The Fall of the Towers (Above all else, believe the Party...)

I believe we've shown beyond any reasonable doubt that WTC-7 was brought down by a controlled demolition. Now let's look at the collapses of the Towers. We'll break our study down in sections - we'll look at the plane impact, the heat of the fires and the official theories regarding the collapses. If you don't need or care to read the background material provided you can skip down to "ALL YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW."

Plane Impact

What role did the planes impact have in the collapse of the Towers? According to MIT professor of material engineering Thomas Eagar the plane impact was insignificant because "the number of columns lost on the initial impact was not large and the loads were shifted to remaining columns in this highly redundant [Towers were designed to handle 5 times normal load] structure." Hyman Brown, construction manager for the Twin Towers stated the Towers were over-designed to withstand almost anything, including hurricanes...and an airplane hitting [them]."( Bollyn: American Free Press)

The Towers were designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707(comparable to a Boeing 767), the largest aircraft at the time. According to Leslie Robertson, the project's structural engineer, the Towers "could probably sustain multiple impacts of jet airliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door, this intense grid, and the plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting." (Brett;whatreallyhappened.com)

According to the NIST report loads were increases by 25% some areas of the building and reduced by 20% in others. The Towers were actually designed to tolerate load increases of 2000% so the increased load is far below what would cause structural failure. NIST claims the most of the fireproofing was dislodged by the impact of the planes and the ensuing fires caused the buildings to collapse.

In short, localized damage and high redundancy. Therefore, essentially the theory is the buildings collapsed due to fire. Remember that prior to 9/11 no steel-framed, high-rise building had ever collapsed due to fire. Because of the properties of steel, if fire were to bring down a steel-framed building down it must be intense, extensive and long lasting. Moreover a steel-framed building would visibly bend before it collapsed. The fires were neither extensive nor long lasting and the evidence indicates they weren't particularly hot.

The Heat of the Fires

Jet fuel (kerosene) can reach a maximum temperature of 1520 degrees F. Liquid fuels quickly boil and evaporate, so the result was ordinary office fires. The thick, black smoke indicates cool,oxygen-starved. The fires in the South Tower were cooler than in the North Tower since most of the jet fuel was burned outside in the huge fireball. It had few visible flames when it fell yet it collapsed faster than the North Tower.

NIST examined 16 perimeter columns and only 3 of them indicated temperatures above 482 degrees F. And none of the core columns examined even reached this temperature. So we have cool, localized and short-lasting fires. It's safe to say the supporting steel columns were not weakened to any appreciable degree. So why did the Towers fall?

The Official Theories of the Collapses of the Towers

Truss Failure Theory aka Pancake Theory

MIT professor Thomas Eagar's Truss Failure theory is probably the most widely known and accepted. It was presented to the public on the Nova program "How The Towers Fell." According to Eagar the relatively lightweight trusses that held up the floors weakened in one area, "unzipped" quickly around the building and started a successive pancake collapse.

There are several problems with this theory:

1) There were no stack of floors at the bottom of the buildings. Most of the mass fell outside of the footprint of the buildings. The non-mettallic material was pulverized and ejected laterally from the onset of the collapse. This is the supposed crushing weight that is causing the floors to fall at near free-fall speed.

2) Nova/Eagar used deceptive depictions of the structures of the Towers. They eliminated the massive steel cores, the perpendicular floor trusses and the corrugated steel pan that unified the structure. This gave the impression the Towers were flimsy structures that could easliy pancake. The truth is they were designed to withstand earthquakes, plane strikes and 140 mph winds. The core could support the entire structure support and the trusses had to be strong to shift the loads during high winds.

3) Eagar ignores the redundant design of the trusses. There were hundreds of points of connection between the floors and the core and perimeter columns. The failure of a few truss-column connections would not cause the nearly simultaneous failure of the other connections. In 1975, the North Tower withstood a hotter, longer fire suffering no structural damage and no trusses needed replacing.

5) The speed of the collapse is too fast. By Galileo's Law of Falling bodies an object dropped in a vacuum from the height of the Towers would reach the ground in 9.2 seconds. The Towers fell in about 13 - 16 seconds. A pancake collapse would be reactive - each floor would have to wait for the floors above them. Using the Law of Momentum Conservation 9/11 researcher Jim Hoffman calculated that it would take about 15 seconds for the floors to pancake even if they offered no resistance. Of course the floors that were, according to Eagar, designed to hold 1300 tons over their own weight, would have provided plenty of resistance.

6) Does not explain the total collapses of the buildings. Perfectly symmetrical pancaking of the floors would not account for the disappearance of the steel cores. The floors would have fallen down around the cores like records on a spindle. The perimeter walls might also have been left standing. Both the core and perimeter columns were anchored 70 ft. below street level and were abundantly cross braced. During its nearly 24 hour fire, the top ten floors of the Windsor Building pancaked yet the steel columns it collapsed around and the perimeter columns it collapsed inside of, remained intact.

In summary, the Truss Failure Theory cannot account for the rapid decent or total collapses of the Towers and must therefore be rejected.

NIST Report on the collapses of the Twin Towers:

Whereas Eagar suggested the truss-vertical column connection was weak, NIST asserted it was actually very strong. Their theory is that the heat of the fires caused the floors to sag causing the perimeter columns to bow inward. This increased the load on the core columns that were weakened by temperatures that reached 1832 degrees F. They used a computer model to simulate "collapse initiation" and assumed "global collapse" was then inevitable. By their own account they did not address the "structural behavior of the tower after the conditions for collapse were reached."

A few of the problems with the NIST Report:

1) UK experts who studied the NIST report objected saying the core could not pull the perimeter inwards via the floor.

2) What happens after "collapse initiation?" We certainly don't see columns being pulled inward. Also the pulling inwards of columns slows the collapse even further. Does it turn into a pancake collapse? It's unknown. We're left to guess here since they don't go beyond the start of the collapse.

3) The claim of core temperatures reaching 1832 F is pure speculation as we've seen the highest recorded temperature of the steel they tested was not even 500 degrees F.

4) Since no "global collapse" of a steel-framed building had ever occurred due to fire, they have no scientific basis to claim that it was inevitable. Every previous total collapse has been due to a controlled demolition.

5) NIST's timeline stopped at the start of the collapse thus ignoring the demolition-like features of the collapse.

6) They adjusted input parameters until they could obtain "collapse initiation" and refuse to show the visualizations of the collapse of the Towers.

The NIST report is meaningless and dishonest. Jim Hoffman has an extensive critque of the report.


ALL YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW

It's impossible to have a near free-fall collapse (had the floors been pancaking) and the total destruction of a building (massive resistance) at the same time. The buildings came down centered around their vertical axes following what would ordinarily be the path of most resistance, which means the integrity of the vertical support columns must have been breached simultaneously. Neither the fires nor the alledgedly pancaking floors could accomplish this.

So what could account for the simultaneous near free-fall collapses and destruction of the buildings? Explosives. We'll look at the evidence for explosives in the next article.