2002-03-06 Learning from 9/11: Understanding the Collapse of the World Trade Center

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic

COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

HEARING CHARTER

Learning from 9/11: Understanding the Collapse of the World Trade Center

Wednesday, March 6, 2002

Noon to 2:00 p.m.

2318 Rayburn House Office Building

1.      Purpose

On Wednesday, March 6, at noon the House Committee on Science will hold a hearing on the investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC).  Witnesses from industry, academia, and government will testify on the catastrophic collapse of the WTC complex and subsequent efforts by federal agencies and independent researchers to understand how the building structures failed and why.  By scrutinizing the steel and other debris, blueprints and other documents, and recorded images of the disaster, engineers, designers, and construction professionals may learn valuable lessons that could save thousands of lives in the event of future catastrophes, natural or otherwise.

The Committee plans to explore several overarching questions raised by the collapse and the ensuing investigation:

1.       What have we learned about how the federal government investigates catastrophic building collapses, and are any changes warranted?

2.       What have we learned about the collapse of the World Trade Center, including which structural elements failed first, and why?

3.       How will we know what changes, if any, are warranted in building and fire codes as a result of lessons learned from the World Trade Center’s collapse?

4.       Has the World Trade Center disaster exposed any gaps in our understanding of buildings and fire, and are changes needed in the federal government’s research agenda?

2.      Background

At 8:47 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed a fuel-laden Boeing 767 into the north tower (Tower 1) of the World Trade Center (WTC) complex.  Approximately 16 minutes later, a second Boeing 767 slammed into the south tower (Tower 2), exploding upon impact and engulfing several of the building’s upper floors in flames.  While the performance of both towers exceeded their design specifications – the buildings were designed to withstand the force from the initial impact of a 707 jet – the subsequent structural and fire damage still caused the buildings to fall.  Tower 2 collapsed in less than an hour, killing victims trapped above the flames and rescue workers in and around the building. Thirty minutes later, Tower 1 met the same fate.  While more than 25,000 people were successfully evacuated from the towers, nearly 3,000 people and emergency responders were killed in the collapses.  As the day progressed, the remaining WTC buildings collapsed as well, including Building 7, which burned for 8 hours before crumbling to the ground.  Fortunately, the later building collapses produced no casualties.   

In the wake of the collapses, search and rescue workers launched an around-the-clock recovery effort to find and recover survivors and victims who perished.  To make way, literally tons of twisted steel and fractured concrete were removed from the rubble pile and loaded onto convoys of bulldozers and flatbed trucks to be carried away to recycling plants and landfills. 

Researchers also began to respond immediately.  Among the first were National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded social scientists and engineers who arrived at the WTC site within 48 to 72 hours after the tragedy to begin collecting data.  Similarly, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) formed a Disaster Response Team within hours of the first plane strike.  On September 12th, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its contractor, Greenhorne and O’Mara, Inc., located in Greenbelt, Maryland, commenced the development of a Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT; explained more fully on the next page) to conduct a formal analysis of the progressive collapses and produce a report of its findings.  A variety of other engineering researchers and professionals, including members of the Structural Engineering Association of New York, also engaged in the monumental task of collecting data that could lead to a better understanding of the collapse of the buildings themselves and to the development of mitigation strategies to prevent a similar tragedy in the future. 

Concerns Related to the Engineering Investigation

Though many of the individuals who have participated in the WTC building performance investigation are architects and engineers with experience investigating other structural collapses – including those resulting from natural causes as well as terrorist attacks – nothing had prepared these investigators for a disaster of this magnitude and complexity.  Unlike the destruction caused by an earthquake, which may affect several buildings across an expansive area, this disaster involved many buildings and a massive debris pile in a small, confined area.  Also unlike most earthquakes, the WTC disaster caused significant casualties and prompted a prolonged search and rescue effort.  In addition, the concurrent criminal investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a separate investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board further frustrated the building performance investigators.  

The investigation has been hampered by a number of issues, including:

·         No clear authority and the absence of an effective protocol for how the building performance investigators should conduct and coordinate their investigation with the concurrent search and rescue efforts, as well as any criminal investigation:  Early confusion over who was in charge of the site and the lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for examination before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence that were destroyed early during the search and rescue effort.  In addition, a delay in the deployment of FEMA’s BPAT team may have compounded the lack of access to valuable data and artifacts.

·         Difficulty obtaining documents essential to the investigation, including blueprints, design drawings, and maintenance records:  The building owners, designers and insurers, prevented independent researchers from gaining access – and delayed the BPAT team in gaining access – to pertinent building documents largely because of liability concerns.  The documents are necessary to validate physical and photographic evidence and to develop computer models that can explain why the buildings failed and how similar failures might be avoided in the future.

