“Our take-home message today is that the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder told journalists at this morning’s press conference in Gaithersburg, Md. “WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from diesel fuel fires.”
Did a hot furniture fire really bring down World Trade Center 7? Or, was it a controlled demolition?
The following is an interesting letter sent by Richard Gage, AIA – Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth to NIST in response to its Invitation for Written Comments.
Undisputed Facts Point to the Controlled Demolition of WTC
Emailed to NIST on January 4, 2007
I’m Richard Gage, AIA, a licensed architect of 20 years. I represent Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a fast-growing body of more than 230 architects and engineers dedicated solely to bringing out the truth about all three high-rise building collapses on 9/11. We believe that we have answers to your questions about the puzzling collapse of World Trade Center 7.
In more than 100 steel-framed, high-rise fires (most of them very hot, very large and very longlasting), not ne has collapsed, ever. So it behooves all of us, as your own former chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division, Dr. James Quintiere, said, “to look at real alternatives that might have been the cause of these collapses.”
Let’s start with temperatures – 1,340˚ F. temperatures, recorded in thermal images of the surface of the World Trade Center rubble pile a week after 9/11 by NASA’s AVIRIS equipment on USGS overflights.3
Such temperatures cannot be achieved by oxygen-starved hydrocarbon fires.
Such fires burn at only 600 to 800˚ F.4 Remember, there was no fire on the top of the pile. The source of this incredible heat was therefore below the surface of the rubble, where it must have been far hotter than 1,340 degrees.
Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., who was hired for the Building 7 cleanup, said that “molten steel was found at 7 WTC.” Leslie Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, stated that on October 5, “21 days after the attacks, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” Fire department personnel, recorded on video, reported seeing “molten steel running down the channel rails… like you’re in a foundry – like lava from a volcano.” Joe O’Toole, a Bronx firefighter, saw a crane lifting a steel beam vertically from deep within a pile. He said “it was dripping from the molten steel.”
Bart Voorsanger, an architect hired to save “relics from the rubble,” stated about the multi-ton “meteorite” that it was a “fused element of molten steel and concrete.” The knowledge that this evidence even exists was denied by one of your top engineers, John Gross, in his appearance at the University of Texas in April of this year. Steel melts at about 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit, about twice the temperature of the World Trade Center Tower 1 and 2 fires as estimated by NIST. So what melted the steel?
Appendix C of FEMA’s BPAT Report (attached to this email) documents steel samples showing rapid oxidation, sulfidation, and intergranular melting.11 A liquid eutectic mixture, including sulfur from an unknown source, caused intense corrosion of the steel, gaping holes in wide flange beams, and the thinning of half-inch-thick flanges to almost razor-sharpness in the World Trade Center 7 steel. The New York Times called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”
NIST left all of this crucial forensic evidence out of its report. Why? Because it didn’t fit in with the official conspiracy theory.
Last year, physicist Steven Jones, two other physicists, and a geologist analyzed the slag at the nds of the beams and in the samples of the previously molten metal.12 They found iron, aluminum, sulfur, manganese and fluorine – the chemical evidence of thermate, a high-tech incendiary cutting charge used by the military to cut through steel like a hot knife through butter.
The by-product of the thermate reaction is molten iron! There’s no other possible source for all the molten iron that was found. One of thermate’s key ingredients is sulfur, which can form the liquid eutectic that FEMA found and lower the melting point of steel.
In addition, World Trade Center 7’s catastrophic structural failure showed every characteristic of explosive, controlled demolition. You can see all these characteristics at our website www.AE911truth.org. The destruction began suddenly at the base of the building. Several first responders reported explosions occurring about a second before the collapse. There was the symmetrical, near-free-fall speed of collapse, through the path of greatest resistance – with 40,000 tons of steel designed to resist this load – straight down into its own footprint. This requires that all the columns have to fail within a fraction of a second of each other – perimeter columns as well as core columns. There was also the appearance of mistimed explosions(squibs?) at the upper seven floors on the network video recordings of the collapse. And we have expert testimony from a European demolitions expert, Danny Jowenko, who said “This is controlled demolition… a team of experts did this… This is professional work, without any doubt.”
Fire cannot produce these effects. Fire produces large, gradual deformations and asymmetrical collapses. Thermate can produce all of these effects used in conjunction with linear shaped charges. If the thermate is formed into ultra-fine particles, as has been accomplished at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is called super-thermate, and is very explosive.
The National Fire Protection Association’s NFPA 921 Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations (1998 Edition) dictates in fire investigations that certain residues should be tested for. Thermate would leave behind signs of sulfidation/corrosion by sulfur. Such residues were in fact noted in Appendix C of the FEMA BPAT report (see note 11). “If the physical evidence establishes one factor, such as the presence of an accelerant, that may be sufficient to establish the cause even where other factors such as ignition source cannot be determined.”15 Thermate and sulfur obviously qualify as accelerants in this case (with regard to the destruction of steel which in turn could have caused the near-free-fall-speed collapse). (The fires were not particularly suspicious, but Building 7’s collapse was, because of its symmetry and speed.)
Because NIST seems to have forgotten or neglected to apply key features of the scientific method, I am including as an attachment to this submission Steven E. Jones, “Revisiting 9/11/2001 — Applying the Scientific Method”, Journal of 911 Studies, April 2007, http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/JonesWTC911SciMethod.pdf.
