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Title: Why the towers fell: Two theories [by a civil engineer]
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URL Source: http://www.vermontguardian.com/commentary/032007/TwinTowers.shtml
Published: Mar 1, 2007
Author: William Rice
Post Date: 2007-04-17 16:30:39 by honway
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Why the towers fell: Two theories By William Rice William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses, Posted March 1, 2007 Having worked on structural steel buildings as a civil engineer in the era when the Twin Towers were designed and constructed, I found some disturbing discrepancies and omissions concerning their collapse on 9/11. I was particularly interested in the two PBS documentaries that explained the prevailing theories as determined by two government agencies, FEMA and NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). The first (2002) PBS documentary, Why the Towers Fell, discussed how the floor truss connectors failed and caused a “progressive pancake collapse.” The subsequent 2006 repackaged documentary Building on Ground Zero explained that the connectors held, but that the columns failed, which is also unlikely. Without mentioning the word “concrete,” the latter documentary compared the three-second collapse of the concrete Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building with that of the Twin Towers that were of structural steel. The collapse of a concrete-framed building cannot be compared with that of a structural steel-framed building. Since neither documentary addressed many of the pertinent facts, I took the time to review available material, combine it with scientific and historic facts, and submit the following two theories for consideration. The prevailing theory The prevailing theory for the collapse of the 110-story, award-winning Twin Towers is that when jetliners flew into the 95th and 80th floors of the North and South Towers respectively, they severed several of each building’s columns and weakened other columns with the burning of jet fuel/kerosene (and office combustibles). However, unlike concrete buildings, structural steel buildings redistribute the stress when several columns are removed and the undamaged structural framework acts as a truss network to bridge over the missing columns. After the 1993 car bomb explosion destroyed columns in the North Tower, John Skilling, the head structural engineer for the Twin Towers, was asked about an airplane strike. He explained that the Twin Towers were originally designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (similar in size to the Boeing 767). He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.” The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse. This is because the short-duration jet fuel fires and office combustible fires cannot create (or transmit to the steel) temperatures hot enough. If a structural steel building could collapse because of fire, it would do so slowly as the various steel members gradually relinquished their structural strength. However, in the 100-year history of structural-steel framed buildings, there is no evidence of any structural steel framed building having collapsed because of fire. Let’s assume the unlikelihood that these fires could weaken all of the columns to the same degree of heat intensity and thus remove their structural strength equally over the entire floor, or floors, in order to cause the top 30-floor building segment (South Tower WTC #2) to drop vertically and evenly onto the supporting 79th floor. The 30 floors from above would then combine with the 79th floor and fall onto the next level down (78th floor) crushing its columns evenly and so on down into the seven levels below the street level. The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed. This violates Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum that would require that as the stationary inertia of each floor is overcome by being hit, the mass (weight) increases and the free-fall speed decreases. Even if Newton’s Law is ignored, the prevailing theory would have us believe that each of the Twin Towers inexplicably collapsed upon itself crushing all 287 massive columns on each floor while maintaining a free-fall speed as if the 100,000, or more, tons of supporting structural-steel framework underneath didn’t exist. The politically unthinkable theory Controlled demolition is so politically unthinkable that the media not only demeans the messenger but also ridicules and “debunks” the message rather than provide investigative reporting. Curiously, it took 441 days for the president’s 9/11 Commission to start an “investigation” into a tragedy where more than 2,500 WTC lives were taken. The Commission’s investigation also didn’t include the possibility of controlled-demolition, nor did it include an investigation into the “unusual and unprecedented” manner in which WTC Building #7 collapsed. The media has basically kept the collapse of WTC Building #7 hidden from public view. However, instead of the Twin Towers, let’s consider this building now. Building #7 was a 47-story structural steel World Trade Center Building that also collapsed onto itself at free-fall speed on 9/11. This structural steel building was not hit by a jetliner, and collapsed seven hours after the Twin Towers collapsed and five hours after the firemen had been ordered to vacate the building and a collapse safety zone had been cordoned off. Both of the landmark buildings on either side received relatively little structural damage and both continue in use today. Contrary to the sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7, the four other smaller World Trade Center buildings #3, #4, #5, and #6, which were severely damaged and engulfed in flames on 9/11, still remained standing. There were no reports of multiple explosions. The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts. They created no huge caustic concrete/cement and asbestos dust clouds (only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud), and they propelled no heavy steel beams horizontally for three hundred feet or more. The collapse of WTC building #7, which housed the offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, among others, was omitted from the government’s 9/11 Commission Report, and its collapse has yet to be investigated. Perhaps it is time for these and other unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 to be thoroughly investigated. Let’s start by contacting our congressional delegation. William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses.
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#1. To: honway, ALL (#0)
First of all John Skilling was NOT the head structural engineer for the WTC towers. Leslie Robertson is the head structural engineer of record. He was the one who moved to New York to do the design. Mr Skilling remained in Seattle. Second, did Mr Rice fail to note the difference in the speed of the planes assumed in the design and the ones that hit the towers? That difference corresponds to a factor of 7 (or more) difference in the impact energy of the planes. There was NO consideration of fire after the plane impact in the design. Leslie Robertson stated that fire resulting from a plane impact was NOT considered in the design. If Mr Rice thinks otherwise, he is wrong. Melting of steel is not the theory of NIST. Wrong again. First, the fires were NOT of short duration (didn't he read the NIST report like he claimed?) and second how hot does he think the temperatures have to get to weaken steel? The fires in the Windsor Tower in Madrid reached 1400 F and that was without jet fuel to start it. There are plenty of examples of temperatures in fires in ordinary office building reaching those temperatures or even higher. Or does Mr Rice actually think steel strength is unaffected at these temperatures? If so, then I question his credentials. Also, does he think the numerous engineers who did analysis with codes that are generally agreed to be the state of the art in fire engineering are incompetent or wrong when they concluded temperatures in the towers reached nearly 2000 F? Apparently Mr Rice overlooked the likelihood that fireproofing in the towers was extensively damaged by the impacts? And how fast does Mr Rice think unprotected steel strength responds to temperatures of ... say ... 1400 F or higher? This is the silliest statement yet. If that were the case, then why are there fire codes on steel structures? Why is there so much effort (and cost) to protect steel members from fire? The fact is that steel framed building HAVE collapsed due to fire. Mr Rice is simply WRONG. Again, we find Mr Rice claiming a theory that NIST does not promote. What Mr Rice is doing is putting forth a STRAWMAN ... something false to knock down. In fact, if Mr Rice had done as much research of the matter as he claims, he'd know that the theory is that sagging floors broke sections of the outer wall columns and THAT is what led to the collapse. Obviously, he didn't. ROTFLOL! Where has this guy been the last 5 years? How can he claim the towers collapsed in ten seconds if he read the NIST reports as he claimed? If he looked at ANY non-conspiracy website he'd see the towers took 15 seconds or so to collapse. Videos and photos prove this. Even some conspiracy leaning websites admit this. And he should know this IF he's done ANY research besides visiting the more extreme conspiracy websites. This alone is good reason to doubt this individuals competence or opinion. The collapse of WTC 7 was not sudden. Firemen have said they knew it was going to collapse hours before it did because they could see it deforming. This is more conspiracy nonsense. NO ONE who was an eyewitness has said they found POOLS of molten metal at the base of the elevator shafts. If this is so, why hasn't ONE demolition expert in the entire world come forward to say it? Afterall, it should be so obvious when someone like Mr Rice even knows it. Does Mr Rice think they are all part of the conspiracy? ROTFLOL! honway, can you provide proof that any of this is true? Can you perhaps point me to a resume or a university where he got his degree? And who did he work for while working on those structures? Pardon me if I'm now a little skeptical. Let's see what the Vermont Technical College website says. His name isn't listed as faculty or staff: http://catalog.vtc.edu/content.php?catoid=12&navoid=225 . Why is that? In fact, a search of their website doesn't turn up the name William Rice anywhere. Why is that?
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Are you on another rampage?
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The official story is so ludricrous that its acceptance is an indication one is completely brainwashed and incapable of free, rational thought, or guilty as sin and protecting the perps.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/ In the link above,you can click on the link to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and hear Dr. Shyam Sunder of the NIST explain Tower 1 collapsed in 11 seconds and Tower 2 collapsed in 9 seconds.
Dr. Shyam Sunder was the Lead Investigator Building and Fire Safety Investigation of WTC Disaster
http://www.vermontguardian.com/commentary/032007/Mar23Letters.shtml Author responds to 9/11 critics This is in response to Jeremy Young’s letter posted in the Vermont Guardian (March 9) questioning my knowledge of basic physics. It would seem that politics often supersedes science when one tries to determine what really happened on 9/11. From my perspective as an engineer, the following statements can only be explained by the use of explosives. However, these facts seem to be either “debunked” or ignored by those who would have us avoid questioning the safer, more comfortable, and less thought-provoking official crash-and-burn theory. I would like to question the prevailing theory by asking Young, or anyone, for reasonable alternative explanations to the following statements: • Only explosives could have caused the pulverization of the WTC buildings’ concrete into dust. • Only high temperature explosives could create the molten metal that lingered for several weeks under the debris of those three WTC buildings. These documented temperatures of the molten metal were much hotter (by over several hundred degrees Fahrenheit) than any temperatures that could possibly be provided by the 9/11 jet fuel/kerosene fires. • Only explosives could propel heavy steel beams/columns more than 300 feet away from the Twin Towers. According to basic projectile physics, this is well beyond the range that can be accomplished by the prevailing crash-and-burn theory. Finally, I reaffirm my knowledge of physics and of Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum. Overcoming the stationary inertia would slow down the collapse. Moreover, Newton’s Law is immaterial when compared to the resistance provided by the massive supporting structural steel framework of each Tower. Each of the Twin Towers’ collapses would have had to compress and destroy about 100,000 tons of structural steel framing and do it in a collapse duration of only ten seconds. Without explosives this is impossible and has never happened in the 100-year history of structural steel buildings. William Rice, P.E. William Rice is a former professor at the Vermont Technical College in Randolph, and wrote a piece in the Feb. 28 issue of Vermont Guardian.
The debunkers cannot deal with the molten steel, so they deny it.
All engineering analysis aside, the above alone presents some disturbing questions.
NIST's official statement is that "the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2." It really doesn't matter what Sunder said in an interview when photos and videos taken that day prove the collapse took about 15 seconds for each tower. You are the one always posting images and videos, honway. Why don't you believe what they are telling you in this case? Here is a CNN live video clip that shows it took about ten seconds for the bottom of the mushrooming dust cloud to reach the ground, and another seven or so for the top to reach the ground. Here is an image that shows free-fallings panels well in front of the collapsing level Here is a link to time indexed frames from a video that clearly shows the collapse taking about 15 seconds: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/ntc_frames.html The following is a link to a photo that http://911research.wtc7.net says was taken 11 seconds into the collapse. http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/photos/docs/trade17.jpg Look at that photo, honway. There is a lot of tower still standing. Now unless you want to claim that all of the above are fabricated or lies, why would you persist in this nonsense? Doing so will only end up discrediting the whole *Truth* movement and make it harder to get the valid questions about 9/11 answered.
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There you go again, you treasonous queer! How many seconds did it take from the start of the collapse to ground contact? Was that not "sudden?" That's the context of the issue. Or, would you confirm that the firemen knew that the controlled demolition was going to take place - as in the abrupt (sudden) collapse of the building? BAC, your queerthink is as disgusting, as you are!
Wrong. Here's another, more sane, explanation: http://www.911myths.com/WTCONC1.pdf "The Pulverization of Concrete in WTC 1 During the Collapse Events of 9-11" Wrong. Here's another, more sane, explanation: http://www.911myths.com/WTCTHERM.pdf "Aluminum and the World Trade Center Disaster" But jet fuel only initiated the fire. Many other things burned in the towers and the rubble later on. Plastics burn very hot (http://911myths.com/html/wtc_molten_steel.html). And as Dr Greening points out in the linked articles at the beginning of this post, there were even hotter chemical reactions possible given the materials and boundary conditions in the towers and rubble. Wrong. Here's another, more sane, explanation (at the end of the article): http://www.911myths.com/html/explosive_force.html Slow it down, from what to what? Odd that Rice is the ONLY structural engineer in the world claiming that the two towers collapsed too fast, Mr. Rice. Maybe it's because the rest of the engineering community actually understands the tremendous loads created when 30 floors of structure fall one floor onto the floor below. I suppose he thinks the collapse should have stopped at that point. ROTFLOL! These towers were 95 percent air. Here's a photo that proves it. http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/staff/agentsmith/wtccoreshilouette.jpg ROTFLOL! He doesn't even have the correct collapse time ... even after all this time to gather the facts. One begins to doubt Mr Rice's competence. And again, I ask for PROOF that Mr Rice is who he says. The Vermont Technical College does not mention his name ANYWHERE on their website nor can I find any mention of this individual anywhere but in these letters he writes. What is his education, where did he work and on what did he work, honway?
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Who raised your post limit? She should be spanked!
After the 1993 car bomb explosion destroyed columns in the North Tower, John Skilling, the head structural engineer for the Twin Towers, was asked about an airplane strike. He explained that the Twin Towers were originally designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (similar in size to the Boeing 767).
He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.”
The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse.
This is because the short-duration jet fuel fires and office combustible fires cannot create (or transmit to the steel) temperatures hot enough.
If a structural steel building could collapse because of fire, it would do so slowly as the various steel members gradually relinquished their structural strength.
However, in the 100-year history of structural-steel framed buildings, there is no evidence of any structural steel framed building having collapsed because of fire.
Let’s assume the unlikelihood that these fires could weaken all of the columns to the same degree of heat intensity and thus remove their structural strength equally over the entire floor,
The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed.
Contrary to the sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7
The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts.
only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud
William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses.
#2. To: BeAChooser (#1)
#3. To: honway (#0)
#4. To: All (#0)
The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed.
#5. To: All (#4)
Dr. Shyam Sunder of the NIST explain Tower 1 collapsed in 11 seconds and Tower 2 collapsed in 9 seconds.
#6. To: All (#0)
Contrary to the sudden collapse of the Twin Towers and Building #7, the four other smaller World Trade Center buildings #3, #4, #5, and #6, which were severely damaged and engulfed in flames on 9/11, still remained standing. There were no reports of multiple explosions. The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts. They created no huge caustic concrete/cement and asbestos dust clouds (only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud), and they propelled no heavy steel beams horizontally for three hundred feet or more.
#7. To: All (#6)
#8. To: honway (#6)
#9. To: honway (#0)
Curiously, it took 441 days for the president’s 9/11 Commission to start an “investigation” into a tragedy where more than 2,500 WTC lives were taken. The Commission’s investigation also didn’t include the possibility of controlled-demolition, nor did it include an investigation into the “unusual and unprecedented” manner in which WTC Building #7 collapsed.
"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men" Plato
#10. To: honway, ALL (#4)
In the link above,you can click on the link to 9/11 Conspiracy Theories and hear Dr. Shyam Sunder of the NIST explain Tower 1 collapsed in 11 seconds and Tower 2 collapsed in 9 seconds.
#11. To: beachooser, nolu_chan, Robin, Minerva, Christine, Brian S, Honway, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#1)
The collapse of WTC 7 was not sudden. Firemen have said they knew it was going to collapse hours before it did because they could see it deforming.
#12. To: honway, ALL (#7)
Only explosives could have caused the pulverization of the WTC buildings’ concrete into dust.
Only high temperature explosives could create the molten metal that lingered for several weeks under the debris of those three WTC buildings.
These documented temperatures of the molten metal were much hotter (by over several hundred degrees Fahrenheit) than any temperatures that could possibly be provided by the 9/11 jet fuel/kerosene fires.
Only explosives could propel heavy steel beams/columns more than 300 feet away from the Twin Towers. According to basic projectile physics, this is well beyond the range that can be accomplished by the prevailing crash-and-burn theory.
Finally, I reaffirm my knowledge of physics and of Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum. Overcoming the stationary inertia would slow down the collapse.
Moreover, Newton’s Law is immaterial when compared to the resistance provided by the massive supporting structural steel framework of each Tower.
Each of the Twin Towers’ collapses would have had to compress and destroy about 100,000 tons of structural steel framing and do it in a collapse duration of only ten seconds.
#13. To: BeAChooser, Christine, Zipporah (#12)
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#14. To: All (#5)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/ Click on 9/11 Conspiracy Therories at the above link for the source of the quote below. Dr. Shyam Sunder- Lead Investigator- Building and Fire Safety Investigation of WTC Disaster: "The measurements have indicated that Tower One collapsed in about 11 seconds and Tower Two collapsed in about 9 seconds." "...the building is 70% just air in volume."
#15. To: BeAChooser, Minerva, Paul Revere, tom007, SKYDRIFTER, Critter (#1)
[BAC] First of all John Skilling was NOT the head structural engineer for the WTC towers. Leslie Robertson is the head structural engineer of record. He was the one who moved to New York to do the design. Mr Skilling remained in Seattle. As usual, BAC's source is missing. My source is not. NIST Report, Chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1.1, reads in relevant part: NIST Report, Chapter 1, page 6, reads in relevant part: ------- [BAC] did Mr Rice fail to note the difference in the speed of the planes assumed in the design and the ones that hit the towers? That difference corresponds to a factor of 7 (or more) difference in the impact energy of the planes. BAC, exactly how much in excess of 600 mph did you determine that the planes were moving when they struck the towers? According to the NIST Report, Chapter 2, page 20, paragraph 2-3, WTC-1 was hit by a plane "[m]oving at about 440 mph..." According to the NIST Report, Chapter 3, page 38, paragraph 3-2, WTC-2 was hit by a plane moving "540 mph...." ------- [BAC] He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.” There was NO consideration of fire after the plane impact in the design. Leslie Robertson stated that fire resulting from a plane impact was NOT considered in the design. If Mr Rice thinks otherwise, he is wrong. Do recall that, "(Some time after completion of the construction, Skilling, Helle, Christiansen, and Robertson, and then Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA) assumed that role. [structural engineer])" ------- [BAC] The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse. Melting of steel is not the theory of NIST. Melting steel happened. Relevant theories attempt to explain how it happened. -------
To fulfill all the functional, aesthetic, and economic desires for this concent, innovative archetecture was needed, In 1962, the firm of Minoru Yamasaki & Associates was hired to perform the architectural desighn which was first unveiled in 1964. The team also involved Emory Roth & Sons, P.C., as the architect of record. The structural engineering was by Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Christiansen. (Some time after completion of the construction, Skilling, Helle, Christiansen, and Robertson, and then Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA) assumed that role.)