·         Uncertainty as a result of the confidential nature of the BPAT study:  The confidential nature of the BPAT study may prevent the timely discovery of potential gaps in the investigation, which may never be filled if important, but ephemeral evidence, such as memories or home videotapes, are lost.  The confidentiality agreement that FEMA requires its BPAT members to sign has frustrated the efforts of independent researchers to understand the collapse, who are unsure if their work is complementary to, or duplicative of, that of the BPAT team.  In addition, the agreement has prevented the sharing of research results and the ordinary scientific give-and-take that otherwise allows scientists and engineers to winnow ideas and strengthen results. 

·         Uncertainty as to the strategy for completing the investigation and applying the lessons learned:  The BPAT team does not plan, nor does it have sufficient funding, to fully analyze the structural data it collected to determine the reasons for the collapse of the WTC buildings.  (Its report is expected to rely largely on audio and video tapes of the event.)  Nor does it plan to examine other important issues, such as building evacuation mechanisms.  Instead, FEMA has asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to take over the investigation.  Yet so far, NIST has not released a detailed plan describing how it will take over the investigation, what types of analyses it will conduct, how it will attempt to apply the lessons it learns to try to improve building and fire codes, and how much funding it will require.    

Role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is charged with supporting the nation’s emergency management system.  FEMA intervenes at all stages of disaster management including preparation, response, recovery, mitigation, risk reduction, and prevention.  In the case of the World Trade Center attack, FEMA dispatched Urban Search and Rescue Teams and established a disaster field office at the site within hours of the first strike to assist in New York City’s rescue effort.  At the same time, the FEMA Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) began their important work of initiating an analysis that could ultimately yield valuable information about the sequence of events and failures that resulted in progressive building collapse.

BPATs are routinely deployed by FEMA following disasters caused by events such as floods and hurricanes.  The teams are formed by, and operate under the direction of the Mitigation Directorate’s Program Assessment and Outreach Division and comprise such individuals as regional FEMA staff, representatives from state and local governments, consultants who are experts in engineering, design, construction, and building codes, and other technical and support personnel.  A contractor for FEMA, Greenhorne & O’Mara, Inc., maintains a roster of hundreds of mitigation specialists from across the United States.  BPAT teams are typically deployed within seven days of any disaster event.

Generally, a BPAT conducts field inspections and technical evaluations of buildings to identify design practices, construction methods, and building materials that either failed or were successful in resisting the forces imposed by the event.  A major objective of the BPAT’s findings and recommendations are aimed at improving design, construction and enforcement of building codes to enhance performance in future disasters.  The culmination of the BPAT’s efforts is a report that presents the team’s observations, conclusions, and recommendations for improving building performance in future natural disasters.

The BPAT team deployed to the WTC site was assembled by the American Society of Civil Engineers and is headed by W. Gene Corley, Ph.D., P.E, Senior Vice President of Construction Technologies Laboratory in Skokie, Illinois.  He was also the principal investigator in the FEMA study of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Office Building.  On September 11th, ASCE, in partnership with a number of other professional organizations, commenced the formation of an independent team of experts to conduct a building performance assessment study at the WTC site as part of ASCE’s Disaster Response Procedure.  In late September, this team, the ASCE Disaster Response team, was officially appointed as the BPAT team and was funded by FEMA to assess the performance of the buildings and report its findings.  The BPAT team received $600,000 in FEMA funding in addition to approximately $500,000 in ASCE in-kind contributions.

The 23-member BPAT team conducted an analysis of the wreckage on-site, at Fresh Kills Landfill and at the recycling yard from October 7-12, 2001, during which the team extracted samples from the scrap materials and subjected them to laboratory analysis. Why the analysis was conducted only after a delay of three weeks after the attacks remains unclear.  Since November, members of the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) have volunteered to work on the BPAT team’s behalf and are visiting recycling yards and landfills two to three times a week to watch for pieces of scrap that may provide important clues with regard to the behavior of the buildings.

In the month that lapsed between the terrorist attacks and the deployment of the BPAT team, a significant amount of steel debris – including most of the steel from the upper floors – was removed from the rubble pile, cut into smaller sections, and either melted at the recycling plant or shipped out of the U.S.  Some of the critical pieces of steel – including the suspension trusses from the top of the towers and the internal support columns – were gone before the first BPAT team member ever reached the site.  Fortunately, an NSF-funded independent researcher, recognizing that valuable evidence was being destroyed, attempted to intervene with the City of New York to save the valuable artifacts, but the city was unwilling to suspend the recycling contract.  Ultimately, the researcher appealed directly to the recycling plant, which agreed to provide the researcher, and ultimately the ASCE team and the SEAoNY volunteers, access to the remaining steel and a storage area where they could temporarily store important artifacts for additional analysis.  Despite this agreement, however, many pieces of steel still managed to escape inspection.