How much longer must we endure NIST’s cover-up of how Building 7 was actually destroyed? Millions of Americans,16 including the 230+ architects and engineers and 600 others of AE911Truth.org, demand that NIST come clean with a full-throttle, fully resourced and transparent forensic investigation of the evidence of the controlled demolition of Building 7.
References
1 AE911Truth.org.
2 James Quintiere, Ph.D., presentation at the 2007 World Fire Safety Conference June 4 and June 5, 2007,
“Questions on the WTC Investigations,” quoted in Alan Miller, “Former Chief of NIST’s Fire Science Division Calls for Independent Review of World Trade Center Investigation,” OpEdNews.com, August 21, 2007, http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/genera_alan_mil_070820_former_chief_of_nist.htm.
3 OFR 01-0429: World Trade Center USGS Thermal, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/thermal.r09.html,cited in Roger N. Clark, Robert O. Green, et al., OFR 01-0429: World Trade Center USGS Imaging Spectroscopy,USGS Open-File Report 01-0429, “Environmental Studies of the World Trade Center area after the September 11,2001 attack,” November 27, 2001, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/.
4 This is a correction from my spoken statement. Moreover, according to NIST NCSTAR 1 (http://wtc.nist.gov/NISTNCSTAR1CollapseofTowers.pdf), p. 29, the highest temperature typically reached by fires of common building combustibles is 1,100˚ C. Moreover, even for WTC 1, where the fires were ignited by jet fuel, NIST estimated the temperature range as between 500˚ and 1,000˚ C. The high end of this range is about 2/3 the melting point of steel. There is no evidence to support the idea that the fires in WTC 7 were any hotter than this. On the contrary, the holes in WTC 7 caused by falling steel from WTC 1, which would have fed oxygen to the fires in WTC 7, were much smaller than those in WTC 1 and farther from the observed flames.
5 Christopher Bollyn, “New Seismic Data Refutes Official Explanation,” American Free Press, September 3, 2002,http://web.archive.org/web/20020905195530/http://www.americanfreepress.net/09_03_02/NEW_SEISMIC_/new_seismic_.html.
6 James Williams, SEAUNEWS, The Newsletter of the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, October 2001, page3, http://www.seau.org/SEAUNews-2001-10.pdf. The words appear without quotes, so they might be Williams.
7 “Molten Metal Flows at Ground Zero,” posted November 16, 2006, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3060923273573302287&sourceid=docidfeed&hl=en.
8 Jennifer Lin, “Recovery worker reflects on months spent at Ground Zero,” May 29, 2002, Knight-Ridder, cited in David Ray Griffin, 9/11, American Empire, and Christian Faith, May 5, 2006, Global Research,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2393.
9 Relics In The Rubble, http://bsdb.nfshost.com/ae911truth_v13/Relics_in_the_Rubble_Meteorite.wmv, excerpted as “Molten Steel Found in Ruins of World Trade Center,” posted May 31, 2007,http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=9841565.
10 “NIST Lead Engineer Questioned About 9/11 ~ Denies Molten Metal,” posted May 21, 2007, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7609798949445498784. One of AE911Truth’s member-signers was present when Dr. Gross made his denial. He denied not only that the reports of molten steel or iron were true, but even knowing of any such reports having been made by any eyewitnesses. This video provides another copy of the clip referenced in “Molten Metal Flows at Ground Zero,” cited above.
11 Jonathan Barnett, Ronald R. Biederman, and R. D. Sisson, Jr., “Limited Metallurgical Examination,” undated, http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_apc.pdf.
12 Steven Jones, “Can one PROVE the use of thermate/superthermate?”, “Answers to Objections and Questions,”July 18, 2006, Journal of 9/11 Studies, http://www.journalof911studies.com/articles/JonesAnswersQuestionsWorldTradeCenter.pdf.
13 Posted on YouTube in three parts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3DRhwRN06I, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sep-HDZoEBM&feature=related, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boNzLZInbjU.
14 John Gartner, “Military Reloads with Nanotech,” Technology Review (MIT), January 21, 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/14105/.
15 “NFPA 921 Section 12-2.4 : Undetermined Fire Cause,” reproduced at http://www.interfire.org/res_file/92112m.asp.
16 Mike Berger, “Zogby Poll Finds Over 70 Million Voting Age Americans Support New 9/11 Investigation,” May
22, 2006, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060522022041421.
Paul Plante says
Did a hot furniture fire really bring down World Trade Center 7?
Oh, my goodness, of course it did!
It was really the drapes and the pictures that people kept on their desks that were the main cause.
WHAT BULL****!
And I recall talking about a controlled demolition years ago now, because there was no other way that building could have come down like it did.
And thermite, which is used to weld rebar together, is as common as dirt and have been around for decades.
But notwithstanding, of course it had to be the office furnishings that did it, for what else could it possibly have been?
Bob says
Just another demonstration of political corruption from all parties .
Paul Plante says
History is what those in power want history to be, and thus it has always been, probably for all time, and that is hardly unique to us, today, and here is yet another case of it right above here.
And it is so easy for those in power, i.e. Joe Biden and DEMOCRAT CENTRAL, the Democrat brain center that controls the minds and thought of all Democrats as if they were the Borg on Star Trek, a true GROUP THINK MIND in the programmed minds of those who are card-carrying Democrats, to do so today, have history be what they want it to be, depending on the day of the week, and the needs of the moment, because for so many generations now, Americans have been conditioned to obey, not question.
Stuart Bell says
That was a CIA building….
Stay hydrated, Fools.
Paul Plante says
“Was” is right!