FIREFIGHTERS THOUGHT THE FIRES WERE CONTROLLABLE

An audiotape of New York firefighters at the scene, unpublicized until mid-2002, indicated that fire officials managed to reach the 78th floor of the South Tower—very near the crash scene, which was at the 80th floor—and seemed convinced that the fire was controllable.

The tape was briefly mentioned by the New York Times but was kept from the public by the US Justice Department, which claimed it might be needed in the trial of the “twentieth hijacker,” Zacarias Moussaoui, even though Moussaoui was in custody at the time of the attacks. The audiotape was a recording of radio transmissions made on the morning of September 11, 2001. The tape reportedly was discovered two or three weeks after 9/11 in offices of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at WTC Building 5. Apparently, Port Authority personnel were monitoring and recording the New York Fire Department (FDNY) channel.

Two fire officials mentioned by name in the tape were Battalion Chief Orio J. Palmer and Fire Marshal Ronald P. Bucca, both of whom perished when the South Tower collapsed along with 343 other firefighters, the greatest single loss of firefighters in one incident in history. According to the Times article, both firemen “showed no panic, no sense that events were racing beyond their control.…At that point, the building would be standing for just a few more minutes, as the fire was weakening the structure on the floors above him. Even so, Chief Palmer could see only two pockets of fire and called for a pair of engine companies to fight them.”

Transcripts released on the Internet provided this statement, “Battalion Seven…Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones.”

As noted by reporter Christopher Bollyn, “The fact that veteran firefighters had a ‘coherent plan for putting out’ the ‘two pockets of fire,’ indicates they judged the blazes to be manageable. These reports from the scene of the crash provide crucial evidence debunking the government's claim that a raging steel-melting inferno led to the tower's collapse.”

Supporting Chief Palmer's description of only small fires in the South Tower are survivors Stanley Praimnath, Donovan Cowen and Ling Young. Praimnath, on the 81st floor, recalled, “The plane impacts. I try to get up and then I realize that I’m covered up to my shoulder in debris. And when I’m digging through under all this rubble, I can see the bottom wing starting to burn, and that wing is wedged 20 feet in my office doorway.” Cowen was in an open elevator at the 78th floor sky-lobby. She recalled, “We went into the elevator. As soon as I hit the button, that's when there was a big boom. We both got knocked down. I remember feeling this intense heat. The doors were still open. The heat lasted for maybe 15 to 20 seconds I guess. Then it stopped.” Young was in her 78th floor office and related, “Only in my area were people alive, and the people alive were from my office. I figured that out later because I sat around in there for 10 or 15 minutes. That's how I got so burned.”

Government pronouncements and hired experts claimed temperatures in the area of these three witnesses were hot enough to cause the trusses of the South Tower to fail, yet these eye-witnesses stated temperatures were cool enough for them to walk away.

Additionally, a number of experts have disputed the claim that melting structural steel brought down the Twin Towers.

Kevin R. Ryan was a site manager for Environmental Health Laboratories in South Bend, IN, a subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), the giant product safety testing firm. In 2003, Ryan wrote to Frank Gayle, deputy chief of the Metallurgy Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Material Science and Engineering Laboratory, challenging the theory that burning jet fuel weakened the towers’ structural steel causing them to fall.

In this communication, Ryan wrote, “As I’m sure you know, the company I work for certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings…the samples we certified met all requirements…the results of these tests appear to indicate that the buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.”

Ryan went on to question the conclusions of “experts,” including Dr. Hyman Brown, who have claimed that the towers collapse was caused by structural steel melting at temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Reiterating that his company had certified the steel to withstand temperatures of 2,000 degrees for several hours, Ryan wrote, “I think we can all agree that even un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3,000°F. Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2,000°F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.”

“This story just does not add up,” Ryan concluded. “If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be a great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this steel did fail at temperatures around 250°C suggests that the majority of deaths on 9/11 were due to a safety-related failure. That suggestion should be of great concern to my company.”

