive ejections of material? Some of the jets have been clocked at over 100 mph…. They’re continuous and widespread. They move progressively down the faces of the building, keeping pace with the falling debris…. The building is being progressively destroyed from the top down by waves of explosions creating a huge debris field.
Chandler then describes the hurling of multi-ton steel members:
Notice that embedded in the dust clouds are huge girders and entire sections of steel framing that are being hurled out of the building…. Some landed as much as two football fields away from the base of the tower.
Chandler next addresses the claim that the ejection of these girders was caused by a spring action resulting from the upper sections crushing down upon them.
Some people have suggested that the weight of the tower crushing down on the girders caused them to flex and they sprung sideways by a spring action. But we are not seeing isolated jumping girders. We are seeing a major fraction of the mass of the building…reduced to small pieces of rubble and fine dust, and being explosively ejected in all directions.
In the videos we can see these bursts being ejected from the sides of the towers nearly 30 floors below the collapse front….
Each of these was a sharp emission that appeared to come from a point-like source, ejecting approximately 50 to 100 feet from the side of the building in a fraction of a second. From the extracted frames of the K.T.L.A video,16 we can estimate that one of the bursts was fully ejected in approximately .45 seconds. This gives an average burst velocity of approximately 170 feet per second.
N.I.S.T’s explanation for these high-velocity bursts of debris is provided not in its final report, but in its FAQs, where it calls them “puffs of smoke” and says, “The falling mass of the building compressed the air ahead of it — much like the action of a piston — forcing smoke and debris out the windows as the stories below failed sequentially.”
Kevin Ryan offers several arguments for why NIST’s explanation is not valid:
■ The floors were not the kind of tightly sealed, highly pressurized containers that would be required to generate overpressure's strong enough to burst windows.
■ The falling mass would need to act as a flat plate exerting uniform pressure at all points. But the falling upper sections, themselves disintegrating as observed in the videos, could not exert uniform pressure.
■ Even if perfect containers and uniform pressure are assumed, using the Ideal Gas Law to calculate the change in pressure, we can determine that the air pressure would not increase enough to burst windows.
■ The bursts
contained pulverized
debris, not smoke
and dust. Yet building
materials 20 to 30 stories below the collapse
zone could not be pulverized and ejected
laterally by air pressure.
N.I.S.T declares in its final report that it found “no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the W.T.C towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.”17 Although it does not elaborate beyond that in its final report, one of the reasons N.I.S.T gives in its F.A.Q's is as follows:
There was no evidence (collected by N.I.S.T or by…the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors as the top building sections began their downward movement upon collapse initiation.
This statement ignores and directly contradicts the plethora of accounts from eyewitnesses who reported witnessing explosions, which they consciously identified as such.
The most comprehensive analysis of these accounts, performed by Dr. Graeme MacQueen, a retired professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University, and documented in Chapter 8 of The 9/11 Toronto Report, identifies 156 such eyewitnesses. The vast majority of them — 135, or 87 percent of the total — are first respondents, including 121 from the F.D.N.Y and fourteen from the Port Authority Police Department. Thirteen are reporters, and the remaining eight MacQueen categorizes as “other,” usually people who worked near W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2. A selection of these accounts organized according to the characteristics discussed below (Identification, Power, and Pattern) is presented in Appendix A on page 44.
MacQueen suggests that the main objection to interpreting these accounts as evidence of controlled demolition is that the observed explosions were some other natural form of explosion that occurs in large fires. However, MacQueen identifies three common characteristics among the accounts that distinguish the explosions in W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 from the four kinds of explosions that typically occur in fires (boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosions or “B.L.E.V.E's”; electrical explosions; smoke explosions or “back drafts”; and combustion explosions):
Identification: If the explosions encountered were the type typically encountered in fires, the firefighters would be expected to recognize them as such and name them. There are very few instances where they do so. On the contrary, they clearly feel these were different types of explosions than those they were used to encountering...
Power: Many eyewitnesses clearly thought they were watching explosions destroy the Twin Towers. But none of the common four types of fire-related explosions could accomplish this…
Pattern: …Many eyewitnesses reported regular, rapid energetic events in sequence down the building, which cannot be explained by any of the four common types of explosion.