The BPAT team is expected to release its report in April.  Because FEMA requires the members of its BPAT team to sign a confidentiality agreement until the report is released, the exact scope of the report is unknown.  But it appears from the role that BPAT teams normally play and general comments ASCE members of the BPAT team have made that the report is likely to include an examination of how the buildings behaved leading up to the collapse, hypotheses for which structural elements failed and thereby initiated the collapse, and recommendations for additional research and analysis.

For example, ASCE has said that the study will rely primarily on audio and video recordings, interviews with survivors, blueprints and design drawings of the World Trade Center, and evidence they or the SEAoNY volunteers have collected from the rubble.  The BPAT team has access to more than 120 hours of high quality film footage and audiotapes of 911 communications with trapped victims.  The BPAT team initially had difficulty in obtaining building blueprints and design drawings from either the City of New York, the Port Authority, the building owners, or the building designers due primarily to liability concerns on the part of the building owners and insurers.  Belatedly, however, the team was provided access to these documents in early January.

ASCE has said that the BPAT study will not include an analysis of the evacuation or rescue procedures and may not be able to validate definitively any of a number of hypotheses regarding the collapse.  But because of the confidentiality of the report, it is unclear whether the it will provide answers or simply lay out more questions.  It is unknown, for example, to what degree the BPAT report will compare video evidence with that collected from the steel beams from the floors that were hit by the planes. 

As a result, independent researchers are unsure how they can contribute to the understanding of how the buildings fell without unnecessarily duplicating work.  Others fear that the BPAT’s silence on the scope of its report may allow critical aspects of the picture to be missed, and that, by the time the report is released and any such gaps are discovered, the trail of evidence that could provide answers may have grown cold.  

The National Science Foundation

Researchers supported by the National Science Foundation are used to mobilizing rapidly after an earthquake and arriving on scene soon after the event to begin collecting data.  Recognizing the similarities between the WTC disaster and earthquakes, NSF program managers awarded nearly $300,000 to experienced earthquake researchers, including engineers and social scientists, to begin an analysis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks within 72 hours of the events.  In an effort to quickly deploy researchers to the site, awards were made through the Small Grants for Exploratory Research Program, a supplemental award program that enables NSF program managers to award additional support to currently-funded investigators through an abbreviated internal review process (see Appendix A for a list of awards). 

The efforts of NSF-funded researchers were impeded by the same obstacles the BPAT team encountered: an inability to examine the steel, either removed from the site during the early search and rescue work or shipped to recycling plants, and the denial of access to building design, construction and maintenance documents.  Interestingly, it was an NSF-funded researcher who ultimately negotiated the arrangements by which he and others investigating the disaster were provided access to the remaining pieces of steel at the recycling plant. 

To date, the NSF-funded researchers continue to face problems.  They continue to be denied access to important building diagrams and blueprints, and so are unable to complete their analyses or develop the computer models necessary to better understand the failure of the buildings structural elements.  Perhaps more importantly, without these computer models, engineering researchers will be unable to develop effective mitigation strategies.   

The National Institute of Standards and Technology

NISTs Building and Fire Research Laboratory carries out research in fire science, fire safety engineering, and structural, mechanical, and environmental engineering.  It is the only federal laboratory dedicated to research on building design and fire safety.  In the past, the lab has investigated several structural failures using authority Congress made explicit in 1985. (15 U.S.C. 282a).  The goals of its previous investigations were to determine the probable technical causes of the failures, examine what lessons could be learned from those determinations, and help develop improved building codes, standards, and practices.  The investigations also identified areas of research that needed further study.

Shortly after the attack, NIST appointed an employee of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory to serve on the 23-member BPAT team.  While this partnership lent some of NIST’s resources and expertise to the BPAT study, NIST did not immediately launch a formal investigation into the technical causes that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

NIST believes that the World Trade Center collapse raises difficult and technical questions regarding building codes and standards, justifying the redirection of funds to its building and fire lab.  For example, standards for concrete design, building loads, and structural integrity may need revision.  In response, NIST has redirected $2 million of its fiscal year 2002 internal discretionary funds to the lab to supplement its current building engineering and standards work.  NIST has also requested permission to reprogram from the rest of its laboratories another $2 million in fiscal year 2002 funds for these efforts.  The reprogramming request is currently pending before the Office of Management and Budget and will ultimately need approval from Congress.  NIST did not need Congressional review to redirect its discretionary funds. 

In January, after a delay of three months since the terrorists’ attacks, FEMA asked NIST to take over the next phase of the investigation of the collapse.  Yet neither NIST nor FEMA has released details as to what that next phase would entail (other than the general outline NIST has provided below).  In addition, the Administration has not yet indicated whether FEMA, NIST, or a supplemental funding request to Congress would provide funds for such an investigation, nor has it identified how much it would cost.

Administration officials and outside parties are weighing whether a formal arrangement should be made for NIST to serve as FEMA’s research arm in the event of future catastrophic building failures.  Currently, there is no formal relationship between the two agencies regarding these matters.

Based on some initial planning, NIST has preliminarily identified the following general areas for investigation:

·         Determine technically, why and how the buildings collapsed (WTC 1 and 2, and possibly WTC 7);

·         Investigate the technical aspects of fire protection, response, and evacuation, and occupant behavior and response;

·         Determine whether state-of-the-art procedures were used in the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the WTC building;

·         Determine whether there are new technologies and procedures emerging that could be employed in the future to reduce the potential risks of collapse; and

·         Identify building and fire codes, standards, and practices that warrant revision.

3.      Questions

Please see Appendix A for copies of letters to witnesses and the questions each was asked to address in testimony at the hearing.

4.      Witnesses

The following witnesses will address the subcommittee:

Mr. Robert Shea, Acting Administrator Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, and, Mr. Craig Wingo, Director of Division of Engineering Science and Technology, Federal Emergency Management Administration

Dr. W. Gene Corley, P.E., S.E., American Society of Civil Engineers, Chair of the Building Performance Assessment Team reviewing the WTC disaster

Professor Glenn Corbett, Assistant Professor of Fire Science at John Jay College, New York City

Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Arden Bemet, Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology

5.      Additional Reading

Glanz, J. (2001, December 4).  Wounded Buildings Offer Survival Lessons.  The New York Times, p. F1

Glanz, J., & Lipton, E. (2001, December 25).  A National Challenged: The Towers; Experts Urging Broader Inquiry in Towers’ Fall.  The New York Times, p. A1

Glanz, J., & Lipton, E. (2002, January 17).  New Agency to Investigate the Collapse of Towers.  The New York Times, p. B3

Glanz, J., & Lipton, E. (2002, February 2).  At Scrapyards, as Search for Clues in the Towers’ Collapse.  The New York Times, p. B1

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The Destruction of Building 7’s Remains

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic
The Destruction of Building 7’s Remains


Engineering is a science that melds theory and experience to create robust structures. Unintended structural failures are rare events that warrant the most careful scrutiny, since they test engineering theory.That is why the NTSB carefully documents aircraft crash scenes, and preserves the aircraft remains, frequently creating partial reconstructions in hangars.

If an investigation reveals a mechanical or design fault, the FAA usually mandates specific modifications of equipment or maintenance procedures system-wide, and future aircraft are designed to avoid the fault.Unintended structural failures are less common in steel-framed highrises than in aircraft.

Being the only such building in history in which fire is blamed for total collapse, Building 7’s remains warranted the most painstaking examination, documentation, and analysis.





Building 7’s rubble pile was at least as important as any archeological dig. It contained all the clues to one of the largest structural failures in history. Without understanding the cause of the collapse, all skyscrapers become suspect, with profound implications for the safety of occupants and for the ethics of sending emergency personnel into burning buildings to save people and fight fires.There was no legitimate reason not to dismantle the rubble pile carefully, documenting the position of each piece of steel and moving it to a warehouse for further study.

No one was thought buried in the pile, since, unlike the Twin Towers, Building 7 had been evacuated hours before the collapse. The pile was so well confined to the building’s footprint that the adjacent streets could have been cleared without disturbing it.

Yet, despite the paramount importance of the remains, they were hauled away and melted down as quickly as possible. The steel was sold to scrap metal vendors and most of it was soon on ships bound for China and India. Some of the smaller pieces and a few token large pieces of steel marked ‘save’ were allowed to be inspected at Fresh Kills landfill by FEMA’s BPAT volunteers.

This illegal evidence destruction operation was conducted over the objections of attack victims’ family members and respected public safety officials. Bill Manning, editor of the 125-year-old Fire Engineering Magazine, wrote in an article condemning the operation:Did they throw away the locked doors from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire? Did they throw away the gas can used at the happy land social club fire? … That’s what they’re doing at the World Trade Center. The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately. 1  

Dr. Frederick W. Mowrer, an associate professor in the Fire Protection Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, was quoted in the New York Times as saying:I find the speed with which potentially important evidence has been removed and recycled to be appalling. 2  

Officials running the “cleanup operation” took pains to make sure the structural steel didn’t end up anywhere but in blast furnaces. They installed GPS locator devices on each of the trucks hauling loads from Ground Zero at a cost of $1000 each. One driver who took an extended lunch break was dismissed. 3  References

