9-11/WTC7/Destruction

 9-11/WTC7/Destruction

Date	11 September 2001, 5:20:52 pm - 11 September 2001, 5:20:58 pm
Exposed by	Barry Jennings, Danny Jowenko
Interest of	David Chandler, Niels Harrit, Tony Rooke
Subpage	•9-11/WTC7/Destruction/Censorship •9-11/WTC7/Destruction/Foreknowledge
Description	Compared to the WTC Twin Towers, few people have seen video footage of the collapse of the 47-story WTC building 7, but the event was predicted and recorded by at least 3 TV networks and exactly resembles a controlled demolition. The event was subject to a news blackout by commercially controlled media for years afterwards, and no mention of WTC7 was made in the 9/11 Commission's final report.

As evidenced by masses of video the collapse is identical to a professional controlled demolition. How else can the perfectly symmetrical collapse, at free-fall speed, into its own footprint be explained?

Why was it demolished and how was it accomplished? Why do the FEMA and NIST reports try to explain the collapse based purely on impact damage from tower debris and a few random fires? Fires have never before or since lead to the collapse of a steel reinforced concrete building, far less a symmetrical, instantaneous freefall collapse which left residue of explosives.

Composite time photo of Building 7. A 2.25-sec. time period to move this distance is pure freefall
Photo credits

Explosions

New York City's corporation counsel, Michael Hess, accompanied by Barry Jennings report that they headed to the Office of Emergency Management's Emergency Operations Center, on the 23rd floor of WTC 7, seeking Mayor Rudy Giuliani. On arrival, Jennings telephoned to ask why the office was deserted and was instructed to leave immediately. Finding that the elevators would not work, they started down the stairs. When they reached the sixth floor, however, there was a powerful explosion beneath them, which prevented their escape by the stairs. They remained trapped on the eighth floor until rescued by firefighters.

NIST had recordings of explosions in the vicinity of Building 7, but withheld this evidence until well after issuing their final report. The final report did not account for even the possibility of these explosions. Recently, a legal suit forced NIST to release this critical evidence. Newly obtained 9/11 eyewitness footage that NIST attempted to keep secret contains what appears to be the sound of explosions coming from the vicinity of WTC 7 after the collapse of the twin towers.

The clip was released by NIST as part of a 3-terabyte package of video and photo data in response to a lawsuit brought by the International Center for 9/11 Studies.

The above video is from eyewitness Richard Peskin, who filmed ground zero from a high rise building that was in the vicinity of Building 7. The first portion of the footage is filmed immediately after the collapse of the closest tower to Building 7, WTC 1. At about 10 seconds into the clip, two clear explosions can be heard.

NIST did consider what they called a "blast scenario," but it assumed the planting of explosives about a single column shortly before the 5:20 PM collapse of Building 7. Their assumption was that whom ever would plant such explosives would have done it earlier in the day after the building was vacated. NIST rejected this scenario because they said no audio record of a blast with sufficient decibel level existed.

We now know NIST had records of several explosive blasts around 11:00 a.m. which they attempted to keep hidden from the public.

But - even if there were no explosions, there is a problem in that there was no evidence of fires during the first 100 minutes following the Collapse of the second (closest) tower which caused the debris damage alleged to have started them

However, according to the NIST Final Report:

1. Fires on floor 22 were not involved in the critical damage to the building. Also fires first observed 2 hours after debris strikes from WTC 1 on floors 29 & 30, also were not floors with critical damage.
2. No fires moved from floor to floor
3. The floors contributing to the critical fire damage were on 7-9 and 11-13. The earliest evidence of fires on any of these floors was 3 hrs, 40 minutes after the debris struck.

Foreknowledge

No known fatalities occurred as a result of the collapse of building 7, since prior to its collapse, a 4 block radius was cordoned off around the building, because fire officials expected the building to collapse. People were moved away from the building, with warnings that building 7 would "be coming down", and that it was "about to blow up". This expectation was communicated to CBS, BBC

Fox News

One minute before it happened, Fox News announced that "we are getting word from New York right now that another buliding has collapsed". They were showing streaming video of WTC7 as it collapsed, but the news anchors were remarkably unphased and continued as if nothing remarkable had happened..

BBC

The collapse of WTC 7 is announced on the BBC before it happened

At 4:57 EST, BBC NYC correspondent Jane Standley, in conversation with Philip Hayton the BBC London Presenter, reported live on air that the building had collapsed. The 'collapse' was headlined in the 5:00pm new roundups of both the BBC and US TV channels. The video of her report has her framed against a large window with a view of the smoking WTC site in the background and building 7 (which she was reporting no longer existed) clearly and prominently visible in the background. The live video feed was severed at 5:15pm whilst Philip Hayton was still talking to her. The building collapsed shortly thereafter at 5:21pm.

Freefall Collapse

Chart illustrating the free-fall period of the WTC7 collapse

The NIST Final Report explained the 2.25-sec freefall resulted in a drop spanning eight stories. No explanation was given as to how the structural components below could have suddenly offered no resistance.