Skilling and his team rose to the challenge of providing the required load capacity within Yamasaki's design concept. They incorporated an innovative framed-tube concept for the structural system.
A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964, described its findings: “The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.”
In the wake of the WTC bombing, the Seattle Times interviews John Skilling who was one of the two structural engineers responsible for designing the Trade Center. Skilling recounts his people having carried out an analysis which found the Twin Towers could withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. He says, “Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed.” But, he says, “The building structure would still be there.” [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993]
#16. To: honway (#14)
What the World Trade Center Building Designers Said: Before and After 9/11 Submitted by Arabesque on Wed, 02/07/2007 - 7:55pm. Leslie Robertson What the World Trade Center Building Designers Said: Before and After 9/11 An analysis of contradictions in statements by Building Designer Leslie Robertson By Arabesque[1] Update: 03/12/2007 Another Quotation from John Skilling added about the possibility of controlled demolition destroying the World Trade Center buildings in 1993. Before 9/11 “A previous analysis [by WTC building designers], carried out early in 1964, calculated that the towers would handle the impact of a 707 traveling at 600 mph without collapsing”[2] (Between Early 1984 and October 1985): “However, O’Sullivan consults ‘one of the trade center’s original structural engineers, Les Robertson, on whether the towers would collapse because of a bomb or a collision with a slow-moving airplane.’ He is told there is ‘little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building was attacked.’”[3] 1993 “[Building designer] John Skilling recounts his people having carried out an analysis which found the twin towers could withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed.” But, he says, “The building structure would still be there.”[4] “The analysis Skilling is referring to is likely one done in early 1964, during the design phase of the towers. A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964, described its findings: “The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.” However, besides this paper, no documents are known detailing how this analysis was made.”[5] “Skilling - a recognized expert in tall buildings - doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower. The supporting columns are closely spaced and even if several were disabled, the others would carry the load. ‘However,’ he added, ‘I'm not saying that properly applied explosives - shaped explosives - of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage.’ Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down. ‘I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.’”[6] 2001 “Leslie Robertson, one of the two original structural engineers for the World Trade Center, is asked at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany what he had done to protect the twin towers from terrorist attacks. He replies, ‘I designed it for a 707 to smash into it,’ though does not elaborate further.”[7] [Leslie Robertson:] “The twin towers were in fact the first structures outside the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airplane.”[8] [Frank A. Demartini:] “The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, spoke of the resilience of the towers in an interview recorded on January 25, 2001. [9] Sept 3-7, 2001—just before 9/11 “The Boeing 707 was the largest in use when the towers were designed. [Leslie] Robertson conducted a study in late 1964, to calculate the effect of a 707 weighing 263,000 pounds and traveling at 180 mph crashing into one of the towers. [Robertson] concluded that the tower would remain standing. However, no official report of his study has ever surfaced publicly.”[10] After 9/11 “The engineer who said after the 1993 bombing that the towers could withstand a Boeing 707, Leslie Robertson, was not available for comment yesterday, a partner at his Manhattan firm said. ‘We're going to hold off on speaking to the media,’ said the partner, Rick Zottola, at Leslie E. Robertson Associates. ‘We'd like to reserve our first comments to our national security systems, F.B.I. and so on.’”[11] “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.”[12] “[The] National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in 2005 state that it has been ‘unable to locate any evidence to indicate consideration of the extent of impact- induced structural damage or the size of a fire that could be created by thousands of gallons of jet fuel.’”[13] “In 2002, Leslie Robertson wrote: “To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance.”[14] “[Leslie Robertson:] I support the general conclusions of the NIST report… The [WTC] was designed for the impact of a low flying slow flying Boeing 707. We envisioned it [to be like] the aircraft that struck the Empire State building [during] WW II. It was not designed for a high speed impact from the jets that actually hit it… Yes there was a red hot metal seen [in the WTC rubble] by engineers. Molten—Molten means flowing—I’ve never run across anyone who has said that they had in fact seen molten metal, or by the way if they had seen it, if they had performed some kind of an analysis to determine what that metal was.” Steven Jones in discussion With Leslie Robertson [MP3] by KGNU Radio, Denver, CO, Oct 26, 2006 Analysis: Robertson has made some glaring contradictions in his statements. · Robertson claims that the building was designed to only survive plane crashes at speeds of 180 mph. Interestingly he made this claim only a few days before 9/11.[15] A quote by Building Designer Skilling indicates that “A previous analysis, carried out early in 1964, calculated that the towers would handle the impact of a 707 traveling at 600 mph without collapsing”.[16] Robertson must resolve this apparent contradiction. It is a very suspicious statement given the fact that it would be reasonable to consider the maximum speed of a plane flying into the Twin Towers. Is it possible that Robertson was asked to leak this “deliberately misleading information” just before 9/11? However, this is just speculation. Also suspicious is the fact that he said in 1984-5 that there was “little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building was attacked.”[17] · Robertson says that the building was not designed to survive jet fuel fires: “To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire”. This claim is suspicious for two reasons: why would they design the towers to survive plane crashes without considering the jet fuel? And more importantly, John Skilling claimed in 1993 that they did consider the jet fuel when they designed the buildings.[18] Given this fact, which statement is more likely to be correct about jet fuel fires being considered? · NIST is also contradicted when they claim that there was no “evidence to indicate consideration of… thousands of gallons of jet fuel”. This statement is clearly false. See John Skilling’s statement: “Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire… The building structure would still be there.”[19] · In interview with Steven Jones, Robertson claims that he had “never run across anyone who has said that they had in fact seen molten metal.” This statement is extremely suspicious considering the fact that Robertson himself claimed to have seen it in a published news report! This contradicts his own statement about seeing molten metal: “Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the WTC, describes fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks.”[20]. As well, substantial eye-witness testimony supports observations of Molten Steel.[21] · Robertson is also incorrect when he says that “if they had seen [Molten Steel, they had not] performed some kind of an analysis to determine what that metal was. This statement is false. FEMA analyzed samples of the molten steel.[22] However, NIST did not even mention the molten steel and called it “irrelevant to [their] investigation.”[23] This could have simply been a mistake by Robertson. Is Robertson being pressured to lie and make false statements? Was he asked to leak a false statement just before 9/11 about the speed of the planes having an impact on their destruction? Are these contradictions by accident or mistake? A news report stated that he wanted to give his opinion to the FBI before making his comments public. This in itself is not overly suspicious—but his contradictions are. No clear answers to these and similar questions can be obtained through speculation alone— Leslie Robertson must account for these himself. If another 9/11 investigation is obtained, it is clear that Leslie Robertson will have to answer these and other relevant questions. ----------------------------------------------- --------------------------------- [1] http: //www.911blogger.com/blog/877 [2] Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline: (see February 27, 1993) [3] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entit y.jsp? entity=leslie_robertson See here: [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 227; New York County Supreme Court, 1/20/2004] [4] [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993] [5] [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 131-132; Lew, Bukowski, and Carino, 10/2005, pp. 70-71] [6] [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993] [7] [Chicago Tribune, 9/12/2001; Knight Ridder, 9/12/2001] [8] [Robertson, 3/2002; Federal Emergency Management Agency, 5/1/2002, pp. 1-17] [9] http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/no vember20 04/141104designedtotake.htm [10] [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 138-139, 366] [11] “Believed to Be Safe, the Towers Proved Vulnerable to Jet Fuel Fire” By JAMES GLANZ http://www.punjabilok.com/america_under _attack/ believed_tobe_safe.htm [12] [US Congress, 3/6/2002; Associated Press, 3/7/2002] [13] [National Institute of Standards and Technology, 9/2005, pp. 13] [14] [Robertson, 3/2002] [15] [Chicago Tribune, 9/12/2001; Knight Ridder, 9/12/2001] These articles the day after 9/11 make clear the fact that this statement was made before 9/11: “Les Robertson, the Trade Center's structural engineer, spoke last week at a conference on tall buildings in Frankfurt, Germany”. [16] Complete 9/11 Timeline: (see February 27, 1993)] [17] http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entit y.jsp? entity=leslie_robertson See here: [Glanz and Lipton, 2004, pp. 227; New York County Supreme Court, 1/20/2004] [18] [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993] [19] [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993] [20] [SEAU News, 10/2001] This fact was observed by David Ray Griffin and Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. [21] http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/20 05/12/wh y-was-there-molten-metal-under.html [22] See here for pictures and comments in FEMA’s report mentioning the melted steel: http://www.911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evi dence/me tallurgy/index.html “Although virtually all of the structural steel from the Twin Towers and Building 7 was removed and destroyed, preventing forensic analysis, FEMA's volunteer investigators did manage to perform "limited metallurgical examination" of some of the steel before it was recycled. Their observations, including numerous micrographs, are recorded in Appendix C of the WTC Building Performance Study. Prior to the release of FEMA's report, a fire protection engineer and two science professors published a brief report in JOM disclosing some of this evidence.” 1 “The results of the examination are striking. They reveal a phenomenon never before observed in building fires: eutectic reactions, which caused "intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese." The New York Times described this as "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation."2 WPI provides a graphic summary of the phenomenon.” “The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified. The rate of corrosion is also unknown. It is possible that this is the result of long-term heating in the ground following the collapse of the buildings. It is also possible that the phenomenon started prior to collapse and accelerated the weakening of the steel structure. A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed to determine what risk, if any, is presented to existing steel structures exposed to severe and long-burning fires.” Evidence of evaporated steel as reported by the New York Times: “Engineers have been trying to figure out exactly what happened… ‘Fire and the structural damage… would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated’” from: Glanz, James (2001). “Engineers are baffled over the collapse of 7 WTC; Steel members have been partly evaporated,” New York Times, November 29. 2001. [23] See here: http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/nis t/WTC_FA Q_reply.html#13
http://www.911blogger.com/node/6040
Mark
"I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down... That didn't sound like just a building falling down to me while I was running away from it. There's a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions. [..] and the whole time you're hearing "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." I think I know an explosion when I hear it... — Former NYC Police Officer and 9/11 Rescue Worker Craig Bartmer
#17. To: Kamala (#16)
Thanks for the information.
“A previous analysis [by WTC building designers], carried out early in 1964, calculated that the towers would handle the impact of a 707 traveling at 600 mph without collapsing”[2]
#18. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#15)
Rather than dishonest and snide remarks, you should pay more attention to the facts and what's been posted on this forum. I've provided links to back my assertion up over and over in previous threads here at 4um (not to mention uncounted times at LP). If you weren't paying attention, NC, that's your problem. You didn't even use your browser because if you had you would know I was right. The fact is Leslie Robertson was the LEAD STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. Skillings ran the company and was not even in NYC where the design was done. http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument "Reflections on the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson, ... snip ... The lead structural engineer reflects on the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers." http://web.mit.edu/civenv/wtc/PDFfiles/Chapter%20I%20History.pdf "Robertson was the most influential engineer on the project and assumed the position of lead structural designer of the towers. Robertson had as much influence on the form of the building as anyone apart from Yamasaki himself." http://www.asce.org/pressroom/news/display_press.cfm?uid=1349 "Leslie E. Robertson, lead structural engineer for the World Trade Center Towers, will be honored with a 2003 Outstanding Projects and Leaders (OPAL) award for lifetime contributions in design. The award will be presented on Thursday, May 1, at the American Society of Civil Engineers' (ASCE) fourth annual OPAL awards gala at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/about.html ""Building on Ground Zero" features candid interviews with leading construction and safety experts, investigators, architects, and engineers—including Leslie Robertson, lead structural engineer of the original World Trade Center and Shanghai's new World Financial Center, and Jake Pauls, occupants advocate and evacuation specialist. And there are dozens more where that came from. Does NOT say that Shillings was the lead structural engineer. Skilling got mentioned because he owned the company. It was Robertson and those under him who were responsible for 99% of the actual design. This was a back of the envelope calculation done AFTER the design was complete. Robertson is on the record stating that the towers were DESIGNED for an impact in fog at low speed (180 mph). http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument "Reflections on the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson, ... snip ... The lead structural engineer reflects on the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers. ... snip ... It was assumed that the jetliner would be lost in the fog, seeking to land at JFK or at Newark. To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires." You might want to read the history of what went on back then before sticking your foot further in your mouth: http://scott-juris.blogspot.com/The%20Height%20of%20Ambition%20Part%20Four.pdf "The Height of Ambition: Part Four September 8, 2002 By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC LIPTON ... snip ... But Robertson still had one more set of structural calculations to perform. Lawrence Wien, who was continuing his fight against the towers, had begun to remind New Yorkers publicly of a Saturday morning in July 1945, when a B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, barreled into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Most of the 14 people who died were incinerated by a fireball created when the plane's fuel ignited, even though the fire was quickly contained. The following year,another plane crashed into the 72-story skyscraper at 40 Wall Street, and yet another one narrowly missed the Empire State Building, terrifying sightseers on the observation deck. Wien and his committee charged that the twin towers, with their broader and higher tops, would represent an even greater risk of mid air collision. They ran a nearly full-page ad in The Times with an artist's rendition of a commercial airliner about to ram one of the towers. ''Unfortunately, we rarely recognize how serious these problems are until it's too late to do anything,'' the caption said. The Port Authority was already trying to line up the thousands of tenants it would need to fill the acres of office space in the towers. Such a frightful vision could not be left unchallenged. Robertson says that he never saw the ad and was ignorant of the political battle behind it. Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer's curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out. The new technologies he had installed after the motion experiments and wind-tunnel work had created a structure more than strong enough to withstand such a blow. Exactly how Robertson performed these calculations is apparently lost - he says he cannot find a copy of the report. Several engineers who worked with him at the time, including the director of his computer department, say they have no recollection of ever seeing the study. But the Port Authority, eager to mount a counter attack against Wien, seized on the results -- and may in fact have exaggerated them. One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. That was perhaps three times the speed that Robertson had considered. If Robertson saw the article in the paper, he never spoke up about the discrepancy. No one else issued a correction, and the question was answered in many people's minds: the towers were as safe as could be expected, even in the most cataclysmic of circumstances. There were only two problems. The first, of course, was that no study of the impact of a 600-mile-an-hour plane ever existed. ''That's got nothing to do with the reality of what we did,'' Robertson snapped when shown the Port Authority architect's statement more than three decades later." First of all, BAC did not say that. That was a quote from the thread's article to which I responded. THIS was my response. All of which is true. After the plane impacts (even at close to 600 mph) the building structure was still there. It was the fuel induced FIRE that caused the problem. It was "horrendous". It did kill a lot of people. And it ultimately collapsed the damaged structure. Skilling NEVER said that they analyzed what that fire would do to the towers or whether they would survive that fire. Indeed, at that time they did the design of the towers, they did not have the tools to determine that. Again, I did not say that. I was quoting an assertion in the article. That is true. NISTs theory for the collapse of the towers does not require melting steel. Perhaps. Likely. But when did it melt? And what caused that melting. The odd thing is that not one expert in fire or steel anywhere in the world has come forward to express the impossibility of ORDINARY fires in the rubble melting that steel. And I'm still waiting to hear your theory for what kept that steel molten for 6 weeks or more. Because it sure wasn't the thermite bombs you seem to believe went off on 9/11. Thermite bombs don't work that way.
[BAC] First of all John Skilling was NOT the head structural engineer for the WTC towers. Leslie Robertson is the head structural engineer of record. He was the one who moved to New York to do the design. Mr Skilling remained in Seattle.
As usual, BAC's source is missing. My source is not.
NIST Report, Chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1.1, reads in relevant part:
NIST Report, Chapter 1, page 6, reads in relevant part:
[BAC] did Mr Rice fail to note the difference in the speed of the planes assumed in the design and the ones that hit the towers? That difference corresponds to a factor of 7 (or more) difference in the impact energy of the planes.
BAC, exactly how much in excess of 600 mph did you determine that the planes were moving when they struck the towers?
A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964, described its findings: “The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour.
[BAC] He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.”
There was NO consideration of fire after the plane impact in the design. Leslie Robertson stated that fire resulting from a plane impact was NOT considered in the design. If Mr Rice thinks otherwise, he is wrong.
He says, “Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed.” But, he says, “The building structure would still be there.” [Seattle Times, 2/27/1993]
[BAC] The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse.
Melting of steel is not the theory of NIST.
Melting steel happened.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#19. To: BeAChooser (#18)
I'm still waiting to learn why you're so apparently sanguine about the govt's efforts to prevent any meaningful investigation.
And I'm still waiting to hear your theory for what kept that steel molten for 6 weeks or more.