The perception that explosions had destroyed W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 was so prevalent among firefighters that it became widely discussed. “At that point, a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges,” said Christopher Fenyo in his W.T.C Task Force Interview. John Coyle recalled in his interview, “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards…. Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”36
The Request for Correction filed with N.I.S.T in 2007 argued that N.I.S.T had, among other problems, ignored the eyewitness evidence of explosions contained in the World Trade Center Task Force Interviews. N.I.S.T responded by saying that it had reviewed them, and, “Taken as a whole, the interviews did not support the contention that explosives played a role in the collapse of the W.T.C Towers” — a markedly different position from the one given in its FAQs, which said that “There was no evidence (collected by…the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions….”
In any case, MacQueen rejects N.I.S.T’s assessment, writing in the paper 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers:
We have 118 witnesses out of a pool of 503. Over 23 percent of our group are explosion witnesses. In my judgment, this is a very high percentage of witnesses, especially when we consider…[that Interviewees] were typically not asked about explosions, and, in most cases, were not even asked about the collapses of the towers. What testimony we have was volunteered, and it therefore represents not the maximum number of witnesses to explosions but the minimum number.
We found that N.I.S.T, because it decided to stop its analysis at the point of collapse initiation, performed “little analysis” of the buildings’ structural behavior during the process of their destruction, thus deliberately ignoring any evidence that could be derived from it. As a result, N.I.S.T’s final report provides virtually no explanation for the evidence examined above. The very limited explanations N.I.S.T does provide come mainly from its F.A.Q's webpage, and are speculative rather than based upon scientific analysis. On the other hand, the hypothesis of controlled demolition readily, simply, and completely explains all of the evidence regarding the structural behavior of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 during their destruction.
next
The Destruction of W.T.C 7
The gradual process and series of structural failures that N.I.S.T claims occurred are not apparent in the videos, which instead show the sudden fall and disintegration of the upper sections.
Constant Acceleration
through
the Path of
Greatest Resistance
Yet, N.I.S.T’s explanation for why W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 collapsed “essentially in free fall” was limited to a half-page section of its 10,000-page report titled “Events Following Collapse Initiation.” In this section, N.I.S.T attempted to explain the speed and completeness of the collapses simply by saying:
The story immediately below the stories in which the columns failed was not able to arrest this initial movement as evidenced by videos from several vantage points.
The structure below the level of collapse initiation offered minimal resistance to the falling building mass at and above the impact zone. The potential energy released by the downward movement of the large building mass far exceeded the capacity of the intact structure below to absorb that through energy of deformation.
Since the stories below the level of collapse initiation provided little resistance to the tremendous energy released by the falling building mass, the building section above came down essentially in free fall, as seen in videos.
However, N.I.S.T provided no calculations or modeling to support its claims. Instead it simply cited the videos as evidence. A Request for Correction to N.I.S.T’s report, filed under the Information Quality Act in 2007 by a group of scientists, an architect, and two 9/11 family members, argued that this was not scientifically valid: Here, N.I.S.T has not offered any explanation as to why (i.e. the technical cause of) the story below the collapse zone was not able to arrest the downward movement of the upper floors. The statement “as evidenced by the videos from several vantage points” is only an explanation of what occurred, but gives the reader absolutely no idea why it occurred. Basic principles of engineering (for example, the conservation of momentum principle) would dictate that the undamaged steel structure below the collapse zone would, at the very least, resist and slow the downward movement of the stories above. N.I.S.T’s use of the videos as evidence to explain why the lower structures failed to resist the fall of the upper sections was repeated by investigator John Gross in a talk he gave at the University of Texas in October 2006. In his talk, he actually refers to the video evidence as the reason why N.I.S.T did not need to perform analysis: “Once the collapse initiated, the video evidence is rather clear. It was not stopped by the floors below. So there was no calculation that we did to demonstrate what is clear from the videos.”7
But, as the Request for Correction pointed out, the inability of the lower structures to arrest the fall of the upper sections is what effectively claimed the lives of 421 first respondents and 118 occupants at or below the impact zones,8 and thus it deserved thorough explanation:
The families of the firefighters and W.T.C employees that were trapped in the stairwells when the entirety of the W.T.C Towers collapsed on top of them would surely appreciate an adequate explanation of why the lower structure failed to arrest or even resist the collapse of the upper floors.