1. Firefighter Mag Raps 9/11 Probe, New York Daily News, [cached]
2. Experts Urging Broader Inquiry in Towers’ Fall, New York Times, 12/25/01
3. GPS ON THE JOB IN MASSIVE WORLD TRADE CENTER CLEAN-UP, securitysolutions.com, [cached]
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FEMA’s WTC Building Performance Study

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic
FEMA’s WTC Building Performance Study

The only government entity that purported to examine the collapse of Building 7 within the year following the attack was the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) composed of volunteer engineers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). That investigation was taken over by the the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in late 2001 amid complaints that the ASCE investigation was being hampered.BPAT members have coffee

Members of the BPAT examine some of the few pieces of steel that the people running the “cleanup operation” sent their way at Fresh Kills landfill.In May of 2002, BPAT published their World Trade Center Building Performance Study. 1   Chapter 5 of the Report is devoted to Building 7.


It makes unsubstantiated claims and uses a variety of deceptive techniques to make the total collapse of Building 7 due to fires seem less implausible than it is. A copy of Chapter 5 marked up by an anonymous author exposes many of these deceptions.

The Report is inconclusive about the cause of Building 7’s collapse, stating:The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence.

Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue.By the time the Report was published, calling for further research, investigation, and analyses, nearly all of the structural steel had been recycled.References

1. World Trade Center Building Performance Study, fema.gov,
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NIST’s Explanation of WTC 7’s Collapse

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic
NIST’s Explanation of WTC 7’s Collapse

In April of 2005, The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) began releasing preliminary reports on WTC 7’s collapse. It revealed its theory of the collapse in the form of a slide presentation named: Project 6: WTC 7 Structural Fire Response and Collapse Analysis. The slides excerpted here are from a revised version of that presentation released in June of 2005.The earlier official report by FEMA, the World Trade Center Building Performance Study had blamed the collapse entirely on fires, raising the obvious question of how fires could have induced the total collapse of this steel-framed building when fires have never caused the total collapse of a steel-framed building. NIST’s WTC 7 inquiry appears to have been motivated by the need to supply additional causative factors to make the collapse of this building without controlled demolition seem more plausible. Hence, it created a scenario of severe structural damage that cannot be easily confirmed or refuted.NIST’s theory of the collapse of Building 7 is summarized by the following five slides from its presentation.


NIST cartoon NIST cartoon NIST cartoon NIST cartoon NIST cartoon


NIST would have us believe that the failure of a single column near ground level led, first to a vertical progression of failures, causing the collapse of the East Penthouse, followed by a horizontal progression of failures leading the collapse of all of the building’s 27 core columns, precipitating a total collapse.In other words, NIST asserts that WTC 7 collapsed like a house of cards.
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2012-09-01Terrorism and Anti-Terrorism

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic
 
Issue of the Week 
Terrorism and Anti-Terrorism
12 September 01
by Gail Robinson






The Fight Against TerrorismIn the past years, the city and federal government have taken many steps to fight terrorism. No one will ever know how many attacks and deaths these efforts have prevented.

But the crashes into the World Trade Center make it clear how difficult it is to guard against every conceivable threat.

In 1996, partly to fight terrorism, Mayor Rudy Giuliani created the Office of Emergency Management, a descendent of the city’s Office of Civil Defense and the Police Department’s Office of Emergency Management. The agency, which includes personnel from the Police and Fire Departments, Emergency Medical Service, and other city agencies, was intended to deal with catastrophes such as a chemical or biological attack or a “mass fatality situation.”

However, until the attack on the World Trade Center, many of the emergencies it had confronted were far less dire, such as the threat of the Y2K computer virus, an infestation of longhorn beetles, and an influx of rodents.

The day of the attack, Emergency Management seemed focused on the dangers of hurricanes and power outtages.” It’s Hurricane Season in NYC,” its website announced.

In a related move, in 1999, Giuliani opened a $15 million emergency management center at 7 World Trade Center. The city boasted that the command center’s walls could withstand 200 miles per hour winds, and the ventilation system was designed to blow out chemicals or germs.

Although it was on the 23rd floor, critics assailed the center as “Rudy’s bunker.” Michael Daly of the Daily News likened it to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s shelter. “Of course, the mayor’s inner circle will not have the cozy security of the traditional underground setting. They will be in the first-ever aerie-style bunker, a 46,000-square-foot expanse on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center.”

That location, of course, turned out to be the center’s undoing, when it, along with the rest of 7 World Trade Center, crumbled into oblivion on September 11.

In November, if things still proceed as planned, voters will decide whether to make the Office of Emergency Management a permanent city agency. The proposal is one of five fairly modest City Charter reforms that will be on the ballot on Election Day.

The mayor’s Charter Revision Commission decided not to place before voters more controversial proposals, such as creating nonpartisan city elections and giving the Fire Department control over Buildings Department inspections.

