"...credible and shocking enough to predict outcries to arrest George W. Bush, U.S.
officials, Congress intel. members & media execs for criminal acts and coverup if millions
of Americans view & understand this evidence."
TomFlocco.com
Article By Morgan Reynolds Former Member Of The Bush Admin
Why Did the Trade Center Skyscrapers Collapse?
by Morgan Reynolds
"It didn’t seem real… There are thousands of these steel beams that just fell like
pickup sticks."
~ John Albanese, volunteer firefighter and amateur photographer
"What struck us – guys like Warren Jennings and myself, who have spent basically all our
lives in the scrap business – we’d never seen steel this heavy, this huge, this massive. It
was just unbelievable."
To explain the unanticipated free-fall collapses of the twin towers at the World Trade
Center on September 11, 2001, mainstream experts (also see The American Professional
Constructor, October 2004, pp. 12–1Cool offer a three-stage argument: 1) an airplane impact
weakened each structure, 2) an intense fire thermally weakened structural components that
may have suffered damage to fireproofing materials, causing buckling failures, which, in
turn, 3) allowed the upper floors to pancake onto the floors below.
Many will nod their head, OK, that does it and go back to watching the NBA finals or
whatever, but I find this theory just about as satisfying as the fantastic conspiracy theory
that "19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant
Afghanistan" caused 9/11. The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own
terms, but its blinkered narrowness and lack of breadth is the paramount defect unshared by
its principal scientific rival – controlled demolition. Only professional demolition appears
to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapses of WTC 1 (North Tower),
WTC 2 (South Tower), and the much-overlooked collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7 at 5:21
pm on that fateful day.
In defending the official account and its clones that try to explain the unprecedented
collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers without demolition, heat arguably is more
important than structural impact. That’s obviously true for building WTC 7 because there was
no alleged airplane impact.
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. 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 "eams and girders sagged and twisted," but "despite this extraordinary exposure,
the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage" (quoted by Griffin, p.
15). Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no
resemblance to what we observed at the WTC.
Second, severe structural damage to the WTC towers would have required fires that were not
only large but growing throughout the buildings and burning for a considerable period of
time. None of these conditions was present. "The lack of flames is an indication that the
fires were small, and the dark smoke is an indication that the fires were suffocating,"
points out Hufschmid (p. 35). Eyewitnesses in the towers, as well as police and
firefighters, reported (pp. 199–200) the same thing.
Third, the impact opening was 15 floors lower in the South Tower than in the North Tower,
where core columns were thicker, so the South Tower fire had to produce more heat to raise
the steel temperatures to soften up (thermally weaken) the steel columns. Yet its fires were
considerably smaller and 30 minutes shorter in duration. The Tower collapsed after burning
only 56 minutes. A prime candidate to explain why "the wrong tower fell first" is that the
small dying fire in the South Tower forced the hand of the mass murderers who decided to
trigger demolition earlier than planned in order to sustain the lie that fire caused the
collapse. The North Tower stood for another 29 minutes and its core steel was thinner at its
upper stories. The 1991 Meridian Plaza fire burned for 19 hours and the fire was so extreme
that flames came from dozens of windows on many floors. It did not collapse.
Fourth, implicitly trying to explain away these difficulties, the current NIST
investigation, conducted by "an extended investigation team of 236 people," makes "dislodged
fireproofing" the key variable to explain the collapses. Supposedly, "the probable collapse
sequence for the WTC towers are (sic) based on the behavior of thermally weakened structural
components that had extensive damage to fireproofing or gypsum board fire protection induced
by the debris field generated by aircraft impact" (p. 111). "Had fireproofing not been
dislodged by debris field," this team of government-paid experts claims, "temperature rise
of structural components would likely have been insufficient to induce global collapse" (p.
108). Perhaps acknowledging the lack of direct evidence for its conjectures, the NIST admits
that "a full collapse of the WTC floor system would not occur even with a number of failed
trusses or connections" and it "recognizes inherent uncertainties" (pp. 110 and 112). The
NIST will have to boost its creativity to plausibly explain the WTC 7 collapse because it
won’t have the benefit of tales of aircraft and debris fields.
Aside from specific defects in the fire collapse theory, a wide variety of facts undermine
it:
* Photos show people walking around in the hole in the North Tower "where 10,000 gallons
of jet fuel were supposedly burning. The women (p. 27) seem to (sic) looking down to the
ground" (the NIST "Response" pdf, p. 62, also shows a similar photo of the same blond woman
with light-colored slacks looking over the edge of the 94th floor).
* By the time the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower’s flames had already
vanished, burning for only 16 minutes.
* The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was
suffocating rather than the sprinkler system dousing the fires.
* FDNY fire fighters remain under a gag order (Rodriguezvs-1.Bush.pdf, p. 10) to not
discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a 9/11 gag
order.
* Even the 9/11 Commission (Kean-Zelikow) Report acknowledges that "none of the [fire]
chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible" (Ch. 9, p. 302).
It shocked everyone that day, amateur and professional alike, although some firefighters
realized that so-called secondary explosive devices were a risk.
Griffin (pp. 25–7) succinctly identifies the primary defects in the official account of the
WTC collapses, and its sister theories. These problems were entirely ignored by The 9/11
Commission Report (2004), so the government appointees must have found it difficult to
account for the following facts:
1. 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.
2. The fires, especially in the South Tower and WTC-7, were small.
3. 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.
4. WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams
(pp. 68–9).