In its reply, N.I.S.T stated: N.I.S.T carried its analysis to the point where the buildings reached global instability. At this point, because of the magnitude of deflections and the number of failures occurring, the computer models are not able to converge on a solution…. We were unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse.
Providing a Full Explanation
of the
Total Collapse
While N.I.S.T acknowledges being “unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse,” other researchers on both sides of the issue have analyzed the question extensively through methods other than computer modeling.
In this graph from Szamboti and Johns’ Discussion
paper, the observed velocity of the roofline of
WTC 1 is compared with the velocity calculated
using Bazant and Le’s analytical method, but
with corrected input values, showing significant
decelerations at each floor.11
A number of papers
supporting the hypothesis
of controlled
demolition have measured
the fall of W.T.C 1’s
upper section and have
observed that it never
slowed down in the
four seconds before it
disappeared from view.
Rather, its acceleration
remained constant,
at approximately 64
percent of free fall,9
and there was never an observable
deceleration, which would be required if the
upper section had impacted and crushed the lower
structure. A lack of deceleration would indicate
with absolute certainty that the lower structure was
destroyed by another force before the upper section
reached it. In January 2011, the A.S.C.E’s Journal of Engineering Mechanics published a paper by Dr. Zdenek Bazant and Jia-Liang Le titled Why the Observed Motion History of the World Trade Center Towers is Smooth. This paper was a response to The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the N.I.S.T-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis, a paper critiquing Bazant’s earlier work attempting to explain why the lower structures provided so little resistance to the upper sections. In the 2011 paper, Bazant and Le claimed that the deceleration of W.T.C 1’s upper section was “far too small to be perceptible,” thus accounting for why the observed motion is “smooth.”
Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical engineer and one of the authors of “The Missing Jolt,” and Richard Johns, a professor of Philosophy of Science, submitted a Discussion paper in May 2011 arguing that Bazant and Le used incorrect values for the resistance of the columns, for the lower structure’s floor mass, and for the upper section’s total mass. By simply correcting the values, Szamboti and Johns argued that Bazant and Le’s analysis actually proves that the deceleration of the upper section would be significant (if demolition were not involved), and that the collapse would arrest in about three seconds.10 While the Journal of Engineering Mechanics inexplicably rejected Szamboti and Johns’ Discussion paper as “out of scope,” Szamboti, Johns, and Dr. Gregory Szuladzinski, a world-renowned expert in structural mechanics, were able to publish a paper addressing Bazant and Le’s analysis in the International Journal of Protective Structures, titled Some Misunderstandings Related to the W.T.C Collapse Analysis.
The Journal of Engineering Mechanics’ Rejection of the Szamboti-Johns
Discussion Paper
Szamboti and Johns submitted their Discussion paper in May 2011. After a year they were told that their paper had been rejected by one peer reviewer (the second reviewer did not respond). Szamboti and Johns found the reviewer’s comments to be erroneous and submitted a rebuttal. The Journal then informed them that their paper had completed peer review and would only require editorial review.
Another year passed with no action. In May 2013, Szamboti and Johns contacted the Journal’s editors. Three months later, the editors informed Szamboti and Johns that their Discussion paper was “out of scope” for the Journal.
Szamboti and Johns appealed the matter to the A.S.C.E’s Engineering Mechanics Institute Board of Governors, the body that oversees the Journal of Engineering Mechanics. Without finding errors in Szamboti and Johns’ paper or explaining why it was appropriate to be deemed out of scope, the Board of Governors determined that Szamboti and Johns were treated fairly and stood by the Journal’s decision to reject the paper.
Later, Roger Ghanem, the President of the Board of Governors, told Szamboti: “While your paper may very well be within the scope of the Journal, the Board’s review of your case was concerned with whether or not the submission was treated fairly and in a manner that is consistent with the policies of the Journal of Engineering Mechanics.”
Today, Bazant and Le’s paper is the sole piece of analysis upon which the official hypothesis’ explanation for the total collapse of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 rests. By rejecting Szamboti and Johns’ Discussion paper, the Journal of Engineering Mechanics has suppressed criticism of Bazant and Le’s paper within its walls. But the papers discussed herein, published elsewhere, argue compellingly that the constant acceleration and lack of observable deceleration, by themselves, constitute irrefutable evidence that explosives were used to destroy W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2.
