Fire Collapse Theory (911 Investigator 1.1)
- Twin Towers Evidence Blows Away Fire Collapse Theory
- By James Smith
- from 911 Investigator 1.1
The catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center complex is said.by government reports to have resulted from structural failure due mainly to fires initiated by the impacts of the airplanes. A closer look at the evidence reveals a much more disturbing crime.
Apart from the fact that no steel-framed high-rise building has ever collapsed due to fire prior to or since Sept. 11, the manner in which the buildings came down is itself a substantial cause for re-investigation. A collapse due to fire would likely proceed gradually with large deformations visible in the building's perimeter, with the building tipping over slowly in the direction of the steadily weakening structural members - to the path of least resistance.
Yet the Twin Towers both came down quite suddenly, without warning, and without any "jolts that would indicate the upper mass impacting the lower mass. The smooth rate of descent was measured at 2/3 of free-fall. In other words, the building was accelerating (traveling faster and faster second by second) straight down through what should have been the path of greatest resistance - the 80,000 tons of structural steel below that was at least five times stronger than necessary to resist this load. Physicists and other experts agree that this could have happened only if the underlying supporting structures were removed ahead of the falling upper building mass. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) acknowledges that each building was destroyed in fewer than a dozen seconds, and that they "came down essentially in free-faU".
For the New York City firefighters on the scene, this rapid destruction without any notice was well beyond their prior experience. Sgt. James Canham, in the oral histories of 118 first responders, put it this way: "This changed all the rules. This went from a structure to a wafer in seconds - in seconds. I couldn't believe the speed ofthat tower coming down. I heard the rumble. I looked up. Debris was already 50 feet from the ground..."
More than a hundred first responders reported experiencing explosions and/or flashes of light as the destruction commenced. Much of this evidence was also captured on video by multiple cameras. EMT Captain Karin Deshore, in a Nov. 7, 2001, New York Times interview, described the astonishing events like this: "Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept
