World Trade Center collapse as controlled demolition

koala · Site Admin Joined: 12 Oct 2006 Posts: 712

The collapse of the World Trade Center was a surprise to the engineering community. While no skyscraper had ever before completely collapsed due to fire or other local damage, three skyscrapers collapsed on September 11, 2001. The challenge for engineers was then to explain how the local damage caused by the airplanes (or, in the case of WTC 7, falling debris) was able to occasion a global progressive collapse. After an intensive three-year investigation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology published an account that has been largely accepted in the engineering community. The official collapse mechanism refers only to the aircraft impacts and the subsequent fires, which are taken to have caused sufficient structural damage to occasion the collapses.

Conspiracy theorists emphasize that the only precedents for global collapse before 9/11 are controlled demolitions, and demand a more thorough investigation of this possibility.

The controlled demolition hypothesis plays a central, albeit not essential, role in the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Jeff King and Jim Hoffman were early defenders of the controlled demolition hypothesis and published their observations online. David Ray Griffin included the theory in his book The New Pearl Harbor. It received its most notable proponent to date in early 2006, when Steven E. Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University, argued that a "gravity driven collapse" without demolition charges would defy the laws of physics. There is a range of opinion about the most likely sort and amount of explosives, the way they were distributed, and how they were successfully brought into the building. Proponents of the hypothesis sometimes cite reports of what they believe are unusual power outages, maintenance work and emergency drills in the weeks leading up to September 11, 2001. Some conspiracy theorists propose a regular controlled demolition, in which the role of the demolition charges would have been to remove the main structural supports in order to let gravity and the weight of the building do the rest. Steven Jones believes that thermite (thermate), perhaps in combination with other devices, was likely involved.

NIST has explicitly rejected this hypothesis. There is widespread agreement, however, about the significance of the controlled demolition hypothesis, even among those who don't endorse it specifically or conspiracy theories in general. The necessary devices could only have been planted well in advance of the September 11 attacks and would have required extraordinary access to three highly secured buildings.

Building Seven

Another aspect of the September 11, 2001 attacks conspiracy theorists frequently raise, is the collapse of Seven World Trade Center, which they believe was caused by a controlled demolition. They cite several reasons for this. First, they believe the collapse displayed clear features of a controlled demolition. Second, they claim that since no plane hit the building, it should not have collapsed. The building, however, was heavily damaged by the collapse of the twin towers, just as world trade center 3, 4, 5 and 6, which all fully or partly collapsed. Third, in a PBS documentary on the collapse, Larry Silverstein, the owner of the building, explained the fire department had decided to "pull it". Although his spokesperson explained that Silverstein meant that firefighters had decided to withdraw from the building and the surrounding area for their own safety, many conspiracy theorist insist that "pull it" is technical slang in the demolition industry for demolish a building. However, individuals in the demolition industry do not in fact use this term. Further fueling the conspiracy theory are the still ongoing investigation in the collapse (the NIST report is to be released early 2007) and the fact that the building housed the offices of government agencies like the CIA, the FBI, and the SEC, along with the City of New York's emergency command bunker.