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WTC Building 7 was a 47 story skyscraper and part of the World Trade Center Complex. On 9/11/2001 at 5:20pm it collapsed to the ground in under 12 seconds. It was not hit by an aircraft like its sister buildings, the WTC twin towers 1 and 2. Professor Leroy Hulsey, head of the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (and a recognized expert in forensic engineering) along with two graduate assistants recently concluded a 4 year investigation into the extraordinary collapse of this New York skyscraper.
The official body charged with investigating and reporting on the collapse, the USA’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), had previously issued a report stating that the collapse had been caused by office fires burning around floors 12 and 13 during the course of the day. These office fires they believed caused a structural failure starting in the North East corner of the building at column 79, floor 13, and this then started a chain reaction of further structural failures until the entire building collapsed into its own footprint.
Since the dramatic collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11/2001, the building has been replaced with a new skyscraper constructed over the original WTC 7 footprint.
Press Release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Ted Walter
(510) 292-4710
[email protected]
September 4, 2019
University Study Finds Fire Did Not Cause
3rd Tower’s Collapse on 9/11FAIRBANKS, Alaska – The fall of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) in New
York City late in the afternoon of September 11, 2001, was not a result of fires, according to a
draft report released yesterday by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF)
following a four-year computer modeling study of the tower’s collapse.The UAF team’s findings contradict those of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, which concluded in a 2008 report that
WTC 7 was the first tall building ever to collapse primarily due to fire. The collapse of WTC 7
has long been the subject of controversy, with critics of the government’s account arguing it was
brought down in a controlled demolition.UAF civil engineering professor Leroy Hulsey was the study’s principal investigator. Feng Xiao,
now an associate professor at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and Zhili Quan,
now a bridge engineer for the South Carolina Department of Transportation, were research
assistants and co-authors.“Our study found that the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused the collapse recorded on video,”
said Professor Hulsey. “We simulated every plausible scenario, and we found that the series of
failures that NIST claimed triggered a progressive collapse of the entire structure could not have
occurred. The only thing that could have brought this structure down in the manner observed on
9/11 is the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building below Floor 17.”
The UAF study was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit
representing more than 3,000 architects and engineers who have signed the organization’s
petition calling upon Congress to open a new investigation into the destruction of the three
World Trade Center towers on 9/11.The release of the draft report begins a two-month period during which the public is invited to
submit comments. The final report will be published later this year. The research team plans to
make public by the end of September all of the data used and generated during the study, a
decision that contrasts with NIST’s withholding of key modeling data on the grounds that
releasing it “might jeopardize public safety.”For more information, visit http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7 and https://AE911Truth.org/wtc7
I have suspected for some time that WTC7 may have been brought down by emergency demolition, proposed and executed by a small team of very dedicated and determined firefighters and their colleagues on the day of 9/11. I expect that such demolition was not officially sanctioned, and was executed covertly while the authorities pretended not to know. There are several lines of circumstantial evidence which strongly suggest this; I will enumerate them later if requested.
I know that my opinion will be most unwelcome among those who promote the theory that the Twin Towers were pre-rigged with explosives before 9/11. I remind such Twin Tower demolition theorists that my opinion converges with that of the late Danny Jowenko, Dutch expert demolition engineer.
I have spent many hours studying the structure of the Twin Towers, and painstakingly watching the videos of the collapses, often frame-by-frame. The claim that the collapses “broke Newton’s laws” are entirely without merit. The collapses proceeded entirely in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion (in which I am sufficiently competent); indeed, the manner of the collapses could have been predicted by application of Newton’s laws.
Chandler’s “Downward Acceleration of WTC1” theory applies only to a contiguous block of material, not to a lattice of steel supporting thousands of tonnes of concrete in a structure that was over 90% empty space. Judy Wood’s “arguments” are based on a single misleading statement and are probably meant as a parody of Chandler’s; considering her qualifications and expertise it seems inconceivable that she intends them seriously.
