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9/11 See other 9/11 Articles Title: Tower Blueprints The blueprints to the Twin Towers and Building 7 remained off-limits to the public for more than five years after the attack, despite the fact that the buildings were built with public money and that the engineering drawings of public buildings are supposed to be public information. 1 Incredibly, the team of engineers from the ASCE that conducted the only investigation of the building "collapses" before Ground Zero had been cleaned up lacked access to the buildings' blueprints -- at least until they signed waivers that they would not use the evidence in a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. 2 In March of 2007, an extensive set of detailed architectural drawings of the World Trade Center became public through the actions of a whistleblower. The 261 drawings included detailed plans for the North Tower (WTC 1), the World Trade Center foundation and basement, and the TV mast atop the North Tower. The set of drawings does not include plans for the other six buildings in the World Trade Center complex. However, since the Twin Towers were of almost identical construction, it is safe to assume that the the structural details that the drawings shown for the North Tower are largely applicable to the South Tower. The drawings contain a wealth of detail about the buildings, including the dimensions of structural members such as the core columns. Most of the drawings can be viewed in this multiresolution browser. The detailed architectural drawings make clear what official reports have apparently attempted to hide: that the Twin Towers had massive core columns, and those columns ran most of the height of each Tower before transitioning to columns with smaller cross-sections. Based on construction photographs exhibited in the Skyscraper Museum and illustrations from the Engineering News Record , 9-11 Research had established by mid-2005 that, low in the Towers, the sixteen core columns that bounded the long faces of the buildings' cores had dimensions of 54 by 22 inches. The detailed drawings show that these columns maintained these dimensions through about the 66th floor. Both of the government-sponsored engineering studies of the Twin Towers' "collapses" -- FEMA's and NIST's -- are highly misleading about the core structures. Neither Report discloses dimensions for core columns -- dimensions that are clearly evident in the architectural drawings. Both Reports use a variety of techniques seemingly designed to minimize the strength of the cores or to conceal their structural role entirely. So effective was FEMA at concealing the nature of the cores that the 9/11 Commission Report , citing the FEMA Report, denied the very existence of the core columns. In May of 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released its Building Performance Study, of which Chapter 2, "WTC 1 and WTC 2", was devoted to explaining the "collapse" of the Twin Towers. It advances the "truss theory" or "pancake theory", in which the supposed failure of floor-truss-to-column connections is the initiating event in a series of chain reactions ending in total collapse. Added commentary in our archived copy exposes many deceptive techniques employed in the article. 3 Key elements of FEMA's theory depend on misrepresentations of the Towers' construction made possible by their vague descriptions. For example, to explain other collapse of the core their Study states: Contrary to the FEMA's hedged assertion that the core columns were freestanding, construction photographs clearly show that large horizontal beams cross-connected the core columns in a three-dimensional matrix of steel. FEMA's report seems crafted to hide the structural significance of the core columns, if not their very existence. Examples of features of the Report that minimize or conceal the core structures include: Illustrations in the Report depict the core columns at the North and South Tower crash zones as being the same size, when in fact the core columns were much broader around the 80th floor than around the 95th. NIST's failure to highlight this difference is especially interesting in light of its estimates of core column damage in the Towers. Those esimates show 10 of the South Tower's core columns severed, compared to only 6 of the North Tower's. How could the South Tower's core have had more damage when its impact-level columns were twice as large as the North Tower's and it sustained only a glancing rather than a head-on impact? Was NIST struggling to explain how the South Tower succumbed to "global collapse" almost twice as quickly as the North Tower despite having much smaller fires? Prior to the release of the detailed architectural drawings, 9-11 Research published the MASTER PLAN, dated December 16, 1963. The MASTER PLAN does not show structural details such as column dimensions, and shows an arrangement of core columns that was later changed. The obsolete core column arrangement indicated in the MASTER PLAN has been reproduced in other publications such as the book 'Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel'. 4 Poster Comment: Independent Investigators Release Suppressed Blueprints of Destroyed World Trade Center Tower Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
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