In language that seems painfully obvious now, the Charter Revision Commission warns that New York is not immune from terrorist threats. So, it says, “The Office of Emergency Management should be codified in the Charter as an independent agency, the Emergency Management Department, to ensure the city’s future success in using a comprehensive approach to emergency management.” If approved, the measure would bar future mayors beyond from changing or eliminating the Emergency Management Office without the City Council’s approval or another referendum.

Most critics of the charter reform proposals have focused not on their substance but on how Giuliani has used the charter reform process. (His 1999 revisions were resoundingly rejected by voters.) Some good government groups object to the comparatively short time the commission, appointed in June, had to act and to the brief period of time that voters will have to consider the proposals. “The mayor has one last chance to degrade the process of amending the city’s constitution,” Gene Russianoff of the New York Public Interest Research Group said in June, “and he’s taking it.”

A DIFFERENT DANGERDuring the past several years, the city also focused on biological and chemical threats, taking particular notice of a 1995 nerve agent attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 12 people and injured thousands. In 1998, the New York Times reported that the city was using much of the $17 million it had received from the federal government for anti-terrorism efforts to deal with so-called unconventional threats such as germ warfare. It was buying germ detectors, working out deals with regional hospitals for emergency care, arranging with drug companies to produce medicines quickly in an emergency and taking steps to stockpile medications.

The city’s concern echoed those of the federal government. In May, President Bush gave a speech expressing concern about chemical, biological and nuclear terrorism. Noting that many countries either have or are seeking such weapons, the president said, “Most troubling of all, the list of these countries includes some of the world’s least responsible states, states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life. Some non-state terrorist groups have also demonstrated an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.” He called for Vice President Richard Cheney to form a task force to examine ways to prepare the nation for terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

And the Defense Department selected New York’s Office of Emergency Management as a key participant in an exercise aimed at preparing for any bioterrorist attacks.In January, John Jay College and Region II of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which includes New York, will sponsor a forum on urban hazards, including terrorism, catastrophic events and mitigation. Tragically, the conference now seems certain to be very well attended.

THE CITY’S BRUSHES WITH TERRORISMDuring the 1970s and 1980s the Armed Forces for Puerto Rican National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN , carried out several attacks. On January 24, 1975, the group bombed Fraunces Tavern in the financial district, the site of George Washington’s farewell to his troops. The attack on the lunch-hour crowd killed four and wounded 60.

The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center killed six people.

A possibly deadly attack was averted in 1997 when two Palestinian men were arrested for planning to bomb the New York City subway system. A third member of the group alerted law enforcement to the plot which apparently included a plan to blow up the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn, a major hub for the subways and Long Island Railroad.

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Secretive CIA Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic


NO PLANE HERE !WTC-7,  the “CIA building”,  47 stories, also  appeared to be destroyed by Thermite demolitions.Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC. (AFP)For the VIDEO, click on the address below.NEWS CAMERA NBC, West Broadway.680 kilobyteshttp://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7big.rmThanks to Common Dreams News Center for the NY Times article below.
“Molten Steel was found in pools in the basement of WTC-1, WTC-2 & WTC-7. Kerosene-based jet fuel, (or the other combustibles normally found in the towers), cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.”  Thermite can. -ed.
Secretive CIA Site in New York Was Destroyed on Sept. 11
by James Risen  Published on Sunday, November 4, 2001 in the New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine New York station was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, seriously disrupting United States intelligence operations while bringing the war on terrorism dangerously close to home for America’s spy agency, government officials say.

The C.I.A.’s undercover New York station was in the 47-story building at 7 World Trade Center, one of the smaller office towers destroyed in the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers that morning. All of the agency’s employees at the site were safely evacuated soon after the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, the officials said.The intelligence agency’s employees were able to watch from their office windows while the twin towers burned just before they evacuated their own building.

Immediately after the attack, the C.I.A. dispatched a special team to scour the rubble in search of secret documents and intelligence reports that had been stored in the New York station, either on paper or in computers, officials said. It could not be learned whether the agency was successful in retrieving its classified records from the wreckage.A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.

The agency’s New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas.The agency’s officers in New York often work undercover, posing as diplomats and business executives, among other things, depending on the nature of their intelligence operations.

The recovery of secret documents and other records from the New York station should follow well-rehearsed procedures laid out by the agency after the Iranian takeover of the United States Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The revolutionaries took over the embassy so rapidly that the C.I.A. station was not able to effectively destroy all of its documents, and the Iranians were later able to piece together shredded agency reports. Since that disaster, the agency has emphasized rigorous training and drills among its employees on how to quickly and effectively destroy and dispose of important documents in emergencies.

As a result, a C.I.A. station today should be able to protect most of its secrets even in the middle of a catastrophic disaster like the Sept. 11 attacks, said one former agency official. “If it was well run, there shouldn’t be too much paper around,” the former official said.