Likewise, Gage’s claim about the Twin Towers “collapsing through the line of most resistance” is also without merit. The line of most resistance was the buildings’ cores, which the video record shows to have stood the longest after collapse initiation. Next strongest were the perimeters, which took second longest to fall. The collapses proceeded fastest through the wide-span floor assemblies, occupying the space between core and perimeter and void of vertical support structure, the weakest line of descent.
In any case, the bottom-up collapse of WTC7 tells us nothing of the top-down collapses of the Twin Towers, and the latter appear perfectly natural (under the highly exceptional circumstances) whereas the former does not.
Having said all that, WTC7 was an absolute pig’s ear of a building; look at the engineering diagrams if you don’t believe me. It looked like it had been cobbled together out of left-over parts, it was built on caissons laid years previously intended for a building of less than half the height and less than a third of the weight, and it had an elaborate truss arrangement to straddle a pre-existing electricity sub-station. Whoever brought this down at such short notice and so relatively symmetrically has my deep respect.
– – – – – – – – –Promoters of Twin Tower demolition theory are promoting entirely the wrong message about the collapses. The Twin Towers were disasters waiting to happen, as many suspected at the time of their construction. Their sprinkler systems were inadequate to control any fire greater than one quarter of one floor, and their evacuation facilities were criminally inadequate; some steel components had fire protection rated at only 90 minutes, whereas full evacuation was known to require over three hours – tens of thousands of people would need to escape via just three tiny staircases.
The real message of the Twin Tower collapses is that the commercial system cares not a jot about people’s lives or safety, and builds fragile structures prone to catastrophic, runaway failure. This message has indeed been buried by the corporate media; the US and indeed global economy would itself collapse if staff realised and refused to work in such arrogantly ambitious phallic symbols.
Here is a link to view the video presentation by Professor Hulsey on the release of his draft report examining the WTC 7 collapse. The talk took place at the University of Alaska Fairbanks on the evening of Sep 3rd. Professor Hulsey is scheduled to give a similar presentation this evening, Sep 5th, at the University of California Berkeley. However, so far there has been no mention of this latest presentation also being live streamed.
Be aware that the audio is extremely poor for the first few minutes while a presenter makes some introductory remarks about Professor Hulsey to the audience. However, once Professor Hulsey takes the mic and starts his presentation, the audio quality improves significantly to a more normal, clear quality. It would be best to maximize the video size to better view the slides and video clips used as part of the presentation. The video runs 1hr 12min in length.
Link to Professor Hulsey’s Presentation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Sep 3rd 2019.
“and builds fragile structures prone to catastrophic, runaway failure.” … If the standard of steel high rise is so fragile and prone to catastrophic runaway failure why has there been not a single example of such failure anywhere , ever?
These fragile structures you mention seem to be remarkably robust.
– “why has there been not a single example of such failure anywhere , ever?”
Actually, numerous steel structures have collapsed; Crystal Palace springs to mind. The Twin Tower collapses were highly unusual, but so was the extent of the initiating damage and fire.
– “These fragile structures you mention seem to be remarkably robust”
Actually, the Twin Towers had about one third of the overall density of skyscrapers built in the 1930s, such as the Empire State building. Such earlier buildings also had internal support more evenly distributed, whereas the Twin Towers incorporated 22 metre floor spans for “open plan” office design. It was these stacked floor structures that underwent catastrophic runaway destruction. But we all know that things were built more solidly in the ’30s than the ’70s; just think of your old Ford Cortina.
The Twin Towers were built within the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and as such were not subject to the usual building regulations; that design would not have been permitted elsewhere. Some engineers such as Charlie Thornton were horrified by the design.
Here’s veteran skyscraper engineer Charlie Thornton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2jAgp1slFM
At 02:15 –
– “The people who designed it and the Port Authority, in their public relations and publicity, said what you just said,” [that the buildings were very strong] “but in fact, in plain English, the buildings were a piece of shit.”