#20. To: Kamala, honway, nolu_chan, ALL (#16)
Where are all those who jumped on me for using blogs as sources? ROTFLOL! The source for this is Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. ROTFLOL! This is false. The calculation was done by Skilling (and only Skilling) and he was not one of the principle designers of the Towers. Nevertheless, and for the record, the towers did handle the impact of a 707 sized plane travelling almost that fast. Let's see. The towers did in fact survive the 1993 bomb attack. And they would probably have survived a "slow-moving airplane". The rest of that statement can be attributed to designers' pride. Read this http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=1687698&date=19930227 (the actual 2/27/1993 article from the Seattle Times) and see how the author has dishonestly added a complete sentence to the Seattle Times article. And Skillings was right about the building surviving the impact, as I just pointed out to nolu_chan. The author does not understand the difference between an analysis and design. A white paper is a back of the envelope stab at an answer to something. It is not part of the design. There is a reason it is called a "white paper". So it's a stretch to imply this white paper was done as part of the design process. That's not true. All Skillings concluded is that the structure would still be standing AFTER THE IMPACT. He expressed concern about what the fires would do. But designers in those days didn't have the means to determine what that would be. It's worth noting that designers also didn't have the computers and computer tools necessary to determine this with any certainty either. And Skillings said "Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed." THE BIGGEST PROBLEM. And it was basically unaddressed because the tools to address it simply didn't exist in those days. By the way, I hope folks can see the irony in this. Mark is putting forth this article and Skillings white paper as proof that the towers were designed to survive and should have survived. At the same time Mark completely dismisses the use of modern computers and computer codes to analyze the response of the structure and the fires. The tools Skilliing had were like the tools of cavemen compared to what engineers have available today. But Mark trusts the old tools and doesn't trust the more modern ones. That deserves a laugh. ROTFLOL! And it looks like he was right as the 1993 van bomb attack proved. And that's probably true too. So what? This doesn't in any way prove that bombs brought down the towers. For one thing, NOT ONE structural engineer or demolition expert in the world is on record saying they believe bombs brought down the WTC towers. NOT ONE. That might mean something... True, he did design for a 707 hitting the towers. BUT AT LOW SPEED. First of all, readers should know that Demartini degree was in architecture, not structures. There is a difference. Second, in that statement, he completely overlooked the importance of velocity in the impact. It was NOT "designed" for a high speed impact. And it was not designed for multiple impacts. Third, Demartini was not the construction manager during the construction of the towers. He was 14 when construction began. So I doubt he was all that familiar with their "design". On the other hand, Leslie Robertson was very familiar with it. As I said, the design was for a plane impacting at 180 mph, not 400, not 500, not 600. A prudent course of action given the power of lawyers in this country. Can you name any that are now complaining? And as I said, lawyers are likely to blame for those documents not being released. Not Bush's cabal. Well if they weren't considered, where's that leave the conspiracy crowd? Suddenly the towers were not designed for a plane crash and fire? Which makes sense given that the computers and computer codes needed to accurately model such effects weren't invented until after the WTC was built. Thank you for confirming what I've already stated. And this statement is completely consistent with everything he had stated previously. Well, there certainly was some molten metal (maybe not the "pools" that the CT community claims). And certainly no one appears to have done an actual analysis to determine what the metal was. But I'm willing to assume some of it was steel. No he hasn't. So is that proof he too was part of the conspiracy? What's it like knowing that virtually everyone out there was part of the conspiracy ... but not you? ROTFLOL! Notice how the author of the article the blog quotes deceptively adds the words "building designer" before Skilling ... just like he dishonestly inserted it (and a complete sentence) into a quote from one of the sources he referenced? No it wouldn't be reasonable. Otherwise all buildings would be designed to consider the maximum speed that a plane could hit it. Any plane. What the designers REASONABLY did is take care of the situation that came up when a plane hit the Empire State building. It was flying in fog. Which is why it hit the building in the first place. That could happen today, perhaps. But in clear weather designers back in the 1960's would have considered it UNLIKELY that a commercial jet would hit the largest buildings in the world. And in fog at low altitude a commercial jet would not likely be going anywhere near its maximum velocity. In fact, the REASONABLE thing to assume is that the plane would be at low altitude because it was preparing to land and it got lost in the fog. And if its preparing to land it isn't travelling at maximum speed. So the statement by the author of the article you quote is simply nonsense. ROTFLOL! Like I said, how many people do the CT community think were part of the plot? Everyone but them because it seems they now have everyone either part of it or actively threatened to keep quiet. Which is completely ridiculous. Well first of all, a plane that was landing and lost in the fog would probably be relatively low on fuel. Second, they didn't because they simply didn't have the tools to do it. No, he did not. He said that fuel induced fires were the big problem. That is all he said. He did not say the towers would survive those fires. Just that it would be standing after the impact. And keep in mind that his firm was designing the building so the last thing he would want to do is cause potential occupants to think the building unsafe. He wrote the white paper to reassure folks. As such he wouldn't emphasize any deficiencies in their ability to do an accurate analysis. Like their inability to analyze what fire would do to a structure like that. An inability caused by the fact that the computers and codes needed to do that with any degree of confidence simply did not exist back them. This is highly deceptive reporting. Reference 20 provides the following source to back up their statement. http://www.seau.org/SEAUNews-2001-10.pdf That source has article written by James M. Williams, SEAU president in which HE presumably describes the contents of a speech by Robertson. He writes "As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running." And that statement does not say that Robertson himself saw molten steel. It doesn't say that anywhere in the linked source. More dishonesty. They did not perform analysis on anything identified as molten steel. They performed it on intact steel samples. In fact, the source that is linked to this claim only states that they found "evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure. A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel." This is not melting in the sense postulated by the CT community. This is something that would actually lower the melting point of the steel. They went on to say that "the rate of corrosion is also unknown. It is possible that this is the result of long-term heating in the ground following the collapse of the buildings. It is also possible that the phenomenon started prior to collapse and accelerated the weakening of the steel structure." Because a "eutectic mixture" is one that has a lower than normal melting point, and because this might have been caused in the years prior to the collapse or in the rubble when the steel was exposed to sulfer and other chemicals, this might actually be yet another explanation why molten steel was found in the rubble. Because their charter was to explain the collapse, not explain why some molten steel was found in the rubble. Is the author a KOOK who thinks that tens of thousands are part of the conspiracy or helping to cover it up? Does THAT make any sense in this day and age? Read Dr Greening paper on the sulfer at the WTC. I think that's clear enough.
http://www.911blogger.com/node/6040
“A previous analysis [by WTC building designers], carried out early in 1964, calculated that the towers would handle the impact of a 707 traveling at 600 mph without collapsing”[2]
“However, O’Sullivan consults ‘one of the trade center’s original structural engineers, Les Robertson, on whether the towers would collapse because of a bomb or a collision with a slow-moving airplane.’ He is told there is ‘little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building was attacked.’”[3]
“[Building designer] John Skilling recounts his people having carried out an analysis which found the twin towers could withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed.” But, he says, “The building structure would still be there.”[4]
“The analysis Skilling is referring to is likely one done in early 1964, during the design phase of the towers. A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964, described its findings
“The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour.
Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.”
“Skilling - a recognized expert in tall buildings - doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower.
‘I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.’”[6]
“Leslie Robertson, one of the two original structural engineers for the World Trade Center, is asked at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany what he had done to protect the twin towers from terrorist attacks. He replies, ‘I designed it for a 707 to smash into it,’ though does not elaborate further.”[7]
[Frank A. Demartini:] “The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.” Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center,
“The Boeing 707 was the largest in use when the towers were designed. [Leslie] Robertson conducted a study in late 1964, to calculate the effect of a 707 weighing 263,000 pounds and traveling at 180 mph crashing into one of the towers. [Robertson] concluded that the tower would remain standing. However, no official report of his study has ever surfaced publicly.”[10]
“The engineer who said after the 1993 bombing that the towers could withstand a Boeing 707, Leslie Robertson, was not available for comment yesterday, a partner at his Manhattan firm said. ‘We're going to hold off on speaking to the media,’ said the partner, Rick Zottola, at Leslie E. Robertson Associates. ‘We'd like to reserve our first comments to our national security systems, F.B.I. and so on.’”[11]
“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.”[12]
“[The] National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in 2005 state that it has been ‘unable to locate any evidence to indicate consideration of the extent of impact- induced structural damage or the size of a fire that could be created by thousands of gallons of jet fuel.’”[13]
“In 2002, Leslie Robertson wrote: “To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance.”[14]
“[Leslie Robertson:] I support the general conclusions of the NIST report… The [WTC] was designed for the impact of a low flying slow flying Boeing 707. We envisioned it [to be like] the aircraft that struck the Empire State building [during] WW II. It was not designed for a high speed impact from the jets that actually hit it…
Yes there was a red hot metal seen [in the WTC rubble] by engineers. Molten—Molten means flowing—I’ve never run across anyone who has said that they had in fact seen molten metal, or by the way if they had seen it, if they had performed some kind of an analysis to determine what that metal was.” Steven Jones in discussion With Leslie Robertson [MP3] by KGNU Radio, Denver, CO, Oct 26, 2006
Robertson has made some glaring contradictions in his statements.
Robertson claims that the building was designed to only survive plane crashes at speeds of 180 mph. Interestingly he made this claim only a few days before 9/11.[15]
A quote by Building Designer Skilling
It is a very suspicious statement given the fact that it would be reasonable to consider the maximum speed of a plane flying into the Twin Towers.
Is it possible that Robertson was asked to leak this “deliberately misleading information” just before 9/11? However, this is just speculation.
Robertson says that the building was not designed to survive jet fuel fires: “To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire”. This claim is suspicious for two reasons: why would they design the towers to survive plane crashes without considering the jet fuel?
And more importantly, John Skilling claimed in 1993 that they did consider the jet fuel when they designed the buildings.[18]
In interview with Steven Jones, Robertson claims that he had “never run across anyone who has said that they had in fact seen molten metal.” This statement is extremely suspicious considering the fact that Robertson himself claimed to have seen it in a published news report! This contradicts his own statement about seeing molten metal: “Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the WTC, describes fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks.”[20].
Robertson is also incorrect when he says that “if they had seen [Molten Steel, they had not] performed some kind of an analysis to determine what that metal was. This statement is false. FEMA analyzed samples of the molten steel.[22]
However, NIST did not even mention the molten steel and called it “irrelevant to [their] investigation.”[23]
Is Robertson being pressured to lie and make false statements? Was he asked to leak a false statement just before 9/11 about the speed of the planes having an impact on their destruction? Are these contradictions by accident or mistake?
No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#21. To: BeAChooser AKA Our resident creepy korean guy (#20) (Edited)
Who is going to read that kooky spam you just posted? You imaginary girlfriend?
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#22. To: BeAChooser (#20)
I would be careful about posting kooky, hostile writings. The authorities have their hackles up about guys like you.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#23. To: BeAChooser (#20)
Don't say anything about that McBeef guy either.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#24. To: BeAChooser (#18)
[From BAC #18] http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument "Reflections on the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson, ... snip ... The lead structural engineer reflects on the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers." [The same NAE source quoting Robertson] Yes, no doubt I could have made the towers braver, more stalwart. Indeed, the power to do so rested almost solely with me. Robertson was not even a partner in Skilling's firm. Robertson was an employee. The power to take an action, or to not take an action, rested with Skilling's firm. Should the partners of the firm have decided that something Robertson wanted to do would not be done, Robertson would have had three choices: (1) do as his employer wanted; (2) quit; (3) get fired. It is unrealistic for the employee to assert that the power to act rested almost solely with the employee. The power rests with the employer.
#25. To: BeAChooser, Kamala, honway (#20)
[BAC #18 quoting] ... no study of the impact of a 600-mile-an-hour plane ever existed. [BAC #20] The source for this is Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. ROTFLOL! This is false. The calculation was done by Skilling (and only Skilling) and he was not one of the principle designers of the Towers. Nevertheless, and for the record, the towers did handle the impact of a 707 sized plane travelling almost that fast. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/Public%20Transcript%20021204%20Final1_withlinks.pdf Transcript of NIST Public Meeting in New York City – February 12, 2004 Table of Contents Jim Hill, National Institute of Standards and Technology ......... 1 Shyam Sunder, National Institute of Standards and Technology ..... 2 Public Comment Session I ........................................ 12 Sally Regenhard, Skyscraper Safety Campaign ..................... 12 Patricia Lancaster, New York City Department of Buildings ....... 15 Jim Tidwell, International Code Council ..........................17 Robert Solomon, National Fire Protection Association ............ 18 Jack Murphy, New York City Fire Safety Directors Association .... 19 Bill Bowen ...................................................... 21 James Quintiere, University of Maryland ......................... 23 Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, University of California, Berkeley ...... 25 Lawrence Shapiro, W.R. Grace & Company .......................... 27 Tim Vellrath, Vellrath Engineering .............................. 29 * * * Dr. Sunder: Good morning. Jim has already introduced me as the lead investigator for the federal building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center disaster, and I will take this time this morning to explain to you our overall goals, our objectives, and where we are in terms of status and progress on the investigation. * * * I want to start first by talking about data collection because this is a very, very important aspect of what we're trying to do. We've collected a very large amount of data and information from a whole host of organizations: The building owners, the designers, the City of New York, both the fire department, the police department, and numerous other organizations that support this, including suppliers of materials, such as fireproofing. We have a few requests for materials that are lost, currently pending, or not yet located. We are making every effort to recreate that information, since much of it was lost when the buildings collapsed, especially those that deal with the buildings themselves. We, at this point, believe that we have received all of the essential information for us to do a credible investigation. And we have said that for the past three months, while we continue to work the problem of the few Page 5 Transcript of NIST Public Meeting in New York City - February 12, 2004 4 pieces of information that we still seek. And in doing so, we've received considerable cooperation from a whole host of organizations, including survivors and victim's families. I'm going to touch on a number of aspects of our investigation which I think it’s worth for the public to know at this point in time. First of all the issue with regard to the safety of the towers in an aircraft collision. Buildings are not designed to withstand the impacts of fuel laden commercial airliners. However, in the case of the World Trade Center, it was a consideration. The structural safety of the towers in an aircraft collision was considered in the original design. We have some documents from 1964 that suggest that. There's another document a month later that considers an aircraft impact at the 80th floor of one of the towers. When you put those two together, the events of September 11th look strikingly similar. The analysis that was reported from that time indicated that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the buildings. We now know that the buildings withstood the initial impact of the aircraft. The loss of life would have been far greater had the buildings collapsed upon impact. The large size of the buildings, the 208 x 208 feet floor plan area, and the dense exterior grid of columns, enabled the buildings to withstand the initial impact of the airplanes. But when you go beyond the initial impact to look at fire safety and life safety, we find that there are some contradictory views. There are two views on whether or not the effect of jet fuel and the subsequent - and the aircraft contents with regard to fire safety was considered or not. One view suggested that the fuel would dump into the building and there would be a horrendous fire. The second view suggested that possibly the fuel load and the fire damage may not have been considered. These are the opinions of people who should know what was done at that time. With regard to life safety, there are two views, again, on what would be the effect on occupant life safety. One view, which considered the fires, suggested that - one view which did not consider the fire suggested that the aircraft impact would not have endangered the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact. Another view, which considered the fires, which took that into account, recognized that a lot of people would be killed, even though the building structure would still stand. We are still hopeful that we'll have further information available from wherever it resides, from the public, from people who know, to help us to better understand these different perspectives. And if we can get documents, that would be even better. * * *
#26. To: BeAChooser, Kamala, honway (#20)