The agency’s New York officers have been deeply involved in counterterrorism efforts in the New York area, working jointly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies. Many of the most important counterterrorism cases of the last few years, including the bureau’s criminal investigations of the August 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa and the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen have been handled out of New York.

The United States has accused Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network of conducting both of those attacks.But United States intelligence officials emphasize that there is no evidence that the hijackers knew that the undercover station was in the World Trade Center complex.With their undercover station in ruins, C.I.A. officers in New York have been forced to share space at the United States Mission to the United Nations, as well as borrow other federal government offices in the city, officials said.

The C.I.A.’s plans for finding a new permanent station in New York could not be determined.The agency is prohibited from conducting domestic espionage operations against Americans, but the agency maintains stations in a number of major United States cities, where C.I.A. case officers try to meet and recruit students and other foreigners to return to their countries and spy for the United States.

The New York station, which has been led by its first female station chief for the last year, is believed to have been the largest and most important C.I.A. domestic station outside the Washington area.The station has for years played an important role in espionage operations against Russian intelligence officers, many of whom work undercover as diplomats at the United Nations. Agency officers in New York often work with the F.B.I. to recruit and then help manage foreign agents spying for the United States.

The bureau’s New York office, at 26 Federal Plaza, was unaffected by the terrorist attack.The destruction of the C.I.A.’s New York station has added to the intense emotions shared by many of its employees about the agency’s role in the battle against terrorism.

For some, the station’s destruction served to underscore the failure of United States intelligence to predict the attacks.In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, morale suffered badly within the C.I.A., some officials said, as the agency began to confront what critics have called an intelligence failure on the scale of Pearl Harbor.

But the terrorist attacks have also brought an urgent new sense of mission to the agency, which has been flooded with job applications as well as inquiries from former officers eager to return to work. Congress is pouring money into the agency’s counterterrorism operations, and the C.I.A. seems poised to begin focusing its resources on terrorism in much the same way it once focused on the Soviet Union in the cold war.

The attacks were not the first in which the C.I.A. was directly touched by terrorists. In 1983, seven agency officers died in the suicide car bombing of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Among the others killed was the agency’s station chief in Lebanon, William Buckley, who died in captivity after being kidnapped by terrorists in 1984, and Richard Welch, the agency’s Athens station chief, who was shot to death by Greek terrorists in 1975.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

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The 9/11 Attack Government Conspiracy

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Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

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Controlled Demolition

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic

Controlled Demolition

Buildings do fall vertically like Building 7, when destroyed by controlled demolition.

The controlled demolition of large structures is a well developed art and science. Removing a tall building from an urban landscape without damaging adjacent structures — a considerable engineering feat — is a task that only a handful of controlled demolitions companies specialize in. One such company is Controlled Demolition Inc., which, incidentally, was subcontracted by Tully Construction to coordinate the removal of rubble from Ground Zero and the disposal of the structural steel in the months following the attack.

The steel skeletons of buildings like WTC 7 are extremely robust. They are designed to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes, and are over-engineered to handle several times the maximum loads anticipated during their lifetimes. Such steel skeletons have local structural integrity. An event that destroyed one portion of the structure would not cause distant portions to shatter. If some force obliterated the load-bearing columns well below the top of a 600-foot tall skyscraper, the top of the building would topple like a tree, not smash its way down through intact floors and into its foundation.

Controlled demolition destroys vertical steel structures while overcoming their tendency to topple onto adjacent real-estate. It does so by shattering the steel skeleton through the precisely timed detonation of explosive charges.

Demolitions are large undertakings with high stakes. The number of charges required is at least the number of columns times some fraction of the number of floors. An error in timing of the detonations could cause expensive collateral damage.

Most demolitions seek to implode the building, causing the mass to move toward the center, resulting in a tidy rubble pile. In tall buildings this is typically done by shattering the interior structures of the building first or ahead of the exterior structures. That causes the interior mass to fall first, pulling outer structures toward the center. Pieces of the outer walls end up on top of the rubble pile. 1  

Building 7’s documented vertical plunge and tidy rubble pile with exterior wall fragments on top are exactly the kinds of results that controlled demolitions achieve through careful engineering.

References

1. How Building Implosions Work, howstuffworks.com, [cached]

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FEMA’s WTC Building Performance Study

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic

FEMA’s WTC Building Performance Study

The only government entity that purported to examine the collapse of Building 7 within the year following the attack was the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) composed of volunteer engineers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). That investigation was taken over by the the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in late 2001 amid complaints that the ASCE investigation was being hampered.

BPAT members have coffee
Members of the BPAT examine some of the few pieces of steel that the people running the “cleanup operation” sent their way at Fresh Kills landfill.