Although Ryan made it clear that he was speaking only for himself, not his company, his employers’ reaction was decisive. On November 22, 2004, the South Bend Tribune carried this headline, “South Bend firm's lab director fired after questioning federal probe.” UL officials denied any testing of the WTC steel and said Ryan was terminated because his letter was written “without UL’s knowledge or authorization.”

But the cat was out of the bag as Ryan's letter had reached the hands of several organizations questioning the official 9/11 story. Dan Kubiak, then-executive director of 911truth.org, a national organization of activists and researchers, said Ryan's firing was “unfortunate for the country and it's particularly tragic for him, but inspiring as hell.”

“The way things are working in the country right now, it's only going to be citizens like this who take their professional knowledge and sense of personal integrity and put it ahead of the strange status quo, that we will see truth and justice [come] out of the system.”

Another puzzling anomaly of the World Trade Center building collapses concerns pools of molten steel, which were recorded under the towers as well as Building 6 up to five weeks after September 11, 2001. Thermal imaging aerial photos showed large pools of hot molten steel in the basement of the three buildings, indicating temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc., of Phoenix, Arizona, who consulted on removing the WTC debris, confirmed that these “hot spots” of molten steel were found as many as five weeks after the collapse when rubble was removed from the elevator shafts seven levels down. These pools of melted metal were also mentioned by Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction, one of four contractors hired to remove debris. Interestingly enough, WTC Building 7, which may have been brought down by explosives, does not show any heat signatures in the thermal imaging photos.

Loizeaux speculated that steel-melting fires were generated by “paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the towers as they ‘pancaked’ into the basement.” Since construction steel's melting point is about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, other experts disputed this idea, saying that due to the lack of oxygen, such debris would have been only a smoldering pile.

Speculating further, Loizeaux told the American Free Press, “If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.” Subterranean explosives could explain the “hot spots” discovered under the rubble. Considering the total destruction, reports from survivors and firemen, and the seismic shocks just prior to the collapse, many people believed that Loizeaux's description was exactly what happened on September 11, 2001.

It is worth noting that Controlled Demolition, Inc. is the same company that hurriedly removed the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City following the explosion there in 1996. Both there and at the WTC, crucial structural evidence was removed before any independent examination or investigation.

Further strong evidence of ground explosions causing the WTC collapses came from seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, twenty-one miles north of the WTC. Just prior to the collapse of the Twin Towers, seismic equipment recorded two “spikes,” indicating large bursts of energy that shook the ground beneath the WTC towers just before their collapse.

Columbia's seismic equipment recorded a 2.1-magnitude ground shock during the ten-second collapse of the South Tower and a 2.3 quake during the eight-second collapse of the North Tower. However, the strongest shocks, or “spikes,” on the data recorder both occurred at the beginning of the tower's collapse, well before falling material struck the ground. The two spikes were more than twenty times the amplitude of the other seismic shock waves associated with the collapsed buildings. One seismologist said the 1993 truck bomb at the WTC did not even register on seismographs; that massive explosion did not cause detectable shock waves through the ground.

“New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexpected seismic ‘spikes’ at the beginning of each [tower] collapse. These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse,” reported the American Free Press in September 2002.

Seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia's Center for Hazards and Risk Research, added to this by saying, “During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking.” Asked about the two unusual shocks, Lerner-Lam was noncommittal. “This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated,” he told the media.

Compounding the mystery of the seismic spikes and the witnesses who claimed to have heard multiple explosions prior to the fall of the towers is the question of the free-fall speed of the collapse. The South Tower, which was struck second but fell first, collapsed within 10 seconds. The North Tower collapsed in only eight seconds. It has been estimated that any object, a hammer for example, dropped from the roof of either tower would free fall to the ground in 9 seconds. It should also be noted that the collapse of WTC Building 7, which according to much evidence was brought down by a controlled demolition, took 8 seconds, approximately the same time as both towers.

Noting the near free-fall speed of the towers’ collapse, many researchers have asked, “How could simply falling debris crush one hundred steel and concrete floors?” Officials at NIST initially attempted to argue that Building 7 did not collapse at free-fall speed but later, faced with the hard data, were forced to admit that at least the top 18 floors did drop at free-fall or even greater speed.