[BAC #20] The source for this is Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. ROTFLOL! This is false. The calculation was done by Skilling (and only Skilling) and he was not one of the principle designers of the Towers. Nevertheless, and for the record, the towers did handle the impact of a 707 sized plane travelling almost that fast. Until after the construction of the WTC was completed, Leslie Robertson had not yet risen to the level of junior partner in he engineering firm of John Skilling. Robertson was an employee, not a partner. Robertson eventually became a partner, but that did not happen until after construction was completed. A series of articles from Engineering News Record from 1964 to 1971, refer to either John Skilling or Leslie Robertson. I have boldfaced each name in each instance and have left no instance unquoted from the linked source. Robertson did not receive a mention until 1971. Prior to that there are repeated references to John Skilling, but nary a mention of Robertson. http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/eng-news-record.htm SOME ARTICLES FROM ENGINEERING NEWS RECORD. ----- Architects are Minoru Yamasaki & Associates of Birmingham, Mich., and Emery Roth & Sons, of New York City. Structural engineers are Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson, of Seattle. July 9, 1964 ----- The concept was explained to the New York Architectural League by John Skilling, a partner in Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson, of Seattle, consulting structural engineers on the World Trade Center (see p. 124). April 2, 1964 ----- Walls resist wind. In designing the record-height towers against wind, Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson adopted a scheme that does not rely on the core at all to take wind. Each tower will act as a vertical, cantilevered hollow tube. The giant Vierendeel trusses forming the loadbearing exterior walls will provide the required rigidity and strength to resist wind. All the horizontal shear will be resisted by the sides of the building parallel to the wind, and most of the overturning moment will be taken by the exterior walls normal to the wind. For economy in resisting the stresses, the wall columns will be made of high-strength steels, as indicated in the diagram above. April 2, 1964 ----- Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, Birmingham, Mich., and Emery Roth & Sons, New York City, are the Architects. Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson, of Seattle, are, the consulting structural engineers; Jaros, Baum and Bowles, of New York City, the consulting mechanical engineers; and Joseph R. Loring and Associates, New York City, the consulting electrical' engineers. These firms were assisted in the design by the World Trade Center Planning Division under the direction of Malcolm P. Levy, and the PNYA engineering department, John M. Kyle,' chief engineer. January 23, 1964 ----- Fig . World Trade Center's towers will rise 1,350 ft in New York January 23, 1964 ----- To maintain uniform column and spandrel dimensions, structural engineers Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson, of Seattle, specified a variety of steel strengths and sections to resist varying stresses throughout the frame. February 2, 1967 ----- Monti on management. Monti operates from the 10th floor of a building overlooking the WTC site. Although he concentrates most of his attention in areas where things go wrong, he maintains constant communication with the main contractors, with the architects and with the engineering consultants, Skilling, Helle, Christiansen, Robertson, Seattle, on structural design; Joseph Loring & Associates, New York City, on electrical work, and Jaros, Baum & Bolles, New York City, on mechanical. February 11, 1971 ----- ============== http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/html/article_11092001.html ----- In 1963, the firm entered a competition held by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build in New York City what would be the tallest buildings ever constructed-the two towers of the World Trade Center. It was one of eight engineering firms-most of them large partnerships in New York-asked to submit proposals. Although the firm's tallest building up to that point was the twenty-story I. B.M. Building in Seattle, the architect of that building was Minoru Yamasaki-the same architect the Port Authority had selected for the World Trade Center. At a meeting to present the firm's proposal to the architect and developers, John Skilling, one of the four partners, used only a drawing pad, an easel, and some markers to make his pitch. ----- What Skilling proposed was a pure tube structure. His design was consistent with the general principles at work in the new generation of high-rises, but he carried the concept of the tube building farther than it had ever been taken before. (Or since: the Sears Tower, in Chicago, which replaced the World Trade towers as the world's tallest building in 1973, is also a tube building, but it is actually a cluster of nine smaller tubes.) The Twin Towers would be perforated steel boxes surrounding a hollow steel core. The outer box would be two hundred and eight feet on each side, and made of fourteen-inch-wide steel columns that were spaced on forty-inch centers-much closer than the fifteen-to-thirty-foot spaces that separate most supporting columns in a building. Like the cast-iron buildings of the previous century, the exterior walls would be load-bearing; unlike most skyscrapers, which hide their supporting columns, the Twin Towers would proudly wear their structure on their sleeves. Because there were so many load-bearing columns around the perimeter of each building, the engineers could completely eliminate all columns within the office space. Joining the outside tube to the inner core were state-of-the-art lightweight floor trusses that spanned sixty feet from core to exterior walls on two sides, and thirty-five feet on the other two sides. Yamasaki liked the design because it reminded him of a bamboo tube, an important totem for him. The Port Authority liked the design because, among other things, the towers would offer the single largest expanse of column-free office space in Manhattan-a realtor's dream. Skilling's firm got the commission, and Robertson, then thirty-five, moved to New York to open a new office, and to supervise the structural aspects of the building's construction. In 1983, the Seattle office and the New York office split, becoming two separate firms. Skilling (who died in 1998) and Robertson later argued about who was more responsible for the structure of the towers. "These are guys with big egos, and things got a little testy between them regarding who was ultimately responsible for the design," says Jon Magnusson, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Seattle-based firm, which is now called Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire. "Skilling said, 'It was me,' Robertson said, 'It was me,' but I think the truth is that both of them made a significant contribution." ----- http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.html John Skilling John Skilling was the head structural engineer for the World Trade Center. In a 1993 interview, Skilling stated that the Towers were designed to withstand the impact and fires resulting from the collision of a large jetliner such as Boeing 707 or McDonald Douglas DC-8. Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed, ... The building structure would still be there. A white paper released on February 3, 1964 states that the Towers could have withstood impacts of jetliners travelling 600 mph -- a speed greater than the impact speed of either jetliner used on 9/11/01. The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707-DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact. ----- Frank Demartini's Statement Frank A. Demartini, on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, spoke of the resilience of the towers in an interview recorded on January 25, 2001. The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door -- this intense grid -- and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting. Demartini, who had an office on the 88th floor of the North Tower, has been missing since the 9/11/01 attack, having remained in the North Tower to assist in the evacuation. 6 Demartini had first worked at World Trade Center when Leslie E. Robertson Associates hired him to assess damage from the truck bombing in 1993. Like All Skyscrapers, the Twin Towers Were Over-Engineered One aspect of engineering that is not widely understood is that structures are over-engineered as a matter of standard practice. Steel structures like bridges and buildings are typically designed to withstand five times anticipated static loads and 3 times anticipated dynamic loads. The anticipated loads are the largest ones expected during the life of the structure, like the worst hurricane or earthquake occurring while the floors are packed with standing-room-only crowds. Given that September 11th was not a windy day, and that there were not throngs of people in the upper floors, the critical load ratio was probably well over 10, meaning that more than nine-tenths of the columns at the same level would have to fail before the weight of the top could have overcome the support capacity of the remaining columns. There is evidence that the Twin Towers were designed with an even greater measure of reserve strength than typical large buildings. According to the calculations of engineers who worked on the Towers' design, all the columns on one side of a Tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind. 7 Also, John Skilling is cited by the Engineering News Record for the claim that "live loads on these [perimeter] columns can be increased more than 2000% before failure occurs." ----- The WTC’s structural engineer, Skilling Helle Christiansen Robertson, called the member a floor truss on the drawings. "All sizes of all members of all trusses were provided in the drawings," says Robertson, currently LERA’s director of design. ============== Engineers blame collapses on fires Burning jet fuel's heat softened steel supports of WTC towers, they say; Sprinklers disabled, outmatched By Edward Gunts Sun Architecture Critic Originally published September 13, 2001 ... Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson - the predecessor to Hooper's firm - was the structural engineer for the World Trade Center. Minoru Yamasaki was the lead architect. Engineers from the firm said eight years ago that the World Trade Center was designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 crash, because they knew a smaller plane had crashed into the Empire State Building. But even then, they warned that it wouldn't be safe from a subsequent fire. "Our analysis indicated that the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel [from the jet] would dump into the building," lead structural engineer John Skilling told The Seattle Times in 1993. "There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed. Skilling's scenario proved to be remarkably prescient. -----
Fig . Proposed skyscrapers will dominate the skyline of downtown Manhattan.
Fig . Floorbeams will span from exterior columns to elevator-core walls.
Fig . Structural consultant John Skilling.
Fig . Architects Richard (left) and Julian Roth and Minoru Yamasaki.
#27. To: BeAChooser (#18)
[From BAC #18] http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument "Reflections on the World Trade Center, Leslie E. Robertson, ... snip ... The lead structural engineer reflects on the rise and fall of the World Trade Center towers. ... snip ... It was assumed that the jetliner would be lost in the fog, seeking to land at JFK or at Newark. To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires." What would a jetliner be doing trying to land in Manhattan??? It has no place to land in New York county, Richmond county, Kings county, or Bronx county. It would have to be seeking to land in Queens county on Long Island (JFK nee Idlewild, or LaGuardia), or over in Newark in New Jersey. The plane that hit the Empire State building got lost in the fog during WW2, and before all the jetliners had radar and could fly in the fog using instruments. There is not much chance of a jetliner getting lost and trying to land at Penn Station, Port Authority Bus Terminal, or on top of Madison Square Garden. Maybe there is a Bermuda Triangle formed by the train station, the bus station, and the garden. Even so, there is not much chance for a jetliner to get caught between Penn Station and MSG. It seems someone forgot about the invention of radar.
#28. To: BeAChooser (#18)
It is a White Paper from 1964. Groundbreaking occurred two years later in 1966. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/Public%20Transcript%20021204%20Final1_withlinks.pdf Transcript of NIST Public Meeting in New York City - February 12, 2004 Shyam Sunder, National Institute of Standards and Technology the lead investigator for the federal building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center disaster: We have some documents from 1964 that suggest that. The impact scenario that was considered is a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour. There's another document a month later that considers an aircraft impact at the 80th floor of one of the towers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center Construction Groundbreaking for the construction of the World Trade Center was on August 5, 1966. In 1970, construction was completed on One World Trade Center, with its first tenants moving into the building in December, 1970. Tenants first moved into Two World Trade Center in January 1972. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper A white paper is an authoritative report. White papers are used to educate customers, collect leads for a company or help people make decisions. They can also be a government report outlining policy.
This was a back of the envelope calculation done AFTER the design was complete.
Buildings are not designed to withstand the impacts of fuel laden commercial airliners. However, in the case of the World Trade Center, it was a consideration. The structural safety of the towers in an aircraft collision was considered in the original design.
#29. To: BeAChooser (#18)
I am not responsible to look for your Hormel samples on other threads or sites. The only things to be learned from researching your spam at other sites is to learn your Bozo count or why you were banned. It does seem that you have a fan club over at FU. http://www.freedomunderground.org/view.php?v=3&t=3&l=24&aid=23539#7 [Dakmar #7] ok, everyone wants BeAChooser to post here say Aye! [continental op #8] Absolutely. BRing him over I'll murder the bastard. ect,ect ect... [continental op #21] I always got time for bealooser. Drag the rat over here. I'll annihilate him.
I've provided links to back my assertion up over and over in previous threads here at 4um (not to mention uncounted times at LP). If you weren't paying attention, NC, that's your problem.
#30. To: nolu_chan (#28)
Leslie Robertson was the coffee and donut boy for the real players, Skilling & Co. They sent him to NY to slop around in the mud, while in Seattle, they got the awards and had dinner. He is the only one alive from that time, I believe. He is jealous, vindictive that he never got the acclaim the others did. I think he eventually left to start his own company. Robertson now is only protecting what matters most, himself, money and his so called reputation.
Mark
"I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down... That didn't sound like just a building falling down to me while I was running away from it. There's a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions. [..] and the whole time you're hearing "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." I think I know an explosion when I hear it... — Former NYC Police Officer and 9/11 Rescue Worker Craig Bartmer
#31. To: Kamala, BeAChooser (#30)
To be fair, Engineering News Record said, "Leslie E. Robertson, was the WTC's project manager." In the world of reality TV, on The Apprentice WTC, Skilling would have been Donald Trump and Robertson would have been the Project Manager.
Leslie Robertson was the coffee and donut boy for the real players, Skilling & Co. They sent him to NY to slop around in the mud, while in Seattle, they got the awards and had dinner.
#32. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#25)
I can't help that Sunder occasionally is unclear when he speaks. He said the towers collapsed in 9 and 11 seconds and that is demonstrably FALSE. What he meant is that the first pieces of material were observed to strike the ground 9 and 11 seconds after the collapse began. And the ONLY document they have does not say that the towers were DESIGNED for a 600 mph impact. It was a WHITE PAPER, not a design document, that only says the tower would survive a 600 mph impact. Which is not surprising, if it was DESIGNED to survive a 180 mph impact ... given the safety factors used by designers of buildings in those days and the dearth of tools with which they could model impacts in those days.
Buildings are not designed to withstand the impacts of fuel laden commercial airliners. However, in the case of the World Trade Center, it was a consideration. The structural safety of the towers in an aircraft collision was considered in the original design. We have some documents from 1964 that suggest that. The impact scenario that was considered is a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour.
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#33. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#26)
Being a partner versus being the lead structural engineer on a project is more a matter of having the MONEY to become a partner, not whether one controls the detailed design of a given project. You are just throwing out a red herring, because I proved by posting numerous credible sources that state unequivocally that Robertson, not Skilling, was the lead structural engineer on the project and indeed one of the most influential members of the design team. It is a FACT that Robertson lived and worked in NYC which is where the design team was located. Skillings was still in Seattle and could not possibly have led the design team effectively. He may have conceptualize the design he wanted at the beginning, but it was Robertson and his team which made it a reality. And it would be Robertson, not Skilling, who would know the details of the design. Skilling was probably out marketing for new work for his company while his man worked the problem. That's what the CEOs of most firms do, by the way.
Until after the construction of the WTC was completed, Leslie Robertson had not yet risen to the level of junior partner in he engineering firm of John Skilling. Robertson was an employee, not a partner. Robertson eventually became a partner, but that did not happen until after construction was completed.
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#34. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#28)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_and_construction_of_the_World_Trade_Center "On September 20, 1962, the Port Authority announced the selection of Minoru Yamasaki as lead architect, and Emery Roth & Sons as associate architects.[26] Yamasaki came up with the idea of twin towers. To meet the Port Authority's requirement to build 10 million square feet of office space, the towers would each be 110-stories tall. Yamasaki remarked that the "obvious alternative, a group of several large buildings, would have looked like a housing project".[27] Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center was unveiled to the public on January 18, 1964, with an eight-foot model.[27] So there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that any White Paper from 1964 affected the DESIGN. You don't know what you are talking about nolu_chan.
"This was a back of the envelope calculation done AFTER the design was complete."
It is a White Paper from 1964. Groundbreaking occurred two years later in 1966.
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#35. To: BeAChooser (#33)
The employee receives a salary. The partners in the company split the corporate profits. The partners decide what the corporate employees do or refrain from doing. If the employee does not like their decision he can quit or be fired. More BAC nonsense.
Being a partner versus being the lead structural engineer on a project is more a matter of having the MONEY to become a partner, not whether one controls the detailed design of a given project.
#36. To: BeAChooser (#34)
So there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that any White Paper from 1964 affected the DESIGN. Yamasaki was the architect. He did not do the engineering. The design of the building did not end with the display of an 8-foot model. But if you say so... After the design was BAC-complete, engineering concepts were explained to the New York Architectural League by the Big Boss Structural Engineer, John Skilling, a partner in Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson. From Engineering News Record The concept was explained to the New York Architectural League by John Skilling, a partner in Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson, of Seattle, consulting structural engineers on the World Trade Center (see p. 124). April 2, 1964 Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center was unveiled to the public on January 18, 1964, with an eight-foot model.[27]
http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/eng-news-record.htm
#37. To: BeAChooser (#33)
Right. Demolition of the buildings on the site did not even begin until 1966. Looking at all those old buildings is what enabled the engineers to do their work. ~rme~ Robertson was an employee of Skilling and company. The architect conceptualizes the design of the building. The building contractors and all those construction workers made it a reality. On March 25, 1966, four years after the enactment of the authorizing legislation, demolition finally began on 26 vacant buildings on the World Trade Center site. It is a FACT that Robertson lived and worked in NYC which is where the design team was located. Skillings was still in Seattle and could not possibly have led the design team effectively. He may have conceptualize the design he wanted at the beginning, but it was Robertson and his team which made it a reality.
http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/World_Trade_Center_History.html
#38. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#36)
And you think they wait to determine what the underlying major structure is until AFTER the Architect unveils the DESIGN to the public? ROTFLOL! Here are some signs from the same article that the design was well underway much earlier than 1964. "The exterior walls will comprise giant Vierendeel trusses, designed to act like huge cantilevered hollow tubes. They will be pre-assembled in units two stories high and about 10 ft wide, spliced at mid-height of the columns and midspan of the deep spandrel beams. The closely spaced columns will consist of 14-inch-sq hollow box sections, providing high torsional and bending resistance. ... snip ... July 9, 1964" Well clearly the design was well underway by July 1964. "Four New York City construction companies will independently review construction techniques planned for the two 110-story towers at the World Trade Center ... snip ... April 16, 1964" Gee, in April 1964 they are already awarding bids to construction folks to REVIEW construction techniques. So they must know what they were going to build. "The Port of New York Authority will. pay architects Minoru Yamasaki & Associates and Emery Roth & Sons an extra $800,000 over the initial $1.5-million fee for designing the World Trade Center in New York City. The new contract covers further design refinements for the superstructure of the twin 110-story towers, studies of integration of the PATH railroad station into the project. October 15, 1964" Hmmm ... in October 1964, they were already awarding more money for REFINEMENTS of the design. "HOW COLUMNS WILL BE DESIGNED FOR 110-STORY BUILDINGS ... snip ... April 2, 1964" Gosh, according to that article in April 1964 they already have all the major dimensions that we know about the structure ... the size of its members ... the response to loads ... the variations in steel strength over the height. So what did Skillling really do? "NEW YORK'S 110-STORY TOWERS ... Most local designers and builders want to know more about the New York World Trade Center and its sky-shattering heights (ENR Jan. 23, p. 33), but they generally like what they've seen so far. ... snip ... James Ruderman, consulting structural engineer "The structural design of the tower buildings shows a commendable job of rethinking, where ideas were given a lot of thought and not just treated routinely." ... snip ... January 30, 1964." Oh my gosh ... in January of 1964 a structural engineer is commenting on the structural design. He must have had something to comment on. Here's a real puzzler for you, NC. The White Paper written by Skilling that you are making such a big deal about was released February 3, 1964. So if the concept was just being explained to Skilling in APRIL of that year, how did he manage to do a detailed analysis to show that the structure could survive a 600 mph commercial jet impact back in February? Hmmmmmmm???? I anticipate that question will go just as unanswered as my question about what kept the molten steel molten 6 weeks after the collapse ... or my question about whether that photo of debris proves Steven Jones is a liar. ROTFLOL!
"Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center was unveiled to the public on January 18, 1964, with an eight-foot model.[27]"
[BAC] - So there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that any White Paper from 1964 affected the DESIGN.
Yamasaki was the architect. He did not do the engineering.
The design of the building did not end with the display of an 8-foot model.
The concept was explained to the New York Architectural League by John Skilling, a partner in Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson, of Seattle, consulting structural engineers on the World Trade Center (see p. 124).
April 2, 1964
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#39. To: BeAChooser (#38)
No moron. You said at #34, "So there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that any White Paper from 1964 affected the DESIGN." A whole bunch of things could, and most certainly did, change in the design after 1964. What I said at #36 was, "The design of the building did not end with the display of an 8-foot model." In your idiocy, you asserted that prior to the White Paper in 1964, the design had been COMPLETED. Now in a bait and switch, in order to try to extract your sorry butt from your display of gross public dumb, you assert, "some signs from the same article that the design was well underway much earlier than 1964." Referring to the White Paper of February 3, 1964, you blathered at #18, "This was a back of the envelope calculation done AFTER the design was complete." That the design was UNDERWAY prior to 1964 would in no way support your prior claim that "there is NO POSSIBLE WAY that any White Paper from 1964 affected the DESIGN." Also, at #18, you did not say the design was UNDERWAY prior to the White Paper, you explicitly stated the White Paper was "done AFTER the design was complete." [BAC upper case emphasis.] AFTER 1964, Robertson's original engineering design plan had to be scrapped because tests in 1965 showed the buildings would sway beyond the limits of human tolerance. As Glanz and Lipton wrote in the New York Times, "Even today, Robertson has no trouble conjuring what two towers full of seasick office workers would have meant: 'A billion dollars right down the tube.' So he went back to work." The Height of Ambition: Part Four * * * Using exterior columns rather than interior ones for lateral stiffness not only increased the building's floor space; it also let Robertson reduce the total amount of structural steel in the building by at least 30 percent. The steel in the tightly spaced columns became as thin as a quarter-inch toward the top, where it had less load to carry. Robertson had succeeded in achieving his main goals for these exotic steel trees. But in designing what would become the feathery branches of those trees -- the floors -- he pushed even further toward lightweightness and cost savings. Rather than the massive beams or heavy framings that serve as horizontal floor supports in virtually every large steel office tower, Robertson chose bar-joist trusses -- airy, weblike networks of thin steel bars and angle irons topped with corrugated decking. Those trusses, which spanned as much as 60 feet, had two critical roles: they held up the concrete floors, and they provided lateral support to the exterior columns, keeping them from buckling under the load they carried. According to Robertson's figures, the trusses worked as well as heavy traditional girders and beams in performing those roles under ordinary circumstances. What he did not take into account was the extraordinary conditions of an intense, violent fire. Girders and beams would be far superior under those circumstances. Thin steel elements heat up and soften faster than thick ones. But in recent conversations, Robertson has said that architects generally handle anything dealing with fire in building projects, not engineers, so he did not think about this reduction in safety. Robertson and the Port Authority made another choice that proved fateful decades later. They chose not to use thick masonry or cement to encase the three escape stairways in each tower but rather light sheets of gypsum. Although the gypsum was extremely resistant to fire, and less likely than masonry to crack when the building swayed in the wind, it would work only if it remained intact -- and it was much more susceptible to being shaken loose or damaged by an explosion or any other kind of unexpected impact. There was another factor that Robertson had to take into account: the swaying motion of his buildings. The lightweight steel skeletons would not only put people unnaturally high in the air, as all skyscrapers do. They would let the buildings sway back and forth in the wind, like the biggest, leafiest trees ever planted. Heavy masonry-clad high-rises like the Empire State Building had never had to deal with this problem. For that reason, engineers had never measured how much swaying motion humans could stand before they became dizzy, seasick, frightened or disoriented. To answer that question, Robertson turned to an expert in human perception in Eugene, Ore. -- a spot as far removed from the New York press as he could find. Paul Hoffman, a psychologist, agreed to perform a secret series of experiments to find out just how much swaying motion was too much. Hoffman purchased a small office building in downtown Eugene and in the summer of 1965 put an ad in the local paper offering free eye checkups at a ''vision research center.'' But it was actually an elaborate ruse: the optometrist who conducted the eye exams was one of Hoffman's employees, Paul R. Eskildsen. And as each patient stared at triangles projected on the wall, a hidden technician would trigger a giant set of hydraulics underneath the room that heaved it back and forth like a big saltshaker. ''This is a strange room,'' one patient said, according to Eskildsen's detailed notes. ''I suppose it's because I don't have my glasses on. Is it rigged or something? It really feels funny.'' Patient after patient reacted the same way -- becoming dizzy and confused soon after the eye exam began. Humans, Hoffman discovered, were much more sensitive to motion than anyone had realized. A few inches of sway over 5 or 10 seconds set off psychophysical alarm bells. ''The people who were most surprised of all were the engineering firm and the Port Authority,'' Hoffman says. First, Port Authority officials trooped out to Eugene. Old photos show them milling around the little optometrist's office, looking flummoxed. Then they insisted on redoing the experiments by swinging a makeshift office on cables inside one of the Lincoln Tunnel's ventilation towers on Manhattan's West Side. ''It was a big packing crate, is what it was, that they had dolled up to look like an office,'' says Eskildsen, who traveled to New York for the new round. ''I had two guys outside who pushed the room. It was hilarious.'' About 40 Port Authority officials rode in the contraption. The results were the same. Wind-tunnel experiments in Fort Collins, Colo., confirmed that Robertson's initial design would sway far beyond those human tolerances, says Jack Cermak, then a professor of civil engineering and the director of the wind-tunnel laboratory at Colorado State University. Even today, Robertson has no trouble conjuring what two towers full of seasick office workers would have meant: ''A billion dollars right down the tube.'' So he went back to work. * * * But Robertson still had one more set of structural calculations to perform. Lawrence Wien, who was continuing his fight against the towers, had begun to remind New Yorkers publicly of a Saturday morning in July 1945, when a B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, barreled into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Most of the 14 people who died were incinerated by a fireball created when the plane's fuel ignited, even though the fire was quickly contained. The following year, another plane crashed into the 72-story skyscraper at 40 Wall Street, and yet another one narrowly missed the Empire State Building, terrifying sightseers on the observation deck. Wien and his committee charged that the twin towers, with their broader and higher tops, would represent an even greater risk of midair collision. They ran a nearly full-page ad in The Times with an artist's rendition of a commercial airliner about to ram one of the towers. ''Unfortunately, we rarely recognize how serious these problems are until it's too late to do anything,'' the caption said. The Port Authority was already trying to line up the thousands of tenants it would need to fill the acres of office space in the towers. Such a frightful vision could not be left unchallenged. Robertson says that he never saw the ad and was ignorant of the political battle behind it. Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer's curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out. The new technologies he had installed after the motion experiments and wind-tunnel work had created a structure more than strong enough to withstand such a blow. Exactly how Robertson performed these calculations is apparently lost -- he says he cannot find a copy of the report. Several engineers who worked with him at the time, including the director of his computer department, say they have no recollection of ever seeing the study. But the Port Authority, eager to mount a counterattack against Wien, seized on the results -- and may in fact have exaggerated them. One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. That was perhaps three times the speed that Robertson had considered. If Robertson saw the article in the paper, he never spoke up about the discrepancy. No one else issued a correction, and the question was answered in many people's minds: the towers were as safe as could be expected, even in the most cataclysmic of circumstances. There were only two problems. The first, of course, was that no study of the impact of a 600-mile-an-hour plane ever existed. ''That's got nothing to do with the reality of what we did,'' Robertson snapped when shown the Port Authority architect's statement more than three decades later. The second problem was that no one thought to take into account the fires that would inevitably break out when the jetliner's fuel exploded, exactly as the B-25's had. And if Wien was the trade center's Cassandra, fire protection would become its Achilles' heel. * * * [nc - there are at least a few more problems. Robertson's assertion of being unaware of the Wein ad and the political battle is not credible. Perhaps Robertson performed only an imaginary study consisting of nothing more than some propaganda released to the press, or he blew smoke at the architect. A prominent article in the New York Times explained that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. There can be no credible assertion of unawareness by all concerned in the building of the WTC and no correction was issued. Robertson's three decades late assertion that he considered only a plane going 180 mph is not credible.] Compare with BAC drivel at #18 http://tinyurl.com/2vm8fu
The New York Times, Sunday Edition
September 8, 2002
The Height of Ambition: Part Four
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC LIPTON
#40. To: all (#0) (Edited)
I have concluded that the only purpose BAC has here is to derail all 9-11 discussions with spam filled posts and outrageous claims. He's the Donald Segretti showing up to sabotage an open forum and make it his agenda. I put him on Bozo, but his impact on these threads is still seen, as he sucks out the oxygen from the conversation. I tend to skip any thread in which he participates actively, and I suspect that is one of his objectives, since disruption is his primary goal.
#41. To: Paul Revere (#40)
Yes, diversion/disruption appears to be his main objective. One way to counter it is to know when to quit replying to his replies. When you have made a point that effectively answers all his previous objections, that is the time to quit. The entire thread is there for people to absorb, if they take the time, and if the "knock-out" reply is enough, the thoughtful people will see it. Even if the readers don't "get it" in real-time, they can go back through the archives and see for themselves who was right and who was wrong. Sure, he will crow a NON SEQUITUR that he "won" if he gets in the last word. In the case of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, everyone knows now that he was wrong about everything. You have to be patient, but the truth will out.
#42. To: nolu_chan (#39)
Another aspect people overlook is all the mechanical floors were not the truss design but conventual heavy girder contruction to support the mechanicals of each 1/3 of the towers.
Mark
"I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down... That didn't sound like just a building falling down to me while I was running away from it. There's a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions. [..] and the whole time you're hearing "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." I think I know an explosion when I hear it... — Former NYC Police Officer and 9/11 Rescue Worker Craig Bartmer
#43. To: roughrider (#41)
It doesn't matter what one posts to "IT". Wether you provide links, pictures or paragraphs. Thats why I have never provided any links to "IT". Why feed "IT" any info that "IT" could split hairs with.
Mark
"I was real close to Building 7 when it fell down... That didn't sound like just a building falling down to me while I was running away from it. There's a lot of eyewitness testimony down there of hearing explosions. [..] and the whole time you're hearing "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." I think I know an explosion when I hear it... — Former NYC Police Officer and 9/11 Rescue Worker Craig Bartmer
#44. To: Paul Revere (#40)
You're right. There's no shortage of examples. And it doesn't matter if someone has real life experience in matters pertinent to the tower collapse incident, he/she/it will try to discredit them. In that attempt, there may be a link included to prove his/her/its point, and in quoting from that link only the "convenient" information is told; but when an important part of the information from that link is brought out that he/she/it didn't mention, it results in more ridicule. Moreover, he/she/it also adamantly and openly refuses to answer ANY other glaring pertinent inconsistencies and/or questions concerning 9/11 You're not the only one. But like you said, it's to little avail...
I have concluded that the only purpose BAC has here is to derail all 9-11 discussions with spam filled posts and outrageous claims. He's the Donald Segretti showing up to sabotage an open forum and make it his agenda.
I put him on Bozo
No matter how noble the objectives of a government; if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion - it is an EVIL government. Eric Hoffer
#45. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#39)
The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964. Otherwise, Skilling could not possibly have completed an analysis of the structure's ability to survive a high speed plane crash that he published a White Paper about on February 3, 1964. You can't have it both ways NC. Either the White Paper is simply nonsense based on an incomplete design or the design (as far as what would be necessary to determine the resistance of the towers to plane impact) was completed by February 3, 1964. And since it must have taken some time to do the analysis that is claimed and write the White Paper, that would imply the design was essentially finished before January 1964. But he didn't change the essential structure during that revision. The revision must have consisted of very few changes because the articles you linked and quoted from 1964 and earlier show design details (size of columns, spacing, steel strengths, etc) that agree quite well with the final design. And indeed, the article you quote doesn't say the revision involved changes in the major structure. Your article is telling us that contrary to what the CT community has been saying, the WTC tower design was MORE vulnerable to fire than other steel skyscrapers (which usually uses girders and beams)? Well ... perhaps that explains why they were the first skyscrapers to collapse due to fire. Oh my goodness ... yet another difference between the WTC tower design and most other skyscraper designs. One that again makes the towers MORE vulnerable to fire if a plane crash has occurred. Are you finally admitting that it was Robertson's design ... not Skilling's. Good for you. Again, what YOU posted says Robertson did look at the tower's performance for a low speed plane lost in fog, not a high speed impact. And one more point ... this points out that Robertson, like Skilling, did an analysis AFTER the design was done. Crash of planes into the towers was apparently not a DESIGN LOAD so it is incorrect to claim that the towers were DESIGNED for even this plane crash. It's just fortuitous for them that calculations showed the towers would survive a plane impact. Otherwise, they might have had to redesign the whole tower. Right? New technologies? That doesn't sound like he just added thickness to steel members or increased the steel strengths, does it? Let's see ... what could they be talking about? Maybe the outrigger space frame which linked the outside wall to the services core? No ... that was part of the initial concept. Wait! I know what they are talking about. http://www.nae.edu/nae/bridgecom.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB "A viscoelastic damping system was invented and patented to ameliorate the wind-induced dynamic component of building motion by dissipating much of the energy of that motion . . . acting more or less like shock absorbers in an automobile. With these dampers, we could control the swaying motion without having to use large quantities of structural steel. This was the first time engineered dampers were used to resist the wind-induced swaying motion of a building." Now my question to you is this. Do you think those viscoelastic dampers significantly affected the resistance of the towers to plane impact? Or increased it's fire resistance? Or affected the way the tower would collapse once fire did its thing? No? Then I don't know why you even bring this up in this debate other than muddy the waters and keep folks from seeing the essential issues. Fine. If you want to claim that no study of the tower's resistance to aircraft impact was performed, that's ok with me. Because I thought it is the CT community that insists the towers were DESIGNED to survive multiple high speed plane crashes. What are you going to do, NC ... just ignore the real mystery here? The link YOU PROVIDED tells us that the concept for the towers was just explained to Skilling in April of 2004. Yet he published his White Paper (where you claim he did a design analysis of the towers) in February 3, 1964. Impossible? Yes.
In your idiocy, you asserted that prior to the White Paper in 1964, the design had been COMPLETED.
Referring to the White Paper of February 3, 1964, you blathered at #18, "This was a back of the envelope calculation done AFTER the design was complete."
AFTER 1964, Robertson's original engineering design plan had to be scrapped because tests in 1965 showed the buildings would sway beyond the limits of human tolerance. As Glanz and Lipton wrote in the New York Times, "Even today, Robertson has no trouble conjuring what two towers full of seasick office workers would have meant: 'A billion dollars right down the tube.' So he went back to work."
What he did not take into account was the extraordinary conditions of an intense, violent fire. Girders and beams would be far superior under those circumstances. Thin steel elements heat up and soften faster than thick ones.
They chose not to use thick masonry or cement to encase the three escape stairways in each tower but rather light sheets of gypsum. Although the gypsum was extremely resistant to fire, and less likely than masonry to crack when the building swayed in the wind, it would work only if it remained intact -- and it was much more susceptible to being shaken loose or damaged by an explosion or any other kind of unexpected impact.
Wind-tunnel experiments in Fort Collins, Colo., confirmed that Robertson's initial design would sway far beyond those human tolerances,
Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer's curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out.
The new technologies he had installed after the motion experiments and wind-tunnel work had created a structure more than strong enough to withstand such a blow.
Robertson's assertion of being unaware of the Wein ad and the political battle is not credible. Perhaps Robertson performed only an imaginary study consisting of nothing more than some propaganda released to the press, or he blew smoke at the architect.
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#46. To: roughrider, Paul Revere, nolu_chan, ALL (#41)
Exactly where have I diverted the discussion, roughrider? The subject of this thread is why the towers fell. ALL my posts have concerned that subject in one way or another. You just don't like the fact that I showed that you and the others here really don't understand the issues, science, engineering, facts or even logic. Then you should have quit back on post #1 when I took the subject article of this thread apart and brought into real doubt the qualifications of its supposed author. Tell you what, roughrider, since you insist we stay on topic. Why don't you respond to my criticisms of the article in post #1. You can start by providing proof that Rice is who he says he is. Show us his resume. Tell us where he got his degree. Who did he work for while working in the field? Show me anything from Vermont Technical College that actually proves he worked or works there. I'm curious, roughrider. Since you are such a master of logic, can you explain how Skillings could have done a definitive analysis of the towers resistance to plane impact that he published in February 1964 if the design wasn't done by then? For that matter, does the claim that the concept of the design was first explained to Skilling in April 1964 make any sense if he published a White Paper analysis of the towers resistance to aircraft impact in February 1964? Or is it time for you to quit? ROTFLOL!
Yes, diversion/disruption appears to be his main objective.
One way to counter it is to know when to quit replying to his replies.
When you have made a point that effectively answers all his previous objections, that is the time to quit.
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#47. To: Kamala, roughrider, ALL (#43)
No, Kamala, here's why you never provide links to what you claim. http://www.fire.nist.gov/fds/docs/fds_tech_guide_4.pdf In the acknowledgments section it states "The Fire Dynamics Simulator has been under development for almost 25 years." In Chapter 2 it states that "Version 1 of FDS was publicly released in February 2000". Gee ... that was before the WTC project, wasn't it. ROTFLOL! And that's just the latest of MANY examples.
Kamala to roughrider - It doesn't matter what one posts to "IT". Wether you provide links, pictures or paragraphs. Thats why I have never provided any links to "IT". Why feed "IT" any info that "IT" could split hairs with.
[Kamala] - The FDS software was so full of bugs it was a joke. None of this computer software was tested or existed before the WTC research project.
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#48. To: innieway, Paul Revere, ALL (#44)
Says the guy who claimed real life experience with regards to structures and then said "EVERYTHING is stronger in compression than in tension" when talking about steel structural elements. Which is completely false. ROTFLOL! You will not find the truth about 9/11 if you start from a foundation of misinformation and lies. You will only end up discrediting the attempt to get that truth.
And it doesn't matter if someone has real life experience in matters pertinent to the tower collapse incident, he/she/it will try to discredit them.
Moreover, he/she/it also adamantly and openly refuses to answer ANY other glaring pertinent inconsistencies and/or questions concerning 9/11
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#49. To: BeAChooser (#45)
Actually, it was the architects and engineers, per a white paper and an unchallenged article in the New York Times, by which questions about the safety of the soon to be built WTC were addressed to assuage the public. They claimed that the building would withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 at 600 mph. Maybe they lied, or maybe they actually designed the WTC to sustain a hit by the largest jetliner then in the sky going at 600 mph. It is only repeating what was said contemporaneously and publicly. Either they did it or they lied about doing it.
If you want to claim that no study of the tower's resistance to aircraft impact was performed, that's ok with me. Because I thought it is the CT community that insists the towers were DESIGNED to survive multiple high speed plane crashes.