Pulverization,
Dismemberment, and
Explosive Ejection of
Materials
Because N.I.S.T stopped its analysis at the point of
collapse initiation, it did not provide an explanation
for the manner in which the buildings’ materials
were destroyed.
Pulverization and Dismemberment
One of the most noticeable features of the two buildings’
destruction was the near-total pulverization of
their concrete flooring. New York Governor George
Pataki provided this account: There’s no concrete. There’s very little concrete. All you see is aluminum and steel. The concrete was pulverized. And I was down here on Tuesday, and it was like you were on a foreign planet. All over lower Manhattan — not just this site — from river to river, there was dust, powder two, three inches thick. The concrete was just pulverized.12
Explosive
Ejection of
Materials
As the concrete was
being pulverized and
the structures were
being dismembered, a
large percentage of the
buildings’ materials
was ejected upwards
and laterally in an arc like
manner far beyond
the perimeters of the
buildings. According
to the F.E.M.A Building
Performance Study,
the debris fields extended
as far as 400
to 500 feet from each
tower’s base. In the popular five-minute video titled North Tower Exploding, produced by physics teacher David Chandler, he describes the observed explosive ejection of materials from W.T.C 1:
Under the canopy of falling debris, do you see the rapid sequence of explosive ejections of material? Some of the jets have been clocked at over 100 mph…. They’re continuous and widespread. They move progressively down the faces of the building, keeping pace with the falling debris…. The building is being progressively destroyed from the top down by waves of explosions creating a huge debris field.
Chandler then describes the hurling of multi-ton steel members:
Notice that embedded in the dust clouds are huge girders and entire sections of steel framing that are being hurled out of the building…. Some landed as much as two football fields away from the base of the tower.
Chandler next addresses the claim that the ejection of these girders was caused by a spring action resulting from the upper sections crushing down upon them.
Some people have suggested that the weight of the tower crushing down on the girders caused them to flex and they sprung sideways by a spring action. But we are not seeing isolated jumping girders. We are seeing a major fraction of the mass of the building…reduced to small pieces of rubble and fine dust, and being explosively ejected in all directions.
Demolition Squibs
Along with the pulverization, dismemberment, and
explosive ejection of the buildings’ materials, we observed
what Kevin Ryan describes as “high velocity
bursts of debris ejected from point-like sources.”15
According to Ryan, “The demolition hypothesis
suggests that these bursts of debris are the result
of the detonation of explosive charges (squibs),
placed at key points in the structure to facilitate the
removal of resistance.” Ryan goes on to describe
these apparent squibs in more detail: In the videos we can see these bursts being ejected from the sides of the towers nearly 30 floors below the collapse front….
Each of these was a sharp emission that appeared to come from a point-like source, ejecting approximately 50 to 100 feet from the side of the building in a fraction of a second. From the extracted frames of the K.T.L.A video,16 we can estimate that one of the bursts was fully ejected in approximately .45 seconds. This gives an average burst velocity of approximately 170 feet per second.
N.I.S.T’s explanation for these high-velocity bursts of debris is provided not in its final report, but in its FAQs, where it calls them “puffs of smoke” and says, “The falling mass of the building compressed the air ahead of it — much like the action of a piston — forcing smoke and debris out the windows as the stories below failed sequentially.”
Kevin Ryan offers several arguments for why NIST’s explanation is not valid:
■ The floors were not the kind of tightly sealed, highly pressurized containers that would be required to generate overpressure's strong enough to burst windows.
■ The falling mass would need to act as a flat plate exerting uniform pressure at all points. But the falling upper sections, themselves disintegrating as observed in the videos, could not exert uniform pressure.
■ Even if perfect containers and uniform pressure are assumed, using the Ideal Gas Law to calculate the change in pressure, we can determine that the air pressure would not increase enough to burst windows.
Eyewitness Accounts of
Explosions
In addition to the wealth of video and photographic
evidence regarding the destruction of W.T.C 1 and
W.T.C 2, there is a wealth of eyewitness accounts.