Pools of molten steel still registering intense heat weeks after the incident, seismic “spikes” just prior to the collapse of the buildings, the free-fall speed of the buildings’ collapse, the pulverization of cement walls—none of this can be adequately explained by airplane crashes and fires alone, much less falling masonry and steel.

There was no initial consensus explanation for the towers collapse since none of the engineers hired by FEMA inspected or tested the steel before it was hauled away for salvage.

“I am not a metallurgist,” explained Dr. W. Gene Corley, head of the FEMA engineer team, who admitted his group was not allowed to make a close study of the WTC steel girders.

Corley himself seemed unconvinced that burning jet fuel was the sole cause of the towers’ collapse. In the executive summary of the “World Trade Center Building Performance Study,” he wrote, “…absent other severe loading events such as a windstorm or earthquake, the buildings could have remained standing in their damaged states until subjected to some significant additional load.” He then explained that fires must have constituted this “significant additional load.”

“The large quantity of jet fuel carried by each aircraft ignited upon impact into each building. A significant portion of this fuel was consumed immediately in the ensuing fireballs. The remaining fuel is believed either to have flowed down through the buildings or to have burned off within a few minutes of the aircraft impact. The heat produced by this burning jet fuel does not by itself appear to have been sufficient to initiate the structural collapses,” he stated.

But Corley explained that secondary fires, involving office supplies and furniture ignited by the burning jet fuel “induced additional stresses into the damaged structural frames while simultaneously softening and weakening these frames.” “This additional loading and the resulting damage were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures,” the FEMA-sponsored study concluded.

But a growing number of people, including experts, have questioned this conclusion.

After all, it has been pointed out, no independent investigation was funded and the $600,000 allocated by FEMA for the WTC study included the cost of hiring their selected experts plus the cost of printing their report. Additionally, Corley and his group were barred from independent visits to Ground Zero and were not able to examine any steel for almost a month after 9/11. Even then, they only examined 150 pieces of steel out of millions, with no way of knowing where they originated.

By the time the FEMA team called for “further investigation and analysis” in its report of May 2002, Ground Zero had been scraped clean of all debris.

According to FEMA’s “Building Performance Assessment,” temperatures at the crash site—only two floors above Chief Palmer and Marshal Bucca—were as high as 1,700–2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, so intense as to melt the structure's steel frame girders.

Assuming FEMA’s temperature estimates are correct, the interiors of the towers became furnaces capable of casting aluminum and glazing pottery. Yet the firemen were able to work for an extended period of time in close proximity and believed the fires they encountered were manageable. Furthermore, photographic blowups depicting the jagged gash in the North Tower just before its collapse clearly show survivors peering out through the hole made by the airplane.

“The sooty smoke and the black holes [seen in photographs of the towers prior to their collapse] cannot be dismissed as interesting aspects of the fires, nor as problems with the photography,” said researcher and author Eric Hufschmid. “Rather, they are signs that the air flow was so restricted that the only significant fires were near broken windows. The fires in both towers were probably coating the [structural] columns with soot rather than heating the columns to a high temperature.”

Citing a severe fire in Philadelphia's Meridian Plaza in 1991, Hufschmid noted, “The Meridian Plaza fire was extreme, but it did not cause the building to collapse. “The fire in the South Tower seems insignificant by comparison to both the Meridian Plaza fire and the fire in the North Tower. How could the tiny fire in the South Tower cause the entire structure to shatter into dust after fifty-six minutes while much more extreme fires did not cause the Meridian Plaza building to even crack into two pieces?” The fact still remains that no other high-rise buildings have ever collapsed due to a fire of any size, or of any length—let alone in under one hour.

“The official theory of the collapse, therefore, is essentially a fire theory, so it cannot be emphasized too much that fire has never caused large steel-frame buildings to collapse—never, whether before 9/11, or after 9/11, or anywhere in the world on 9/11 except allegedly New York City—never,” declared David Ray Griffin.