And here’s an excerpt from the professional journal Fire Engineering, archived at globalresearch.ca:
https://archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAN309A.html
– “The builders and owners of the World Trade Center property, the Port Authority of New York-New Jersey, a governmental agency that operates in an accountability vacuum beyond the reach of local fire and building codes, has denied charges that the buildings’ fire protection or construction components were substandard but has refused to cooperate with requests for documentation supporting its contentions”
The problem with Professor Hulsey’s investigation is that nearly all the building debris was disposed of years before either his investigation or the NIST investigation even began. It will never be possible to know if all the specified components were actually fitted, or whether substandard parts were substituted. Maybe he and his highly respectable team have been able to address some of this, but it seems unlikely that much can be proved conclusively.
WTC7 stood for many hours beyond its fire rating, everyone was evacuated and so no one was hurt or killed in the collapse. Consequently, investigation was of a much lower priority than the Twin Towers. In fact its collapse was a godsend to the fire-fighters, who wished to search for their comrades trapped in the wreckage of the Twin Towers.
WTC 7 couldn’t have been rigged in a few hours.
I have also studied the towers structural details. I obtained the drawings this year, so i would be surprised if you’d seen them.
I headed up the research group who began uncovering these details in WTC7 from analysis of the structural drawings and comparison to NIST’s report, when we got the drawings 7 or 8 years ago.
This study from Alaska corrects stiffener plate omissions, shear stud omissions, plate dimension errors, artificial pinning of the perimeter columns, omission of lateral support beams, and exaggeration of thermalexpansion in the steels.
You have to ask yourself when NIST claim that a 53ft beam can expand over 6.25″ over 577C. Not gonna happen. Ever.
Every error and omission that NISt made was in favour of their chosen hypothesis. EVERY single one made failure at column 79 look a little more likely.
We are about a year into analysing the Tower drawings now, and I can say that NIST’s model for those is even worse than their attempt at WTC7.
We will see a similar study to this for the towers before too long. You should maybe take a proper look at the structure and try to be on the right side of that debate when it comes.
Here’s the tower drawings – if you’re into your engineering you’ll love them. There’s about 15,000. Bring me any SE who claims it was fire and I will take you and him through the drawings for any one of these buildings and explain the reality to you.
https://archive.org/details/fav-gerrycanHere is the SAME ENGINEER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Z_X8xgrF8
What does Mr Thornton say about the towers and an aircraft ?
“wouldn’t do anything to the main building”
“as for knocking it over, would not happen”
Then after 911 when he gets a US govt contract – “the buildings were shit”. Yeah Right Charlie.
You failed to mention that Mr Thornton’s business partner was the guy who ultimately signed to allow the steel (EVIDENCE) to be removed and shipped off.
We could have known from directional shear stud damage for example, exactly what had moved where, in order to initiate the collapses.
Why do you think the US govt allowed and facilitated the destruction of evidence, using people they would then award major contracts to?
How do you see Mr Thornton’s change of heart re the towers now? I hear numbers that I understand when he is explaining how resilient they are. I know they’re 16 times stiffer than a conventional high rise.
I don’t hear him explaining anything about them structurally to justify his comments. He could not lace John Skilling’s boots.
I do not defend NIST’s analysis of WTC7’s collapse, though I feel that I must point out that your “correct[ion of] stiffener plate omissions, shear stud omissions, […], omission of lateral support beams]” cannot be verified because the building debris is no longer available.
Civilian controlled demolition indeed takes ages to rig, because adjacent structures must not be damaged. Under conditions where adjacent damage is not a concern, military engineers have certainly brought down buildings very rapidly on many occasions. This is what I suspect happened under the emergency conditions of 9/11. It is what fire-fighters said would happen, what John Kerry though had happened, what Larry Silverstein seemed to suggest had happened, and what, according to one report (ABC I think) he was trying to arrange.
I do not deal with collapse initiation of the Twin Towers; it is beyond my abilities, and I am aware of NIST’s failure to simulate collapse initiation. If explosives or incendiaries were used to aid initiation of either collapse they must have been applied at the damaged zones, and that pretty much rules out their being present before the aircraft impacts.
