Mysteries of the Twin Towers

Will the National Commission reveal the truth?

by Rodger Herbst, BAAE, ME

The attacks of September 11, 2001 are fueling the Bush administration's preemptive wars abroad, as well as a programmatic attack on civil liberties at home, yet they still have not been adequately investigated. In January 2002, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney individually asked Tom Daschle that inquiries be limited to the congressional intelligence committees.The resulting inquiry, following damaging revelations, was effectively shut down by Dick Cheney when he denounced it as a source of a "National Security Agency leak". The inquiry was not permitted to tell the full story, to make the President accountable, or to propose legislation for reform. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March-April 2003 "Slow Walked and Stone Walled" by John Prados.)

Title VI of Public Law 107-306 established a new Congressional National Commission, to examine and report upon the facts and causes of the attacks, and build upon the investigations of other entities. This commission, charged with completing its work prior to the 2004 presidential election, has already suffered delays, and will be hard pressed to finish its work in the allotted time. The cause of the collapse of the towers has not been determined, and the subject has not even been explicitly included in the charter of the new commission.

On December 25, 2001 The New York Times reported that some of the nation's leading structural engineers and fire-safety experts believe the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) was inadequate, and are calling for a new, independent and better-financed inquiry. Experts critical of the investigation included some who actually took part in it. The team of some 20 investigators had inadequate financial and staff support, had been prevented from interviewing witnesses, and had even been unable to obtain basic information such as detailed blueprints of the buildings. (NYT, 12/25/01 www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/nyregion/25TOWE.html) The City of New York continues to hold hundreds of documents and audio tapes recording the response of emergency services to the September 11 attacks on the WTC. (NYT 7/23/02) New York State Supreme Court Justice Richard Braun ruled in February 2003 that the city had not provided sufficient reason for withholding these documents. The City of New York has appealed this ruling. (AP 2/6/2003)

Unofficial Comments

The WTC towers did not collapse because of the airplane impacts alone, because both towers stood for an hour or more after impact. Based on videos and photographs of the collapse, experts came to various conclusions. In an article dated October 4, 2001, Professor Wilem Frischmann, of the Pell Frischmann Group and the City University, London, said that the aircraft puncturing of the outer steel shells of the towers would not in itself have caused the towers to fall. Although the explosion caused by the fuel-laden aircraft would have been intense, the lack of available oxygen inside the towers would, according to Professor Frischmann, have limited the fireball's temperature to less than 1,000 Celsius, within the tower design limits. The towers were designed to survive impact with a 707 commercial aircraft and ensuing fires due to burning fuel, comparable to that of the 767 aircraft that struck the towers.

Professor Thomas Eager, professor of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems at MIT, similarly concluded that the fire could not possibly have been hot enough to melt steel. His analysis has been published by the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society.

"Fire has never caused a steel building to collapse," according to author Eric Hufschmid, "So how did a 56-minute fire bring down a steel building as strong as the South Tower?...The Meridian Plaza fire in Philadelphia was extreme, but it did not cause the building to collapse. The fire in the South Tower seems insignificant by comparison".(Eric Hufschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack Endpoint Software 2002).

On August 2, 2002, discovery of a "lost" audiotape was reported. This tape is important, because it established that firefighters actually reached the crash zone on the 78th floor of the south tower, that the crash zone was not a raging inferno, and that the firefighters apparently believed they were in control of the situation. (www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/nyregion/04WTC.html) and (www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0.11209.769307.00.html) Reports of explosions by members of the NYC Fire Department and others also appear in the mainstream media. Hufschmid, J. M. King, and others have noted that the explosives theory explains very well the apparent removal of all structural support from the lower floors, and the neat demolition-like collapse of the towers. (www.serendipity.li/WTC.html)

Evidence for Explosives

There are witness accounts, and photographic and video evidence available which suggest that explosions actually did occur within the Twin Towers prior to their collapse.