At the time NIST was maintaining the building collapsed at 40% gravitational acceleration, high school physics teacher David Chandler submitted a graphical analysis of a video showing the collapse. This led to NIST acknowledgement of 100% gravitational acceleration, which is free fall. An updated video analysis by Chandler with more recent information from NIST is available from Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth on YouTube.

To gain an appreciation for eight stories of freefall, consider this figure showing two slices of time. The start of freefall is shown on the left, and the end of freefall on the right. The eight stories are shown as a block near the bottom left. This would be hidden from our view, and we don’t know if it was a block of eight floors as shown, or if the floors with structure removed were distributed in some manner. It’s probably more likely the columns on single floors were taken out every third floor, to leave column segments convenient in length for later removal.

After the period of freefall had ended, the remaining upper part of the building continued to accelerate downward, but because of resistance of the lower structure, descended at something less than gravitational acceleration.

No Mention of the Collapse of WTC 7 in The 9/11 Commission Report

Lee Hamilton - Joint Chair of the 9-11 Commission of Inquiry

Lee Hamilton, the former co-chair of the 9-11/Commission, gives a wide-ranging interview to the CBC about Without Precedent, a book he co-authored on the 9-11 Commission (see August 15, 2006). The interviewer, Evan Solomon, points out that the 9/11 Commission's final report does not actually mention the collapse of Building 7, and Hamilton says he does not recall whether the Commission made a specific decision to leave it out.

Commercially-controlled media Blackout

Full article: 9/11 WTC7 Media Blackout

The commercially-controlled media rapidly instituted a complete blackout of all reporting of the WTC7 event, which was effective at forestalling widespread discussion of it for many years. The effectiveness of this can be gauged from the 9/11 Commission's utter failure to mention WTC7's collapse in their first report. After 2007, this policy was changed for the production of 'hit pieces' intended to discredit those who question the official account of a fire induced collapse.

Explosive Residues

Danish Chemistry Professor Niels Harrit published a paper entitled "Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe" in the Open Chemical Physics Journal. He presented evidence that dust produced by the WTC collapse contained residues of nano-thermite (an explosive)..

FEMA-Report Appendix on Swiss-Cheese Looking Steel Sample

Eroded A36 wide-flange beam

As commented by 911 Research, FEMA's WTC Building Performance Study, Appendix C Limited Metallurgical Study, describes observations interesting from a forensic standpoint, that steel members were severely corroded by sulfidative attack.

In an article by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, "A Search for Clues In Towers' Collapse; Engineers Volunteer to Examine Steel Debris Taken to Scrapyards," New York Times, February 2, 2002, the authors state, "Perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation involves extremely thin bits of steel collected from the trade towers and from 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story high rise that also collapsed for unknown reasons. The steel apparently melted away, but no fire in any of the buildings was believed to be hot enough to melt steel outright."

The characteristic of severe corroding by sulfidative attack produces "Eutectic Steel." A short YouTube video probing this aspect was produced by Jonathan Cole, P.E., titled "9/11 Experiments: The Mysterious Eutectic Steel."

NIST Did Not Mention Swiss-Cheese Looking Steel Sample

Whereas the authors of FEMA Appendix C took the approach of calling for further research, since, for example, the rate of corrosion was unknown, NIST took the approach of saying, since it is unknown, the relationship between when the corrosion occurred, and the collapse can’t be determined. Furthermore, NIST noted the Appendix C authors stated they believed one of the steel samples came from WTC 7. NIST treated this as equivalent to the location being unknown, and it was not possible to link the first sample conclusively to WTC 7. Because of this, it wasn’t studied further.

This explanation was provided in a letter dated June 24, 2010, from NIST Senior Communications Officer, Michael E. Newman, to Ronald H. Brookman. Mr. Brookman had written to NIST Director Patrick Gallagher inquiring on this and other matters, May 31, 2010.

Larry Silverstein "Pull it"

Larry Silverstein took out a long lease on the World Trade Center only six weeks before 9/11. In a 2002 PBS documentary entitled 'America Rebuilds', Silverstein made the following statement about Building 7:

I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse.'"

Subsequently, Silverstein Properties issued a statement denying that "pull it" meant "demolish building 7", claiming that when Silverstein advised the fire commander that "the smartest thing to do is pull it," what he meant was that it would be wise to pull a contingent of firefighters out of the building, although at that time, there were no firefighters in the building.

See Also

• Building What? How SCADs Can Be Hidden in Plain Sight - David Ray Griffin
• BBC reported Building 7 had collapsed 20 Minutes before it fell - By Paul Watson and Alex Jones. A detailed analysis of the BBC reporting of the Building 7 collapse
• RememberBuilding7.org on Silverstein's statement
• History Commons WTC 9/11 Timeline - An impressive collection of evidence, which tells quite a different story