#50. To: BeAChooser, roughrider, Paul Revere, ALL (#46)
[BAC #46 to roughrider] Exactly where have I diverted the discussion, roughrider? BAC constantly invents "facts" or distorts facts and attributes statements or arguments to the other party which were not made, and he can proceed to argue against a flawed argument of his own manufacture, making believe he is arguing against something said by the other party. Let me explain how bareback rider changes and diverts the conversation with a big lie. This is just typical BAC. [BAC at #45 to nolu_chan] "The link YOU PROVIDED tells us that the concept for the towers was just explained to Skilling in April of 2004. (sic -1964) Yet he published his White Paper (where you claim he did a design analysis of the towers) in February 3, 1964. [BAC at #46 to roughrider] "For that matter, does the claim that the concept of the design was first explained to Skilling in April 1964 make any sense if he published a White Paper analysis of the towers resistance to aircraft impact in February 1964?" Here we have another BAC BIG LIE. NO SOURCE ever asserted that "the concept of the design was first explained to Skilling in April 1964." In my #26, I quoted an article demonstrating that Skilling presented his design in 1963: ----- What Skilling proposed was a pure tube structure. His design was consistent with the general principles at work in the new generation of high-rises, but he carried the concept of the tube building farther than it had ever been taken before." This is just the way BAC operates. The concept was explained to the public in January 1964 and according to BAC it was first explained to the chief structural engineer in April 1964 - only in BAC world.
"In 1963, the firm entered a competition held by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to build in New York City what would be the tallest buildings ever constructed-the two towers of the World Trade Center. It was one of eight engineering firms-most of them large partnerships in New York-asked to submit proposals. Although the firm's tallest building up to that point was the twenty-story I. B.M. Building in Seattle, the architect of that building was Minoru Yamasaki-the same architect the Port Authority had selected for the World Trade Center. At a meeting to present the firm's proposal to the architect and developers, John Skilling, one of the four partners, used only a drawing pad, an easel, and some markers to make his pitch.
At #34, BAC quoted Wikipedia stating Yamasaki presented his design to the public in January 1964: "Yamasaki's design for the World Trade Center was unveiled to the public on January 18, 1964, with an eight-foot model."
In my #36, I quoted an April 2, 1964 article which documented an explanation of the concept BY John Skilling: "The concept was explained to the New York Architectural League by John Skilling, a partner in Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson, of Seattle, consulting structural engineers on the World Trade Center."
The concept was not explained TO JOHN SKILLING in April 1964. Speaking to the New York Architectural League in April 1964, the concept was explained BY JOHN SKILLING.
#51. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#49)
And it did. At least close to a 600 mph impact by a comparably sized plane. Nope. They didn't. We have proof. The towers survived the impact. Nope. They did not. The lead structural engineer states that the structure was designed for a 180 mph impact. The ANALYSIS that was done to see it might survive a 600 mph impact was done AFTER the design of the major structural elements. I think I proved that. You tried to pull a fast one here, NC, AND YOU GOT CAUGHT.
They claimed that the building would withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 at 600 mph.
Maybe they lied,
or maybe they actually designed the WTC to sustain a hit by the largest jetliner then in the sky going at 600 mph.
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#52. To: BeAChooser (#51)
You never answered my post. Well?
"You tried to pull a fast one here, NC, AND YOU GOT CAUGHT."
#53. To: BeAChooser (#51) (Edited)
The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact. 4 http://911research.w >http://tc7.net/wtc/analysis/d esign.htmlA white paper released on February 3, 1964 states that the Towers could have withstood impacts of jetliners travelling 600 mph -- a speed greater than the impact speed of either jetliner used on 9/11/01.
Like All Skyscrapers, the Twin Towers Were Over-Engineered One aspect of engineering that is not widely understood is that structures are over- engineered as a matter of standard practice. Steel structures like bridges and buildings are typically designed to withstand five times anticipated static loads and 3 times anticipated dynamic loads. The anticipated loads are the largest ones expected during the life of the structure, like the worst hurricane or earthquake occurring while the floors are packed with standing- room-only crowds. Given that September 11th was not a windy day, and that there were not throngs of people in the upper floors, the critical load ratio was probably well over 10, meaning that more than nine-tenths of the columns at the same level would have to fail before the weight of the top could have overcome the support capacity of the remaining columns.
There is evidence that the Twin Towers were designed with an even greater measure of reserve strength than typical large buildings. According to the calculations of engineers who worked on the Towers' design, all the columns on one side of a Tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind. 7 Also, John Skilling is cited by the Engineering News Record for the claim that "live loads on these [perimeter] columns can be increased more than 2000% before failure occurs." 8
#54. To: BeAChooser (#51)
Post 53 and the information at the link in it sez you are busted, booby.
#55. To: nolu_chan (#50)
Seems to me that BAC has a reading comprehension problem. Not surprised, I would imagine many believers of the government theory are similarly challenged.
This is just the way BAC operates. The concept was explained to the public in January 1964 and according to BAC it was first explained to the chief structural engineer in April 1964 - only in BAC world.
God is always good!
"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11 [White House, 1/5/02]
#56. To: BeAChooser (#51) (Edited)
Why the bloody hell would they use a sped close to the V1 of the aircraft? (The gear and flaps up stall speed) The model best suited to use to engineer to withstand impact of an aircraft would be cruise speed. The Vno and or Vmo would be much more logical a standard to use in engineering models. (Vno-Normal Operating Speed, Vmo-Maximum Operating Speed)
#57. To: BeAChooser (#51)
nud·nik also nud·nick(ndnk)
n. Slang
An obtuse, boring, or bothersome person; a pest.
#58. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#50)
It's sad that you resort to this sort slimy language and innuendo. It is an indication that you know your arguments and assertions are without any real merit. Robertson was, according to numerous credible sources, the lead structural engineer. Not Skilling. Skilling just owned the company. He was not the project manager ... the person most intimately familiar with the design and most influential in determining the loads to which it was designed. Robertson was. Robertson was at the location where the design team worked ... NYC. Not Skillings. Robertson says the towers were DESIGNED for a low speed plane impact. Skillings did an ANALYSIS (even he called it that in his 3 PAGE White Paper) of a high speed plane impact. There is a difference between design and analysis. The analysis showed the towers would survive the crash. But that is not unexpected if the towers were designed for a low speed impact, given the sort of safety factors involved in design. To claim the towers were designed for a high speed impact is simply dishonest. To claim they were designed for the fire that would follow a plane impact is dishonest. So do you want to make those claims, NC? Thank you for catching that. I badly misread that quote. I'm embarrassed to have made that mistake. You see, I have no problem admitting when I'm clearly wrong. How about you? And never the less, Skillings white paper is dated February 3 1964. It's difficult to imagine that he'd have been able to do an ANALYSIS on anything less than an already completed design and conclude the towers would survive. It's difficult to believe that he was able to complete and document such a complex analysis in less than a month. Thus, it's difficult to believe that the major structural elements weren't already designed by January 1st 1964. Now here is another source for consideration: http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1-1.pdf "For the design of the WTC towers, which began in 1962, the Port Authority in May 1963 instructed the architect and engineers to prepare their designs of WTC 1 and WTC 2 to comply with the NYC Building Code."
Let me explain how bareback rider changes
Speaking to the New York Architectural League in April 1964, the concept was explained BY JOHN SKILLING.
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#59. To: BeAChooser (#58) (Edited)
And when your words are shown not to have merit and to be erroneous, you pretend that that did not happen. People get angry and frustrated with you because you do not dialog in good faith. You are brainlessly and reflexively defending everything and anything the current administration says happened 9-11. If you were dialogging in good faith, you would not be so black and white in your alleged opinions. BAC, the designated 4UM false flag op cheerleader.
"It's sad that you resort to this sort slimy language and innuendo. It is an indication that you know your arguments and assertions are without any real merit."
#60. To: Ferret Mike (#59)
Damn, that hurts to watch, especially since my kid is the captain of the school cheerleading squad. lol
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#61. To: Critter (#60)
Yep. I feel sorry for that girl at the end particularly. ;-)
#62. To: BeAChooser (#58)
You see, I frankly don't care what this report said unless you can explain away all of the above. Because the proof is in the pudding. Bush was right. This report was wrong. And didn't you know? Aligyrl got the boot. BeAChooser posted on 2004-05-13 00:53:27 ET http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=24590&Disp=26&Trace=on#C26 So, do you still believe the severely and conclusively debunked Saddam/al Qaeda connection? You sure like conspiracy theory when it involves the death of Ron Brown or this ridiculous and debunked connection between Saddam and al Qaeda.
26. To: wbales1 (#25) Explain the presence of al-Zarqawi in Baghdad after 9/11. Explain his being allowed to conduct operations from Baghdad, including the assassination of our ambassador to Jordan. Explain his connection to the al-Qaeda camp in Northern Iraq ... a camp where it was proved after the war they were working with ricin. Explain his trip to Europe after visiting this camp when he visited two al-Qaeda cells (one in England, one in France) that when later broken up were found to be planning ricin attacks on civilians. Explain the al-Qaeda captured in Jordan that just confessed to planning a chemical attack (which included the use of VX) and who say that al-Zarqawi was the mastermind behind the plot and that they trained for the attack IN IRAQ. Explain Kay's conclusion that WMD components were transported from Iraq to Syria right before the war based on Iraqi interrogations and other data (such as photos and sources within Syria). Explain the murders of so many Iraqi scientists that were seen to be cooperating with Kay's effort to locate the WMD. Explain the intercepts (some played by Powell) that suggest Iraqis had nerve agents and wished to hide them. Explain the VX counteragents found in the possession of the Iraqi military. Explain the just discovered document that suggests Atta did indeed meet with Iraq intelligence just before 9/11. Explain the coincidence in location and time between the first anthrax case and the hijackers. Explain the CIA's list of 50 al-Qaeda / Iraq linkages that was published by the Weekly Standard. etc. etc. etc.
#63. To: Ferret Mike, nolu_chan, ALL (#59)
You seem to be the one doing the cheerleading (for NC) here. That is, unless you'd like to make a real contribution to the discussion. Tell us, FM, how did Skillings do an analysis to end all analyses (that's what the CT community claims ... right?) and document it on February 3, 1964, if the design wasn't completed until later in 1964 as nolu_chan would have us believe?
BAC, the designated 4UM false flag op cheerleader.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#64. To: BeAChooser (#63)
How many posts do you have left tonight Short Leash?
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#65. To: BeAChooser (#63)
Disingenuous, you have routinely ignored me this last week when I tried to get a response to you. I also remember once at LP trying to talk of low intensity conflict. You responded that because the insurgents used mortars it wasn't low intensity warfare. BAC, mortars are used in hit and run low intensity conflict situation. You ignore, bait and service a hidden agenda. I have no faith now that you will ever operate in good faith. So we'll see how well you argue against your past statements.
"That is, unless you'd like to make a real contribution to the discussion."
#66. To: BeAChooser (#63) (Edited)
Did you ever see the movie where Harrison Ford faces off against an arab armed with a big sword. Now imagine yourself, armed with your firearms, in the role of the arab ... because that's the comparison between WMDs and your weapons ... and I suspect the outcome would be similar. So just go ahead and ignore insane megalomaniac dictators and terrorists armed with WMDs. Make their day! BeAChooser posted on 2002-11-13 14:05:45 ET And these WMD are...? Well? Enough NeoCon nuttery and B.S., where is the beef?
http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=5668&Disp=27#C27
27. To: All (#26)
To all of you posting these pictures of your favorite weapon.
#67. To: Minerva (#64)
It appears Howlin is in true Clinton-mode here. Smearing someone with the term "stalker" sure sounds familiar to me. This is my first post on this new forum. How appropriate that it concerns Howlin. As you may know, she and I crossed swords numerous times, dictionary definitions and all! And, of course, she and her friends are undoubtedly the reason I'm no longer on TOS. I guess they couldn't forgive my labeling them "move-on'ers", a completely accurate description which Jim eventually banned as a "personal insult". Or perhaps it was my calling them "democRATS" whenever they debated like democRATS. In any case, I was booted from TOS in June with no warning and no explanation (despite what the Admin Moderators claim happens in such cases). I also haven't been given the courtesy of a response to any of the several polite emails I sent to Robinson asking for an explanation. Since I never used foul language or, as far as I can tell, violated any of the stated guidelines for posting on TOS, the only reason I can see for TOSsing me is that move-on'ers are now paying the bills and Robinson's got to eat. Now, regarding Howlin's accusation that you are a stalker ... I "feel your pain". Here is the irony. Do you know that Howlin was once known as "Stalker"? Below is from the TOS thread "A day in the life of President Bush (photos): 6/19/02": ********* To: omegatoo When I first came here, I worked for an unnamed chat room who didn't want me to use Howlin as my screenname, so I took Stalker; when I left them, I picked used this one since most people who had been on Court TV chatroom knew me by this one. Take a look at the JOIN DATE on Stalker........LOL. posted on 6/19/02 8:34 PM Pacific by Howlin ********* Now I wonder why she called herself that? BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-05 19:20:34 ET It's interesting ow in his first LP post, BAC advances the notion that JR and howlin are Move On operatives. Interesting way to start out in a new place, with easily debunk-able conspiracy theory. http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi? ArtNum=1066&Disp=33#C33
33. To: Registered (#24)
#68. To: Ferret Mike (#67)
Sounds like FR booted him for being a kook too. Sort of the story of his life.
n any case, I was booted from TOS in June with no warning and no explanation (despite what the Admin Moderators claim happens in such cases). I also haven't been given the courtesy of a response to any of the several polite emails I sent to Robinson asking for an explanation.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#69. To: Minerva, christine (#64)
christine - it was yours, semper libertas' and sentryoveramerica's bannings that got me so upset about fr. BAC - Thanks! You are part of the reason I decided to join and unlurk. It is sad what is happening to FR. I'm still in recovery but soon I'll venture out into the News Forum at LP. I'll try and behave. :) And maybe by the time this country really needs a site like FR used to be, LP will fill that role BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-07 01:09:09 ET Irony ping.
42. To: christine (#40)
#70. To: Minerva (#68)
Indeed. It also looks like Christine tried really hard to make him feel welcome at LP and that he doen't get along with her now mainly because that was one of the thousands of bridges BAC has burned over the years.
"Sounds like FR booted him for being a kook too. Sort of the story of his life."
#71. To: BeAChooser (#63)
RedBlooded and Howlin posted more offensive stuff than BeAChooser had ever posted Let me make one small correction. In my years on TOS I don't believe I posted anything "offensive" ... unless "offensive" is labeling someone a "move-on'er" because they advocate ignoring the crimes of the Clintons and DNC ... unless "offensive" is labeling someone a "democRAT" because they debate like one, run from facts like one and hold views that we all used to think only democRATS would hold. I didn't use foul language or make adhominem attacks. I never willfully told an untruth. But I was subjected to innumerable swear words and continuous adhominem assault ... all because I continued to force "move-on'ers" to defend the indefensible. I exposed, for all to see, their often unstated view that the crimes of Clinton and the DNC shouldn't even be investigated. I took them to task for spin such as "they are being investigated but we aren't in the know" or "it will have to wait until after the WOT ends" or "the public doesn't want a investigation" and a thousand other excuses. In my posts I mostly stuck to reviewing demonstrable (sourced) facts about Filegate, Chinagate, Emailgate, the Riady Non-Refund, the death of Foster and the death of Brown, and asking why these facts aren't being investigated by the Bush administration. This is a question that move-on'ers want everyone to ignore. The only time these folks ever showed up on threads dealing with these topics was to spout a pithy one-liner that would make them seem conservative in their views. But after more than a year of probing, I can document numerous instances where "move-on'ers" clearly lied about facts in the above cases or tried to deflect the argument with spin that could only have come from a democRAT playbook. "Move-on'ers" are the people who clearly now control FR ... who show up first on any thread critical of FR or Bush/GOP. Whether they are democRATS or a new and disturbing breed of Republican I don't know. But I do know their views will be bad for FR, the conservative cause and America in the long run. I was banned from TOS, plan and simple, because "move-on'ers" don't like being held to the fire by someone who insists Bush and the GOP hold the law and the constitution sacred. They also don't like someone willing to use their own past statements to prove they aren't being honest when they post their pithy one-liners. If you want to make a "move-on'er" uncomfortable, just ask why he/she insists on focusing solely on the Clintons and ignores the dozens if not hundreds of other high level democRATS who demonstrably committed serious crimes the last 9 years. If you want to make a "move-on'er" angry, ask him/her why Bush/Ashcroft are ignoring the statements of the pathologists and all the other facts in the death of Ron Brown. BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-07 16:07:55 ET http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=1485&Disp=543#C543 My, such interesting conspiracy theory about Ron Brown and how Bush is covering up his murder by Clintonistas. So, when did you chang and bcome a low level shill for these people on the Internet to try to damage the Truth Movement? You obviously are not allergic to what is commonly called 'conspiracy theory,' yo juast like that which dovetails into your political mindset, and that you are not being employed to try to muddy the waters on.
543. To: FreedominJesusChrist (#380)
#72. To: BeAChooser, angle, christine, SKYDRIFTER, Minerva (#58)
as long as leftists and rightists refuse to put truth ahead of their ideology they will never see what is going on That's correct. And that road leads to tyranny in some form or another. BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-21 12:21:10 ET http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=1963&Disp=43#C43 So BAC, now that we have ideology driving the official story of 9-11 away from the truth, where are you? What happened to your insight and good sense? How much are you getting to do what you do, service NeoCon nuttery at the expense of the truth of 9-11?
43. To: palo verde (#42)
#73. To: Ferret Mike (#71)
Woo-hoo! FR is secretly controlled by the Democrats! Only a kook of BeAChooser's caliber could come up with a conspiracy theory like that.