Teresa Veliz, who escaped from the 47th floor of the North Tower: noted : "The flashlight led us into Borders bookstore, up an escalator and out to Church Street. There were explosions going off everywhere. I was convinced that there were bombs planted all over the place and someone was sitting at a control panel pushing detonator buttons. I was afraid to go down Church Street toward Broadway, but I had to do it. I ended up on Vesey Street. There was another explosion. And another. I didn't know where to run." (September 11: An Oral History, Dean E. Murphy, 2002, pp. 9-15)

On September 11 the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) interviewed one of its New York-based reporters, Steve Evans: "I was at the base of the second tower...that was hit," Evans said. "There was an explosion-I didn't think it was an explosion-but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake...then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions... We can only wonder at the kind of damage-the kind of human damage-which was caused by those explosions-those series of explosions," he said.

Earthquake data was recorded by seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, 21 miles north of the WTC. Quakes occurred mid way during each collapse, before any rubble even hit the ground. (www.serendipity.li/wot/bollyn2.htm: American Free Press)

The towers were about 1300 ft tall. Such a height produces a time of nine seconds for an object to fall from the top of the towers. The tower collapse lasted barely longer than this, which suggests that the underlying structure was removed, allowing essentially free fall of the entire structure. Hufshmid's book shows frames from a video looking up at the South Tower. The frames show the collapse "progressing floor by floor in a nearly perfectly balanced manner". After ribbons of dust blow out of the windows of one floor, they grow into larger dust clouds; meanwhile ribbons of dust blow out of the windows of the next lower floor, and so on. Hufschmid speculates small explosive packages were set off in the upper floors first, and progressively larger packages at successively lower levels. Detailed photos show debris, as well as the dust of pulverized concrete being ejected horizontally up to several times the width of the towers during the collapse. According to Hufschmid, concrete is only pulverized in mid air in this manner by explosives.

The remarks of Mark Loizeaux, president of CDI of Phoenix, Maryland, add credence to a large, lower explosion: "pools of molten steel were found...at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels... three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed" Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800* Fahrenheit. (www.serendipity.li/wot/bollyn2.htm: American Free Press)

The Official Assessment

The decision to rapidly recycle the 300,000 tons of steel columns, beams and trusses from the WTC in the days immediately after 9/11 adversely effected the inquiry, and curiously no forensic examination of the debris was permitted by the agency in charge, the FBI. On January 4, 2002: A firefighter trade magazine with ties to the New York Fire Department called the investigation into the collapse of the WTC a "half-baked farce." The article pointed out that the probe has not looked at all aspects of the disaster and has had limited access to documents and other evidence. "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately." It concluded that a growing number of fire protection engineers have theorized that "the structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers." These fire engineering specialists adopted the notion of a failure of lightweight trusses connecting building perimeter to load-bearing central columns. (New York Daily News, 1/4/02 2002/nydailynews010402.html)

Although the building's plans have not been accessible for investigation, photos of tower construction suggest that lateral steel floor beams anchored the perimeter to the central columns, safely enabling large lateral loads due to wind. Thus the "lightweight truss hypothesis" appears to be false. (www.nerdcities.com/guardian/WTC/wtc-demolition.htm)

On May 1, 2002: FEMA released its report of the WTC collapses. It concluded, "with the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined." (FEMA study, 5/1/02 www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm) A tiny fraction of the steel beams from the tower debris were inspected. A NYT article of February 2002 noted that pieces of steel were found that were "apparently melted and vaporized not solely because of the heat of fires, but also because of a corrosive contaminant that was somehow released in the conflagrations." Recommendations in Appendix C of the FEMA WTC report noted: "The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of samples 1 and 2 constitute an unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified."

Surviving physical evidence.

Not all of the evidence was lost. Dr. W. Gene Corley, who headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse, noted that 80 pieces of steel were saved. ( www.serendipity.li/wot/bollyn2.htm: American Free Press)

Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Berkeley testified "I have identified and saved some components of the structures that appear to have been subjected to intense fire or impact of fast moving objects. " (cryptome.org/wtc-hearing.htm) Some physical evidence is therefore still available, and could be further tested.

A "911 Citizens Watch" has been organized to monitor the progress of the current National Commission. Citizens Watch has also recently gotten an opportunity to present key unanswered questions to the National Commission, and intends to keep pressing until all questions are adequately answered.

You are invited to participate in this process. See www.911citizenswatch.org and www.unansweredquestions.org.