5. In a PBS documentary, Larry Silverstein, the WTC lease-holder, recalled talking to the
fire department commander on 9/11 about WTC-7 and said, "…maybe the smartest thing to do is
pull it," slang for demolish it.
6. FEMA, given the uninviting task of explaining the collapse of Building 7 with mention
of demolition verboten admitted that the best it could come up with had "only a low
probability of occurrence."
7. 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.
Professional demolition, by contrast, can explain all of these facts and more. Demolition
means placing explosives throughout a building, and detonating them in sequence to weaken
"the structure so it collapses or folds in upon itself" (p. 44). In conventional demolitions
gravity does most of the work, although it probably did a minority on 9/11, so heavily were
the towers honeycombed with explosives.
1. Each WTC building collapse occurred at virtually free-fall speed (approximately 10
seconds or less).
2. Each building collapsed, for the most part, into its own footprint.
3. Virtually all the concrete (an estimated 100,000 tons in each tower) on every floor
was pulverized into a very fine dust, a phenomenon that requires enormous energy and could
not be caused by gravity alone ("…workers can’t even find concrete. ‘It’s all dust,’ [the
official] said").
4. Dust exploded horizontally for a couple hundred feet, as did debris, at the beginning
of each tower’s collapse.
5. Collapses were total, leaving none of the massive core columns sticking up hundreds of
feet into the air.
6. Salvage experts were amazed at how small the debris stacks were.
7. The steel beams and columns came down in sections under 30 feet long and had no signs
of "softening"; there was little left but shorn sections of steel and a few bits of
concrete.
8. Photos and videos of the collapses all show "demolition waves," meaning "confluent
rows of small explosions" along floors (blast sequences).
9. According to many witnesses, explosions occurred within the buildings.
10. Each collapse had detectable seismic vibrations suggestive of underground explosions,
similar to the 2.3 earthquake magnitude from a demolition like the Seattle Kingdome (p.
108).
11. Each collapse produced molten steel identical to that generated by explosives,
resulting in "hot spots" that persisted for months (the two hottest spots at WTC-2 and WTC-7
were approximately 1,350o F five days after being continuously flooded with water, a
temperature high enough to melt aluminum (p. 70).
Controlled demolition would have required unimpeded access to the WTC, access to explosives,
avoiding detection, and the expertise to orchestrate the deadly destruction from a nearby
secure location. Such access before 9/11 likely depended on complicity by one or more WTC
security companies. These companies focus on "access control" and as security specialist
Wayne Black says, "When you have a security contract, you know the inner workings of
everything." Stratesec, a now-defunct company that had security contracts at the World Trade
Center and Dulles International Airport, should be investigated, among others, because of
the strange coincidence that President Bush’s brother, Marvin P. Bush, and his cousin, Wirt
D. Walker III, were principals in the company, with Walker acting as CEO from 1999 until
January 2002 and Marvin reportedly in New York on 9/11. At least one report claims that a
"power down" condition prevailed on September 8–9 (pdf, p. 45) at WTC to complete a "cabling
upgrade," presenting an opportunity to plant explosives with low risk of detection.
A related point is that demolition companies go to considerable expense to wire steel-framed
skyscrapers with explosives to produce safe implosions, and they would love to do it more
cheaply by simply setting two small fires like those that (allegedly) caved in building 7.
Apparently, the terrorist-inventors have kept this new technology secret.
Why would the killers destroy WTC-7, especially since a collapse would arouse suspicion in
some quarters? A logical if unproven theory is that the perpetrators used Mayor Giuliani’s
sealed OEM "bunker" on the 23d story of WTC-7 to conduct the twin tower implosions and then
destroyed the building and evidence to cover up their crimes, just as a murderer might set
his victim’s dwelling ablaze to cover up the crime (one in four fires is arson). Giuliani’s
"undisclosed secret location" was perfect because it had been evacuated by 9:45 a.m. on
9/11, it enabled unmolested work, provided a ringside seat, was bullet- and bomb-resistant,
had its own secure air and water supply, and could withstand winds of 160 mph, necessary
protection from the wind blasts generated by collapsing skyscrapers.
There is special import in the fact of free-fall collapse (item one in the list immediately
above), if only because everyone agrees that the towers fell at free-fall speed. This makes
pancake collapse with one floor progressively falling onto the floor below an unattractive
explanation. Progressive pancaking cannot happen at free-fall speed ("g" or 9.8 m/s2).
Free-fall would require "pulling" or removing obstacles below before they could impede
(slow) the acceleration of falling objects from above. Sequenced explosions, on the other
hand, explain why the lower floors did not interfere with the progress of the falling
objects above. The pancake theory fails this test.
If we put the murder of 2,749 innocent victims momentarily aside, the only unusual technical
feature of the collapses of the twin towers was that the explosions began at the top,
immediately followed by explosions from below. WTC-7, by contrast, was entirely
conventional, imploding from bottom up.
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. 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 prove to be sound. Revised engineering and construction practices, for example, based
on the belief that the twin towers collapsed through airplane damage and subsequent fires is
premature, to say the least.
More importantly, momentous political and social consequences would follow if impartial
observers concluded that professionals imploded the WTC. 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. Meanwhile, the job of scientists,
engineers and impartial researchers everywhere is to get the scientific and engineering
analysis of 9/11 right, "though heaven should fall." Unfortunately, getting it right in
today’s "security state" demands daring because explosives and structural experts have been
intimidated in their analyses of the collapses of 9/11.
June 9, 2005
Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D. [send him mail], is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University and
former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis
headquartered in Dallas, TX. He served as chief economist for the US Department of Labor
during 2001–2, George W. Bush's first term.