Estimating the rate of the collapses of the Twin Towers after collapse initiation is well within my abilities with Newtons laws and the momentum equations derived from them, because the margins are so huge that detailed consideration of the structure is entirely unnecessary. A mere glance of the relatively tiny truss seats is sufficient to state that they stood no chance of arresting the descent of ten or eleven floor assemblies, let alone their contents, the vertical frame members, hat truss and service floor contents etc. Likewise, momentum considerations are unequivocal; the internal destruction of floor assemblies was bound to accelerate smartly, leaving the laterally unbraced perimeter to fall outward, which it did, breaking into sections as would be expected. Chandler’s “Downward Acceleration of WTC1” is clearly without merit and I am disappointed (though not surprised) that you didn’t denounce it.
Listen to the whole section; here’s a longer excerpt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCD2MSWR_jY
Thornton was clearly comparing wind load with the relatively minor impact of an aircraft. He said that an aircraft couldn’t knock the building over, and indeed, the 9/11 impacts did not.
You quoted selectively, leaving out the following:
– “it could affect localised structural elements, it could knock out a column, it could be some damage”
Yes, in 1988, when the video was made, Thornton is being loyal to his profession, playing down the likely effects of an aircraft impact, and not being rude about another professional’s work. He’d expect the same in return, of course, and Skilling would be unlikely to call Thornton’s designs “overweight, heavy constructions with masses of unnecessary stone and concrete”.
– “WTC 7 couldn’t have been rigged in a few hours.”
Hang on, what exactly are you suggesting here? It was fire-fighters who were saying that WTC7 “might be brought down”, and “move back; that building is about to blow up”. Are you saying that someone secretly rigged WTC7 for demolition pre-9/11, and then, after nearly 300 fire-fighters had been killed while attempting to rescue people from WTCs 2 and 1, they let the surviving brothers in on the secret that they’d had WTC7 rigged for weeks and were about to detonate it? And the fire-fighters didn’t immediately turn round and murder these explosive-rigging maniacs?
That doesn’t sound like a plausible scenario to me.
I didn’t mention Thornton’s business partner because I didn’t know, but I’m not particularly surprised; there can’t be very many players in the hi-rise design game. Likewise with the awards of contracts; the US government wanted the whole matter of building collapses played down as quickly as possible, while they moved swiftly to their favourite pass-time of attacking defenceless countries.
I explain Thornton’s change of heart by the building collapses that had just killed three thousand people. Along side the fact that it had probably made him angry it was also terribly bad for business; much better to pin it on a “bad apple” than to let it taint the whole industry.
– “Civilian controlled demolition indeed takes ages to rig, because adjacent structures must not be damaged”
It also pads out the contract, saves on staff and bolsters the fee, of course. It’s not like you get many jobs per day in that game, is it?
– “WTC 7 couldn’t have been rigged in a few hours.”
The sort of pre-rigging you’re suggesting is also implausible for another, more mundane reason. Pre-rigging for a typical civilian controlled demolition involves pre-weakening structural members with disc cutters, and boring holes ready to take explosive charges. If I’d have worked in WTC7 I think I’d have been pretty suspicious if gashes and holes had started accumulating all over the building, especially if the building had suddenly collapsed subsequently, so unless you know of such reports from staff I think we should conclude that any such work was done after WTC7 was evacuated on 9/11.
Don’t get so focussed on structural engineering that you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Okay then, one issue at a time.
First. Stiffener plates omitted – FROM THEIR MODEL – of course they were installed in the actual building – I thought you said you had studied this stuff.
Here’s a video I made about the omission of the stiffener plates by NIST in their analysis reuploaded 6 years ago.
And there you go blaming the truss seats. The concrete and pan with rebar above the trusses was stronger than them and sagging trusses in the towers do not have the ability to pull the perimeter columns in as observed. In the transverse areas of the towers the long span floor truss system was not connected to the core, but to the short span transfer truss.
This indicates that for the perimeter coolumns to be pulled in on the South face of the Borth tower some 5 – 10 minutes before initiation would require a failure within the core area, thus causing the perimeters to be pulled in. In NIST’s tower analysis the added an imaginary 5kip lateral force to the perimeter column to get them to bend in as observed, for the very reason that the sagging trusses could not do it.