Move-on'ers" are the people who clearly now control FR ... who show up first on any thread critical of FR or Bush/GOP.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#74. To: Ferret Mike (#71)
In other words BeAChooser was an obnoxious kook and FR booted him off the site for it. Instead of learning from the experience though, BeAChooser goes to LP and whines about it. LP eventually boots him off for being a whiney kook. ROTFLOL!
n my years on TOS I don't believe I posted anything "offensive" ... unless "offensive" is labeling someone a "move-on'er" because they advocate ignoring the crimes of the Clintons and DNC ... unless "offensive" is labeling someone a "democRAT" because they debate like one, run from facts like one and hold views that we all used to think only democRATS would hold. I didn't use foul language or make adhominem attacks. I never willfully told an untruth. But I was subjected to innumerable swear words and continuous adhominem assault ... all because I continued to force "move-on'ers" to defend the indefensible.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#75. To: Minerva, BeaChooser, SKYDRIFTER (#68)
BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-21 22:11:40 ET http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=2032&Disp=9#C9 Hee he, so, he never ever posts information about himself does he? Well, it looks more and more like the reason he dos not want to answer my question on whether he is part of that swiftboat the Truth Movement site he links pictures from is because he is indeed part of the picture there. Tell me BAC, what software do you develop?
9. To: Lazamataz (#0)
As a software developer, I certainly believe in protecting intellectual property, but this sort of puts the lie to claims that the DOJ is too busy fighting the WOT to do anything about the crimes committed by the Clintons and DNC the last 9 years. I guess Ashcroft is more worried about these files being in the hands of teenagers than the FBI files on Republicans that are in the hands of democRATS ... or the files stamped secret that Huang and his spy associates were given privy to and passed on to the Chinese communists. I'd say Bush and Ashcroft have their priorities wrong.
#76. To: beachooser, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#58)
BAC, you are the epitome of "CLEARLY WRONG!" You fucking liar! You're worthless, BAC. Thus, only queers will have you. Trace told on you BAC - you gonna deny the obvious? You see, I have no problem admitting when I'm clearly wrong.
#77. To: SKYDRIFTER (#76)
FJC - "Hey BAC, speaking about Filegate, Check out this thread. Take note of Howlin's response, big surprise, right?" BAC - I saw that! Of course, that thread is about Foster's death, not Filegate. Why doesn't someone on that thread ask Howlin why she thinks those who believe Foster and Brown may not have died like the Clinton administration claimed give the GOP a bad name? She said that in the past. Why doesn't someone ask Howlin why she believes Ron Brown wasn't murdered but won't state her reasons ... other than to claim "unnamed" sources ... other than to say she believed what Starr concluded in the matter (when, in fact, he had absolutely nothing to do with or say about the Brown death) ... other than to cite an official report which is demonstrably flawed (for example, it doesn't even mention the opinions of the official pathologists that Brown's wound looked like a bullet wound and he should have been autopsied) ... other than to cite a highly biased democRAT Congresswoman who said she believes the official report. Howlin is the least credible person on Free Republic today ... the biggest move-on'er of them all. Her blind support of Bush and the GOP does more damage to their credibility than anyone else posting there. As that thread proves. BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-21 22:28:54 ET Amazing how an anti Bush, anti conspiracy theory crusader like BAC started out championing what could be construed as conspiracy theory and has become a Bush butt buddy politically? I had always heard that politics makes strange bed fellows, but this is crazy.
37. To: FreedominJesusChrist (#35)
#78. To: Ferret Mike, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#75)
I'm impressed that BAC hasn't killed himself yet. BAC is clearly a coward among cowards. The one thing about BAC is that he has no significant presence on this planet, beyond the Internet. He tries for recognition on these forums, but ends up being the butt-boy for the controllers of the Bush Cabal. He clearly has nothing of value to offer the world, hence his extreme of 'privacy.' When he finally does a number on himself, no one is going to miss him, any more than a forest fire. Cho has gotten a fair amount of sympathy; BAC won't.
#79. To: BeAChooser, Minerva (#63)
That shatters the current record of two held by Vince Foster. Good one. Actually ... it is interesting that Bush said four bullets because that implies some specific knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the death. None of the reports I read in the press said that it was 4 bullets. Could there be a message in this? BeAChooser posted on 2002-08-22 00:31:26 ET http://libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=2049&Disp=5#C5 Yo BAC - Why is Bush a liar then, and not now? Why is his word suspect then, and gospel you suck out of his butt these days? I'll make this chapter one and continue back tracking through the sludge of this person's LP posts tomorrow. I have to get to work anyway. It is just too interesting to put down, and I want to savor this.
5. To: EarnYourVote (#3)
#80. To: Ferret Mike, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#77)
Didn't BAC say something about not attacking others? Did I get that wrong? OR; is BAC just the LIAR and queer that the world knows him to be. He did his best on me, at ElPee. It didn't work for him, but he did his best. Howlin is the least credible person on Free Republic today ... the biggest move-on'er of them all. Her blind support of Bush and the GOP does more damage to their credibility than anyone else posting there. As that thread proves.
#81. To: SKYDRIFTER (#78)
Cho has gotten a fair amount of sympathy; BAC won't. Exactly, you can't miss this guy's stripes, or stink.
When he finally does a number on himself, no one is going to miss him, any more than a forest fire.
#82. To: BeAChooser (#51)
[nolu_chan #49] [BAC #51] Nope. They didn't. We have proof. The towers survived the impact. ----- BAC, you are still a lying piece of crap. As an editor, however, you are quite creative. ... Such a frightful vision could not be left unchallenged. Robertson says that he never saw the ad and was ignorant of the political battle behind it. Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer's curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. ... Exactly how Robertson performed these calculations is apparently lost -- he says he cannot find a copy of the report. Several engineers who worked with him at the time, including the director of his computer department, say they have no recollection of ever seeing the study. ... One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. ... If Robertson saw the article in the paper, he never spoke up about the discrepancy. No one else issued a correction, and the question was answered in many people's minds: the towers were as safe as could be expected, even in the most cataclysmic of circumstances. There were only two problems. The first, of course, was that no study of the impact of a 600-mile-an-hour plane ever existed. "That's got nothing to do with the reality of what we did," Robertson snapped when shown the Port Authority architect's statement more than three decades later. The second problem was that no one thought to take into account the fires that would inevitably break out when the jetliner's fuel exploded, exactly as the B-25's had. [BAC] The ANALYSIS that was done to see it might survive a 600 mph impact was done AFTER the design of the major structural elements. I think I proved that. No. The press release about a purported analysis, the report of which seems to have been eaten by the dog, occurred in response to a near full-page ad in the New York Times challenging the safety of the WTC design. I think I've proved that.
Maybe they lied, or maybe they actually designed the WTC to sustain a hit by the largest jetliner then in the sky going at 600 mph.
----- Maybe they lied,
Maybe they lied, or maybe they actually designed the WTC to sustain a hit by the largest jetliner then in the sky going at 600 mph.
Read again my statement, and what you quoted of it, and then your preposterous response. They [Lawrence Wein, then owner of the Empire State Building, and committee] ran a nearly full-page ad in The Times with an artist's rendition of a commercial airliner about to ram one of the towers. "Unfortunately, we rarely recognize how serious these problems are until it's too late to do anything," the caption said.
Robertson's story is less convincing than an Alberto Gonzales performance.
But when the towers were built, the people were publicly assured, in the New York Times, that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 mph... much as they would later be assured that the air atop Robertson's Rubble, at ground zero, did not pose a health hazard.
#83. To: Ferret Mike, SKYDRIFTER, ALL (#67)
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=50387&Disp=67#C67 ROTFLOL! You haven't really got a clue what I meant by "move-on'er". Or what I'm really about. Just for the record I'm not. And for the record, I've posted numerous fact and source filled complaints about certain bogus claims that are posted over and over here at 4um with regard to what happened to the WTC towers and Pentagon. If you and SKYDRIFTER want to base your defense against those complaints on some out of context references to past posts by me, on nasty innuendos concerning me and on raw speculations about who I am, then go right ahead. You will only end up making the fact that you folks are ignoring dishonesty in your own camp and by the *Truth* Movement leaders even more apparent. Works for me ...
It's interesting ow in his first LP post, BAC advances the notion that JR and howlin are Move On operatives.
Well, it looks more and more like the reason he dos not want to answer my question on whether he is part of that swiftboat the Truth Movement site he links pictures from is because he is indeed part of the picture there.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#84. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#82)
If you want us to believe that, then prove to us the Skilling's White Paper actually says they DESIGNED the towers for those loads. All the sources I've seen that claim first hand knowledge of the paper's contents simply say it said they did an ANALYSIS of the towers for that case. There is a difference. And you have two choices where the White Paper is concerned given the date it was released ... February 3, 1964. Either it analyzed a structure whose major dimensions had already be determined (in which case how much effect could it have had on the design?) or it was a wag that ASSUMED dimensions that had not yet been determined (in which case, how good could that analysis really be)? One more thing. The Skilling paper was 3 pages long. How detailed an analysis could it possibly be given such a short length? And what tools did they actually use to do that analysis? The truth is that you don't know. In fact, have you actually seen the Skilling White Paper? Well here: http://pilotsfor911truth.org/WTC.html "I found photostat images of WTC designer John Skilling's 3 page 1964 White Paper on a German website and posted the links over on the UK911 board. ... snip ... Lucky I saved them" Well what do you know. That paper wasn't ONLY about a plane crash calculation. In fact, it contained eleven numbered points, and only ONE, pertained to that subject. And ALL it said is this: "3. The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707-DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact." That's ALL. There are NO details given to show the nature of that analysis (and considering how limited impact analysis tools were in those days, perhaps much of that analysis was actually hand waving designed to satisfy the customer and public). The word DESIGN is not used in that paragraph. It says the buildings have been INVESTIGATED and found to be safe. Which seems to imply an analysis AFTER the design was completed. And I don't challenge that possibility or the conclusion that Skillings reached. After all, the towers did survive the impact of the planes. The local damage from the impact did NOT cause collapse. It was the fires combined with that damage that NIST (and modern analysis tools) say caused the collapse. And curiously enough, that white paper doesn't even mention the threat of fire from the impact. Yet the CT community has been trying to suggest Skilling said the structure was also designed to handle the fire from that airplane crash. Well, having discounted Robertson's statements, the only piece of physical evidence you have to even prove an analysis was done for a commercial jet doesn't even mention the word fire. And also note that the paper, dated February 3, 1964, states: "The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure. The preliminary calculations alone cover 1200 pages and involve over 100 detailed drawings." It goes on to talk about the towers being "designed" for different loads. The word "designed" is used repeatedly. And you wanted us to believe that the essential dimensions of the structure hadn't already been determined by the start of 1964. I think this memo proves you wrong, NC. Robertson also said: http://scott-juris.blogspot.com/The%20Height%20of%20Ambition%20Part%20Four.pdf "He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out. " Sure, NC. Based on a white paper that has ONE paragraph claiming that but where, again, there appear to be no other documents proving such a calculation actually took place. A paper that clearly appears to be a public relations ploy to alleviate concerns about the towers. And a white paper that doesn't say the towers were DESIGNED for that load. Oh ... and one more thing. SO WHAT? The truth is that if the towers were designed for a plane impact (like the CT community insists without actually being able to prove it), then the towers performed as expected. But nowhere in either Robertson's or Skilling's account is there evidence that the towers were designed to handle the fire that would result from such a collision. Indeed, designers in those days simply did not have the analysis tools to address such a problem with any confidence. That is the part of the story that the CT community simply leaves out in their haste to make the government and bombs the culprit in the collapse. Actually, it is only a part of the story they leave out. Fine. If you want to claim no Robertson study was done, that's ok with me. But remember, the CT community is the one that insists the towers were *designed* to withstand multiple jet impacts (which none of the actual participants in the design claimed). And if you discount the Robertson claim, all you are left as evidence is that one paragraph in Skilling's 3 page White Paper. Which is dated February 3, 1964. Which doesn't appear to have actually used the word "design". Which has no details about that analysis either. And here is yet another source for you to ignore and discount: http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/html/article_11092001.html "Skilling's firm got the commission, and Robertson, then thirty-five, moved to New York to open a new office, and to supervise the structural aspects of the building's construction. In 1983, the Seattle office and the New York office split, becoming two separate firms. Skilling (who died in 1998) and Robertson later argued about who was more responsible for the structure of the towers. "These are guys with big egos, and things got a little testy between them regarding who was ultimately responsible for the design," says Jon Magnusson, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Seattle-based firm, which is now called Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire. "Skilling said, 'It was me,' Robertson said, 'It was me,' but I think the truth is that both of them made a significant contribution." ... snip ... "He also designed the buildings so they would be able to absorb the impact of a jet airliner: "I'm sort of a methodical person, so I listed all the bad things that could happen to a building and tried to design for them. I thought of the B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, that hit the Empire State Building in 1945. The 707 was the state-of-the-art airplane then, and the Port Authority was quite amenable to considering the effect of an airplane as a design criterion. We studied it, and designed for the impact of such an aircraft. The next step would have been to think about the fuel load, and I've been searching my brain, but I don't know what happened there, whether in all our testing we thought about it. Now we know what happens-it explodes. I don't know if we considered the fire damage that would cause. Anyway, the architect, not the engineer, is the one who specifies the fire system."
maybe they actually designed the WTC to sustain a hit by the largest jetliner then in the sky going at 600 mph.
Robertson says he never saw the ad but just out of his engineer's curiosity calculated that the towers would handle the impace from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner then in service.
* A prominent story appears in the New York Times explains that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour.
* When the towers are hit by a plane and fall to the ground, Robertson says he cannot find a copy of his precious report.
* The director of Robertson's computer department has no recollection of any such study.
* The dog ate his homework.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#85. To: BeAChooser, christine, ... (#84)
Boy, you put a lot of work into this one. Do you really believe the tripe you’ve been pushing? If so I truly feel sorry for you. You either don't have the mental capacity to understand reality (lack of intellect or mentally unstable (like to argue)) or you have sold your soul to TPB (sociopath, meaning unable to enjoy a sunset, poetry, art or the love of fellow humans) Any of the above cases leads me not to "dislike" you like many other posters on this forum but to really feel sorry for you for you true loss of the beauty that life has to offer those that don't have your limitations. There are some that believe that sociopath is superior since they lack the "impediment" of conscience that allows them to succeed where those with a conscience would fail. But nothing could be further from the truth. Although this may not describe you, for you could fit one of the other options mentioned. But either way it is obvious you suffer from a handicap that impedes your enjoyment of the wonders of life and fellowship.
It was a narrow escape. If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism. -- Mark Twain
No group of professionals meets except to conspire against the public at large. -- Mark Twain 
#86. To: BeAChooser (#84)
[BAC post of SKILLING White Paper] "The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact." [nc quoting] "* A prominent story appears in the New York Times explains that study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour." [BAC] Sure, NC. Based on a white paper that has ONE paragraph claiming that but where, again, there appear to be no other documents proving such a calculation actually took place. ------- SKILLING's White Paper says "the buildings have been investigated." It does not say SKILLING performed the investigation. SKILLING's White Paper says "Analysis indicates...." It does not say SKILLING performed the analysis. The New York Times report, sourced to an architect working on the WTC, attributes the study to . ROBERTSON now claims he cannot find the ROBERTSON study analysis report. If you want the report, ask ROBERTSON what ROBERTSON did with the ROBERTSON study analysis report. By the way, the White Paper also contains the following: "7. The design has been reviewed by some of the most knowledgeable people in the construction industry. In a letter to John Skilling, the Structural Engineer for the World Trade Center, the Chief Engineer of the American Division of U.S. Steel Corporation said: ...."
#87. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#86)
There is a difference between analysis and design. One can do an analysis of something after the design of that something is essentially done. When one designs, one sizes members, etc to carry DESIGN loads. But in this case, it sounds more like they did an analysis after the fact to determine if the already designed structure would survive a load that was not part of the design. And it is true that it doesn't say that Skilling performed the analysis (although the CT community has been trying to claim that's what the White Paper was ... HIS work as an expert). Perhaps Skilling was just referring to the analysis that Robertson did ... and misreported the speed of the aircraft wrong. Afterall, it wouldn't the first time that a CEO has misrepresented the work done by underlings. Fine, this would fit the above scenario. So it turns out there wasn't ever a Skilling analysis? ROTFLOL! And Robertson is VERY CLEAR about his work having related to a plane lost in fog flying at 180 mph ... not 600 mph on a clear day. It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really?
"SKILLING's White Paper says "the buildings have been investigated." It does not say SKILLING performed the investigation."
SKILLING's White Paper says "Analysis indicates...." It does not say SKILLING performed the analysis.
The New York Times report, sourced to an architect working on the WTC, attributes the study to ROBERTSON.
ROBERTSON now claims he cannot find the ROBERTSON study analysis report.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#88. To: BeAChooser (#83)
I do know. You mean someone who wants to move on away from the issue of who killed Ron Brown. It is your humor function that is broken. If it is too subtle or dry, you don't get it. Do you have a connection with the site I asked you about, start by answering that question. You are too black and white on the issue of 9-11 and your smugness is that of someone who has other aspects of this game going elsewhere. Indulge me. I have posted on forums since 1995 and you have my other interlocutor has an agenda alarm bells going in a five alarm manner. You are too smug and too into the baiting game. You are up to something besides merely posting in forum on 9 11.
"You haven't really got a clue what I meant by "move-on'er". Or what I'm really about."
#89. To: BeAChooser, all (#87)
BAC, What do you hope to accomplish by making all these posts here, where clearly, few believe the official story?