In May of 2002, BPAT published their World Trade Center Building Performance Study. 1   Chapter 5 of the Report is devoted to Building 7. It makes unsubstantiated claims and uses a variety of deceptive techniques to make the total collapse of Building 7 due to fires seem less implausible than it is. A copy of Chapter 5 marked up by an anonymous author exposes many of these deceptions.

The Report is inconclusive about the cause of Building 7’s collapse, stating:The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue.

By the time the Report was published, calling for further research, investigation, and analyses, nearly all of the structural steel had been recycled.

References

1. World Trade Center Building Performance Study, fema.gov,

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Foreknowledge of WTC 7’s Collapse

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic

Foreknowledge of WTC 7’s Collapse

Of the two principal theories of WTC 7’s collapse — one being global structural failure due to prior debris impact and ongoing fire damage, and the other being controlled demolition — the second is favored by foreknowledge of the collapse. This is particularly true given the lack of precedent of total collapses of steel framed structures during fires. So unprecedented was the collapse of Building 7 that the government has yet to explain it, in 2007.

That would probably be lost on most responders on the site, who would have the fresh memories of the Twin Towers’ explosions to help them accept the notion that the total of collapse of smoking skyscrapers is a natural and even predictable occurrence.

Witness reports show that officials who controlled the streets around WTC 7 evacuated the area in the hour before the 5:20 PM collapse, and that various officials forwarded verbal warnings conveying certainty that the collapse would occur. Network television broadcasts contain announcements of the collapse at least 23 minutes before the event.

Witness Accounts of Foreknowledge

This overview of witness accounts shows that the evacuation of the area surrounding WTC 7 started sometime around 4 PM, and was completed only a few minutes before the 5:20 collapse. The warnings of the collapse, which are recalled in dozens of accounts by emergency responders, show a striking consistency of conviction that the collapse would occur.

Premature Announcements on Television Broadcasts

The BBC announces the collapse of WTC 7 as the facade stands behind correspondent Jane Standley.

At least two television networks made premature announcements of the collapse of WTC 7. The BBC unequivocally announced the collapse about 23 minutes before the fact, and even featured a New York correspondent speaking of the collapse in past tense with the still-erect skyscraper standing behind her.

CNN anchor Aaron Brown announced that the building “has either collapsed or is collapsing” about an hour before the event. Unlike the BBC correspondent, Brown seemed to be able to read the skyline and see that Building 7 was still standing — perhaps accounting for the muddled announcement.

These premature reports were uncovered in the wake of the publication of URLS of a vast archive of television footage.

The following pages contain partial transcripts of these premature reports.

Vast Archive of Footage

The premature announcements of the collapse of WTC by television networks went unnoticed until researchers discovered a vast archive of television broadcast footage from the day of the attack. On February 22, 2007, a post on 911Blogger.com listed the URLs on Archive.org of 417 mpeg recordings capturing about 60 hours broadcast coverage starting on the morning of 9/11/01 from each of six different television stations. Each of the high-quality recordings covering about 41 minutes of broadcast.

The coverage included the following television stations and time spans:

TV stationstart timeend time
NBC4 Washington9/11 08:319/13 20:23
ABC7 Washington9/11 08:319/13 22:29
BBC9/11 09:169/13 20:19
FOX5 Washington9/11 08:319/13 20:23
CNN9/11 08:489/13 20:33
CBS9 Washington9/11 08:319/13 20:23

Unfortunately, Archive.org made the footage archive inaccessible to the public shortly after the BBC foreknowledge story was publicized.

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Videos Show Building 7’s Vertical Collapse

Posted on September 19, 2020 by mekorganic

Videos Show Building 7’s Vertical Collapse

The survival of several video recordings of Building 7’s collapse, though of low resolution, allow study of the building’s motion and the time of collapse.

Each of the following videos shows the entire visible portion of the building falling with a vertical precision otherwise seen only in controlled demolition. Moreover, they show that the collapse took only about 6.5 seconds from start to finish. That rate of fall is within a second of the time it would take an object to fall from the building’s roof with no air resistance.

video broadcast by CBS – 1.4MB – mpeg
This 36-second video shows Building 7 from an elevated vantage point to the distant northeast.		CBS WTC 7 video
video from an NBC news camera – 1.5MB – mpeg
This 9-second video shows the Building 7 collapse from a vantage point about mile to the northeast on West Broadway.		Broadway WTC 7 video
video broadcast on CBS – 1.7MB – mpeg
This 9.6-second video shows the Building 7 collapse from a vantage point only about 1000 feet to the north.		West Street WTC 7 video

Video Credits

Thanks for Krsto Herenda for finding the CBS video, and to plaguepuppy for transcribing it to MPEG.

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