They also omitted bridging trusses in all the one way zones throughout their full tower model along with anchor straps and shear studs along with other reinforcement.
You can observe that the antenna of the north tower tilts before the roofline moves at initiation, confirming a failure initiating event initially confined to the core, not yet having transmitted through the outrigger truss above floor 107 that held the antenna support steels.
The North tower collapsed in about 13.8s total which equates to around 2/3 freefall, total freefall being approcx 9.2s for 1365ft. Still way too fast.
Maybe you should go get that SE to help you out a bit here.
You could use an incendiary to do any pre weakening that couldn’t be accessed for WTC7
You can get to almost all 47 cores of either tower at all levels from the elevator shafts.
Didn’t they have the “largest elevator upgrade in history” in the WTc in the year before the attack ?
The boring holes bit doesn’t apply so much to steel frames. 45 degree cut charges to make the core step off itself doesnt need holes drilling.
WOAH – I have just realised what you are actually saying.
just to be clear- you are saying that WTC7 was rigged ON THE DAY of 911 ?
When Danny Jowenko made the comment about “they must have worked hard” he was being sarcastic/ You clearly have no comprehension whatsoever of what it takes to get a steel frame to come straight down, evenly like that.
You don’t look at that sort of structure and CD it a few hours later the same day.
“A mere glance of the relatively tiny truss seats is sufficient to state that they stood no chance of arresting the descent of ten or eleven floor assemblies, let alone their contents”
That sounds great until you take into account the fact that the floor system in the twin towers did not take any of gravity load of the building. It supported and it’s own weight. It’s job structurally was to transfer lateral loads redistributing overstress.
You said you’d studied this stuff. Trying to tell me about the structurak details for towers that you have NEVER seen the structural drawings for until tonight. And here you are getting the basics of a framed tube design wrong. Structural 101.
You should probably go get that SE now….. It would make for a more enlightening exchange.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ETVHLF_p8
this is an engineer talking about the WTC. Sitting in the WTC. Because he is an engineer employed to maintain and oversee the WTC.
Is he wrong too ?
Was John Skilling, the lead structural engineer who designed the towers wrong with his analysis ? (and it did account for jet fuel btw)
“Chandler’s “Downward Acceleration of WTC1” theory applies only to a contiguous block of material, not to a lattice of steel supporting thousands of tonnes of concrete in a structure that was over 90% empty space. Judy Wood’s “arguments” are based on a single misleading statement and are probably meant as a parody of Chandler’s; considering her qualifications and expertise it seems inconceivable that she intends them seriously.”
With your permission, I could ask David to come on and respond to you here personally ? Not saying he will, but I could ask him.
You’ll get shorter shrift from him than me though, mentioning Judy in the same paragraph as him. Remember, he is the guy who got NISt to admit that WTC7 fell at a rate of freefall for 2.25s.Will probably take him about that long to destroy your attempt at smearing his research.
I’m not smearing Chandler’s research; he did very well measuring the descent rate of WTC7. Incidentally I take his measurements more seriously than he does himself – he gets a nice smooth velocity curve, and that indicates accuracy, so I’m prepared to accept that the WTC7 roofline’s acceleration briefly exceeded g.
The implication of that is that the roofline is less than indicative of the behaviour of the entire system. Much confusion has been generated, both by over-simplification and over-complication, eg. “g” and “free-fall” have been used interchangeably, but g is a rate of acceleration whereas free-fall is a physical condition. A thing can accelerate at g without being in free-fall, and none of the observable system elements were in free-fall, because they being affected by elements we can’t see.
Yes, I’d like a chat with Chandler; please do ask him to join us. Can we keep Gage from getting involved please? He seems angry and unpleasant, and I doubt I could remain in conversation. I have heard that David Chandler is a Quaker; do you know if that is so? I attend Chelmsford Meeting of the friends, but I am not myself a member.
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