To see how ludicrous is the claim that the short-lived fires in the towers could have induced structural collapse, we can compare them with some other fires. In 1988, a fire in the First Interstate Bank Building in Los Angeles raged for 3.5 hours and gutted 5 of this building's 62 floors, but there was no significant structural damage. In 1991, a huge fire in Philadelphia's One Meridian Plaza lasted for 18 hours and gutted 8 of the building's 38 floors, but, said the FEMA report in 1991, although “[b] eams and girders sagged and twisted…under severe fire exposures…, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage.” In Caracas in 2004, a fire in a 50-story building raged for 17 hours, completely gutting the building's top 20 floors, and yet it did not collapse. And yet we are supposed to believe that a 56-minute fire caused the WTC South Tower to collapse. Unlike the fires in the towers, moreover, the fires in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Caracas were hot enough to break windows. On February 12, 2005, the 32-story Windsor building in Madrid, Spain, made of steel-reinforced concrete, burned for almost a full day. Fire completely engulfed the upper ten stories of the building. Although the fire apparently caused the collapse of the top floor spans surrounding the still-standing core structure of the ten uppermost floors, fear that the structure would totally collapse like the Twin Towers proved unfounded. The structure remained intact.

And yet we are supposed to believe that a 56-minute fire caused the WTC South Tower to collapse. Unlike the fires in the towers, moreover, the fires in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Caracas were hot enough to break windows.

Another important comparison is afforded by a series of experiments run in Great Britain in the mid-1990s to see what kind of damage could be done to steel-frame buildings by subjecting them to extremely hot, all-consuming fires that lasted for many hours. FEMA, having reviewed those experiments, said: “Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800–900°C (1,500–1,700°F) in three of the tests…, no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments”

These comparisons bring out the absurdity of NIST’s claim that the towers collapsed because the planes knocked the fireproofing off the steel columns. Fireproofing provides protection for only a few hours, so the steel in the buildings in Philadelphia and Caracas would have been directly exposed to raging fires for 14 or more hours, and yet this steel did not buckle. NIST claims, nevertheless, that the steel in the South Tower buckled because it was directly exposed to flames for 56 minutes.

It was also considered peculiar that both towers dropped within fifteen seconds, essentially free-fall speed. Wouldn't the lower floors have held the weight even if only momentarily?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Materials Professor Thomas Eager explained to PBS’s NOVA that the WTC fires were so massive that they caused the total collapse of 47 core steel-reinforced columns as well as 236 exterior columns. “If it [fire] had only occurred in one small corner, such as a trashcan caught on fire, you might have had to repair that corner, but the whole building wouldn't have come crashing down,” explained Eager. “The problem was, it was such a widely distributed fire, and then you got this domino effect.”

He described this domino effect as caused by the failure of angle clips, steel brackets that held the floor trusses between the inner core columns and the exterior columns. “Once you started to get angle clips to fail in one area, it put extra load on the other clips, and then it unzipped around the building on that floor in a matter of seconds,” said Eager.

Eager's explanation suffers from the fact that neither tower had fires covering the entire floor and the fact that cross trusses would have prevented, or at least slowed, the “unzippering” effect of the angle clips. His explanation also fails to address the speed of the towers’ collapse. Even if one can accept that each floor did not impede the collapsing ones above it, there is no explanation for what shattered the outer walls and inner core columns, threw debris hundreds of feet away from the buildings, and turned most of the concrete to pulverized dust.

Rather than come up with an explanation of how a limited hydrocarbon fire that burned for a short time could have weakened the 47 core steel-reinforced columns in each of the two towers sufficiently for a free-fall collapse, The 9/11 Commission Report simply omitted this fact, and instead depicts the interior of the towers as “a hollow steel shaft, in which elevators and stairwells were grouped.”

According to David Ray Griffin, the commission avoided the “embarrassing problem” of the massive steel interior columns by simply denying their existence, “thereby demonstrating enormous ignorance or telling an enormous lie.”