The largest source of eyewitness accounts is the
New York Fire Department’s (F.D.N.Y’s) World Trade
Center Task Force Interviews, which comprise approximately
10,000 to 12,000 pages of statements
by over 500 F.D.N.Y personnel collected from early
October 2001 to late January 2002. N.I.S.T declares in its final report that it found “no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the W.T.C towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to September 11, 2001.”17 Although it does not elaborate beyond that in its final report, one of the reasons N.I.S.T gives in its F.A.Q's is as follows:
There was no evidence (collected by N.I.S.T or by…the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions in the region below the impact and fire floors as the top building sections began their downward movement upon collapse initiation.
This statement ignores and directly contradicts the plethora of accounts from eyewitnesses who reported witnessing explosions, which they consciously identified as such.
The most comprehensive analysis of these accounts, performed by Dr. Graeme MacQueen, a retired professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University, and documented in Chapter 8 of The 9/11 Toronto Report, identifies 156 such eyewitnesses. The vast majority of them — 135, or 87 percent of the total — are first respondents, including 121 from the F.D.N.Y and fourteen from the Port Authority Police Department. Thirteen are reporters, and the remaining eight MacQueen categorizes as “other,” usually people who worked near W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2. A selection of these accounts organized according to the characteristics discussed below (Identification, Power, and Pattern) is presented in Appendix A on page 44.
MacQueen suggests that the main objection to interpreting these accounts as evidence of controlled demolition is that the observed explosions were some other natural form of explosion that occurs in large fires. However, MacQueen identifies three common characteristics among the accounts that distinguish the explosions in W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 from the four kinds of explosions that typically occur in fires (boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosions or “B.L.E.V.E's”; electrical explosions; smoke explosions or “back drafts”; and combustion explosions):
Identification: If the explosions encountered were the type typically encountered in fires, the firefighters would be expected to recognize them as such and name them. There are very few instances where they do so. On the contrary, they clearly feel these were different types of explosions than those they were used to encountering...
Power: Many eyewitnesses clearly thought they were watching explosions destroy the Twin Towers. But none of the common four types of fire-related explosions could accomplish this…
Pattern: …Many eyewitnesses reported regular, rapid energetic events in sequence down the building, which cannot be explained by any of the four common types of explosion.
The perception that explosions had destroyed W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 was so prevalent among firefighters that it became widely discussed. “At that point, a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges,” said Christopher Fenyo in his W.T.C Task Force Interview. John Coyle recalled in his interview, “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards…. Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”36
The Request for Correction filed with N.I.S.T in 2007 argued that N.I.S.T had, among other problems, ignored the eyewitness evidence of explosions contained in the World Trade Center Task Force Interviews. N.I.S.T responded by saying that it had reviewed them, and, “Taken as a whole, the interviews did not support the contention that explosives played a role in the collapse of the W.T.C Towers” — a markedly different position from the one given in its FAQs, which said that “There was no evidence (collected by…the Fire Department of New York) of any blast or explosions….”
In any case, MacQueen rejects N.I.S.T’s assessment, writing in the paper 118 Witnesses: The Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers:
We have 118 witnesses out of a pool of 503. Over 23 percent of our group are explosion witnesses. In my judgment, this is a very high percentage of witnesses, especially when we consider…[that Interviewees] were typically not asked about explosions, and, in most cases, were not even asked about the collapses of the towers. What testimony we have was volunteered, and it therefore represents not the maximum number of witnesses to explosions but the minimum number.
Conclusion
In this chapter we examined five areas of evidence
regarding the structural behavior of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C
2 during their destruction. Table 4 above presents
each area of evidence and shows how researchers
supporting each of the competing hypotheses have
accounted for this evidence. We found that N.I.S.T, because it decided to stop its analysis at the point of collapse initiation, performed “little analysis” of the buildings’ structural behavior during the process of their destruction, thus deliberately ignoring any evidence that could be derived from it. As a result, N.I.S.T’s final report provides virtually no explanation for the evidence examined above. The very limited explanations N.I.S.T does provide come mainly from its F.A.Q's webpage, and are speculative rather than based upon scientific analysis. On the other hand, the hypothesis of controlled demolition readily, simply, and completely explains all of the evidence regarding the structural behavior of W.T.C 1 and W.T.C 2 during their destruction.
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The Destruction of W.T.C 7
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