#90. To: Ferret Mike (#88)
Not
just Ron Brown. Filegate, Chinagate, Campaign funding violations, Emailgate,
and various other gates. And just because certain people wanted to "move
on" doesn't mean they are members of MoveOn.Org. I did. I answered no. Do you have a reading
problem? Paranoia runs deep. Into your heart it
will creep.
"You haven't really got a clue what I meant by "move-on'er".
Or what I'm really about."
I do know.
You mean someone who wants to move on away from the issue of who killed Ron
Brown. It is your humor function that is broken.
Do you
have a connection with the site I asked you about, start by answering that
question.
You are up to something besides merely posting in
forum on 9 11.
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#91. To: beachooser, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#83)
On your best day, BAC, you're a lying asshole!
#92. To: BeAChooser, all (#90)
Ha! Told you he's an RNC ward heeler.
#93. To: BeAChooser (#90)
THE 9/11 TRUTHS ZIONIST ISRAEL DOES NOT WANT AMERICA ESPECIALLY WHITE AMERICA TO KNOW: 250+ 9/11 'Smoking Guns' The Incredible 9-11 Evidence THE ISRAELI/US CONNECTION TO 9/11 Mossad - The Israeli Connection To 911 The World Trade Center Demolition Aren't you lucky, you get to read one of my infinite number of replies for today.
Dan C. Lewin
Zionist Commando Daniel Lewin Orchestrated The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks http://www.ilaam.net/Sept11/ZionistDid911.html 
Rabbi Dov Zakheim
The Mastermind Behind 911?
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=1927 
BUSH AUTHORIZED THE 9/11 ATTACKS
http://www.nogw.com/download/2006_insider_911.pdf
Found in the Mainstream Media
http://killtown.911review.org/911smokingguns.html
We've All been Overlooking
http://www.serendipity.li/wot/aa11.html
http://www.nogw.com/9_11.html
http://www.rense.com/general64/moss.htm
and the So-Called War on Terrorism
http://www.assassinationscience.com/wtc.html
"You can not save the Constitution by destroying it."
#94. To: Itisa1mosttoolate (#93)
You mean they WEREN'T 100 Israeli art students that happened to be everywhere the "hijackers" were for the summer of 2001?
#95. To: Paul Revere (#94)
Jeremiah 11:9 Then the LORD said to me, A conspiracy has been found among the men of Judah and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
"You can not save the Constitution by destroying it."
#96. To: Itisa1mosttoolate (#95) (Edited)
I can see that's a prophesy that has come true.
#97. To: Paul Revere (#96)
John D. Rockefeller's brother William was appointed president of Standard Oil. In 1911, William Rockefeller hired a high- level British Intelligence operative named Claude Dansey. Dansey converted the U.S. Army Intelligence Service into a subsidiary of the British Secret Service. RELIGIOUS MIND-CONTROL CULTS http://tinyurl.com/5db3y
"You can not save the Constitution by destroying it."
#98. To: Itisa1mosttoolate, Christine, Jethro Tull, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#97)
An interesting link; if one could discern the historical facts. If Mengele had been an Iluminatist, he'd have been among the camp inmates. The Illuminati didn't survive - 1785, was it?
#99. To: SKYDRIFTER (#98)
"You can not save the Constitution by destroying it."
#100. To: Itisa1mosttoolate, Christine, Jethro Tull, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#99)
A tremendous number of articles "allude" to the Illuminati. No one that I've discovered has documented the survival of the group. Admittedly, many groups (Including the Skull & Bones) have emulated what the Illuminati is supposed to have represented. When I see such references, I lose respect for the authorship - instantly. There may be a lot of important fact in such articles; I don't have the time & patience to sort the facts from the illusions. If you can forgive my prejudices, check out my book at - http://www.p hoenixmasonry.org/enigma_of_freemasonry/text.htm I cover the Illuminati, in there.
#101. To: BeAChooser (#87)
[BAC] And Robertson is VERY CLEAR about his work having related to a plane lost in fog flying at 180 mph ... not 600 mph on a clear day. When the material was first released to the press it was very clear that Robertson's analysis involved a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph. The newspaper article based on Robertson's purported work and Skilling's white paper based on Robertson's purported work have the same, precise content. The goal was to counter the argument made by the owner of the Empire State Building that the WTC design was unsafe with regard to being hit by a jetliner. Assuring the public that the building could withstand a hit by The Spirit of St. Louis at 180 mph would have been worse than useless. [BAC] It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really? Had I done an analysis 40 years ago proving that the WTC, the most important project of my lifetime, could withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph, and "that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact," if I could not find the paperwork today, I would be able to replicate the analysis and prove the point again. The towers withstood the impact just as Titanic withstood the impact with the iceberg. Aye cap'n, it wasn't the iceberg got 'er, it was the water! It's been 40 years. Do you believe that Robertson not only lost the report but has forgotten how to do the analysis?
#102. To: BeAChooser (#90)
More like common sense. You should use it more often, instead of relying on others to think for you.
Paranoia runs deep. Into your heart it will creep.
God is always good!
"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11 [White House, 1/5/02]
#103. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#101)
That is false, NC. The only evidence to support the contention that a 600 mph case was examined is a single paragraph in a White Paper that does not mention Robertson's name. But Robertson states with complete certainty on his part that his analysis was for 180 mph in fog ... and he gives a quite logical reason why that number was chosen. An impact in fog is possible, a impact on a clear day is highly unlikely. A plane will not be flying at full speed in fog. For that matter, commercial jets don't normally fly at 600mph in clear weather AT LOW ALTITUDE. Any way you look at it, the REASONABLE thing to do was look at a low speed impact. For that reason, I believe Robertson ... and not Skilling or an unidentified architect at the Port Authority (who both were playing politics and might have exaggerated what was done because they were trying to quiet public concern). Yeah ... sure you would, NC. And you didn't answer my question. ROTFLOL!
[BAC] And Robertson is VERY CLEAR about his work having related to a plane lost in fog flying at 180 mph ... not 600 mph on a clear day.
When the material was first released to the press it was very clear that Robertson's analysis involved a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph.
" [BAC] It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really?"
Had I done an analysis 40 years ago proving that the WTC, the most important project of my lifetime, could withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph, and "that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact," if I could not find the paperwork today, I would be able to replicate the analysis and prove the point again.
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#104. To: BeAChooser (#103)
You are once again "forgetting" the article in the New York Times. The Skilling White Paper and the New York Times article sourced to a WTC architect provide the same precise information, that Robertson assured that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. Robertson name was used, and he was identified as the source of the analysis.
That is false, NC. The only evidence to support the contention that a 600 mph case was examined is a single paragraph in a White Paper that does not mention Robertson's name.
One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. ... If Robertson saw the article in the paper, he never spoke up about the discrepancy. No one else issued a correction, and the question was answered in many people's minds: the towers were as safe as could be expected, even in the most cataclysmic of circumstances.
#105. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#104)
I didn't forget that article. I specifically said I don't believe the claim of the unnamed Port Authority architect that is mentioned by the NYT. You don't happen to have the name of the Port Authority architect, do you? No? Well perhaps you can tell everyone how often a commercial jet flies at 600 mph a thousand or so feet above the earth's surface? Afterall, you are the one saying that Robertson would rationally have used that instead of a low speed plane as the case of concern. So do commercial jets fly at 600 mph at a 1000 feet altitude ANYTIME they are flying (and remember, this was PRIOR to concerns about terrorists using hijacked planes as WMD) over cities ANYWHERE? Hmmmmmmm????
You are once again "forgetting" the article in the New York Times.
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#106. To: BeAChooser (#87)
For such a project it is mandatory BAC. If you knew much about the legal requirements of such projects you would know this. BAC, WTC7 says the government did it and that you are their whore. I hope the 30 pieces of silver were worth it for you.
It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really?
God is always good!
"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11 [White House, 1/5/02]
#107. To: BeAChooser (#103)
Give up, you have been shown to be a liar so many times you really have no credibility left. Such is a whore's life.
The only evidence to support the contention that a 600 mph case was examined is a single paragraph in a White Paper that does not mention Robertson's name.
One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour.
God is always good!
"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11 [White House, 1/5/02]
#108. To: BeAChooser (#105)
That is so much bull crap it is oozing from your sides BAC. Guess you never heard of the Kamikazes in WW2. LOL! You are lame BAC, very lame.
and remember, this was PRIOR to concerns about terrorists using hijacked planes as WMD
God is always good!
"It was an interesting day." - President Bush, recalling 9/11 [White House, 1/5/02]
#109. To: RickyJ, ALL (#106)
It's probably a good idea to keep such documents, but I challenge you to prove there is any legal requirement that calculations in the design phase of a skyscraper must be kept at all or kept indefinitely. And have you ever heard of a "statute of repose"? It's the number of years after a project is completed after which the designers and contractors cannot be held responsible for damages or problems that may subsequently occur. THAT is the period during which engineering firms PROBABLY SHOULD (again, show me where it says MUST) keep all records if they are smart. Now for New York the statute of limitations/repose on product liability is 3 years, however, personal injury cases currently have an indefinite liability in that for three years after an injury the building builder/owners can be sued. However, that has been successfully contested in court cases recently and architects in New York are currently trying to get a maximum 10 year repose statute passed for personal liability cases. So yes, it would be smart if builders under the current NY laws kept important design documents for a long time ... perhaps indefinitely ... but I know of no laws that state it is mandatory. Go ahead, Ricky ... prove me wrong.
"It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really?"
For such a project it is mandatory BAC.
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#110. To: BeAChooser (#109)
That could be one reason why the engineers and architects are lying about whether or not they designed the towers to withstand plane crashes and resulting fires. If they admit they did, and the official fairy tale says that plane crashes and resulting fires caused the collapse, they may be vulnerable to law suits.
However, that has been successfully contested in court cases recently and architects in New York are currently trying to get a maximum 10 year repose statute passed for personal liability cases.
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#111. To: BeAChooser (#105)
I specifically said I don't believe the claim of the unnamed Port Authority architect that is mentioned by the NYT. I am impressed. BAC does not believe the claim of the Port authority architect cited as a source for the NYT article, which just happens to be corroborated by the White Paper of Project Manager Robertson's boss, Chief Engineer John Skilling. However, BAC believes that Robertson did a study and the dog ate it. So do commercial jets fly at 600 mph at a 1000 feet altitude ANYTIME they are flying So do commercial jets fly at any speed at 1000 feet over Manhattan? Or possibly into Manhattan. Hmmmmmmm???? After all, you are the one claiming that Robertson did not consider a jetliner's cruising speed, but that he was considering a jetliner at slow speed coming in for a landing so he can go take a physical at 90 Church Street or something. That's where you got your physical, right? 90 Church Street?
#112. To: BeAChooser, RickyJ (#109)
You do not seriously purport that there is a product liability issue, do you?
Now for New York the statute of limitations/repose on product liability is 3 years, however, personal injury cases currently have an indefinite liability in that for three years after an injury the building builder/owners can be sued. However, that has been successfully contested in court cases recently and architects in New York are currently trying to get a maximum 10 year repose statute passed for personal liability cases.
#113. To: nolu_chan, RickyJ (#112)
Do you suppose that architect might have
gotten his information from Skilling's White Paper? And you still don't have
the name of this architect, do you? Actually,
I don't care whether Robertson did a study or not, NC. It is the *truth*
movement that wants there to have been a study ... one proving the towers were
designed to survive plane crashes. It doesn't matter to me whether there were
or weren't because the fact is the towers did survive a high speed impact by
big commercial jets. But at least it appears you've now dispensed with the
claim they were "designed" rather than just analyzed after the fact. And that
they were designed to survive the fires from a plane crash. Or do you wish to
contest that further? ROTFLOL! Not
ordinarily. But if you put aside terrorism, I can't think of any reason a
commercial jet would be flying at 600 mph 1000 feet above Manhattan. But the
notion of being lost in fog (given that such a thing has happened there
before) isn't all that irrational.
Strawman. Robertson said he assumed the plane was LOST IN FOG, just like the
other plane that had hit a skyscraper in NYC before the WTC was designed.
You are claiming the building was
designed for plane impact and fire so it shouldn't have collapsed. If it was,
then yes, this would be a product liability issue. If it wasn't, then this is
a case of fraud ... and the statute of limitation in that case is 7 years or
so. Now NY is special in that it allows for an indefinite time to the injury
before starting the clock in personal injury cases. Of course lately, courts
have ruled against that indefinite period in several cases and bills are
pending to set the time of repose to 10 years. Either way, you and Ricky still
haven't proven that by law builders MUST keep records for ANY length of time.
That is what was claimed. Care to try now or do you wish to continue focusing
on the irrelevant and strawmen?
BAC does not believe the claim of the Port authority architect
cited as a source for the NYT article, which just happens to be corroborated
by the White Paper of Project Manager Robertson's boss, Chief Engineer John
Skilling.
However, BAC believes
that Robertson did a study and the dog ate it.
"So do commercial jets fly
at 600 mph at a 1000 feet altitude ANYTIME they are flying"
So do commercial jets fly at any speed at 1000 feet over
Manhattan? Or possibly into Manhattan. Hmmmmmmm????
After all, you are the
one claiming that Robertson did not consider a jetliner's cruising speed, but
that he was considering a jetliner at slow speed coming in for a landing so he
can go take a physical at 90 Church Street or something.
You do not seriously purport that there is a product liability
issue, do you?
---------------------------------------------------------
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#114. To: BeAChooser, RickyJ (#113)
Do you suppose that architect might have gotten his information from Skilling's White Paper? No. It is impossible to read Skilling's White Paper and determine that the study was done by Robertson. But at least it appears you've now dispensed with the claim they were "designed" rather than just analyzed after the fact. And that they were designed to survive the fires from a plane crash. Or do you wish to contest that further? ROTFLOL! Before the building was built, the PANYNJ and the public were assured in 1964 that "The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact." 1964 is before the buildings were built. The area had not yet been cleared of existing buildings. He could only be talking about the future buildings, as designed. You are claiming the building was designed for plane impact and fire so it shouldn't have collapsed. If it was, then yes, this would be a product liability issue. If it wasn't, then this is a case of fraud ... and the statute of limitation in that case is 7 years or so. Counselor, you do not know what you are talking about. All cases brought in court will use a theory of NEGLIGENCE.
#115. To: nolu_chan, RickyJ (#114)
That doesn't say they were DESIGNED for an airplane
impact. Only that an analysis (rudimentary as it would have had to have been
in 1964, given the tools they had to work with back then) showed the towers
would survive an impact. I'm not disputing that. And it doesn't say anything
about the towers surviving the fires that would result. Indeed, the sources
you've quoted on this thread indicates they thought that the fires were THE
PROBLEM. But not before they were designed. There is a difference
between design and analysis, as I've already pointed out. A design includes
safety factors. A analysis just looks at what will likely happen.
I suggest it is you who doesn't know what you are talking about. I suggest you
look up the term "statue of repose". And I notice neither you or Ricky have
yet offered any proof that calculations MUST be retained as was claimed. tick
tick tick ....
BeAChooser - But at least it appears you've now dispensed with
the claim they were "designed" rather than just analyzed after the fact. And
that they were designed to survive the fires from a plane crash. Or do you
wish to contest that further? ROTFLOL!
Before the building was built, the PANYNJ and the public were assured
1964 is before the buildings were built.
Counselor, you do not know what you are talking about. All
cases brought in court will use a theory of NEGLIGENCE.
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#116. To: BeAChooser, nolu_chan, RickyJ, christine, THE SKYDRIFTER, all fans of hyperbolic silliness everywhere! (#115)
ROTFLOL! We return to the scene of yesterday's epic battle. And from the ashes of defeat we hear the dreaded battle cry! ROTFLOL! Can it be possible? Could the horrifying monstrous supervillain have survived the assault of our heroes? Out of the ashes it comes, oozing the slime of misrepresentation, distraction and general reichwing untruth! The strangely hermaphroditic creature howls it's defiance into the wind, challenging THE SKYDRIFTER and nolu_chan and his trusty sidekick little RickyJ to battle! "ROTFLOL!" It screams into the wind. "ROTFLOL! ROTFLOL!" And the epic battle commences all over again!
To: nolu_chan, RickyJ, ALL
Paranoia is a survival trait in a Decidership.
#117. To: BeAChooser (#115)
I think you mean "statute of repose," beachy. Spellcheck ain't gonna help you with your vocabulary.
I suggest you look up the term "statue of repose".
Paranoia is a survival trait in a Decidership.
#118. To: bluedogtxn (#116)
hehehehehe
#119. To: christine (#118)
During another demonstration in front of the new Building 7, police confiscate the group's camera and literally accuse them of being "terrorists."
A bunch fat Bo Dietl types...
“Yes, but is this good for Jews?"
#120. To: christine (#118)
I think you mean .... ROTFLOL!
hehehehehe
Paranoia is a survival trait in a Decidership.
#121. To: Eoghan (#119)
scumbags--calling the protestors terrorists? that p's me off.
#122. To: Eoghan (#119) (Edited)
The irony of Nazis taking over our law enforcement based upon a phony attack orchestrated mainly by Zionists.
#123. To: Eoghan, christine (#119)
Alex talked to Luke Rudkowski earlier today. The group http://www.wearechange.com is out of New York and Luke Rudkowski had another confrontation, this time with zbigniew brezinsky. Human-Deficient Brzezinski Exposed for 9/11 Culpability Security Attempts to Seize Activist's Video Tape and Intimidate Free Speech During Oration by 'Grand' Architect and Trilateral Player Serving Agenda of Would-Be Global Landlords http://www .jonesreport.com/articles/250407_brzezinski_911.html These globalist goons and their minions make me sick.
It was a narrow escape. If the sheep had been created first, man would have been a plagiarism. -- Mark Twain No group of professionals meets except to conspire against the public at large. -- Mark Twain
#124. To: christine (#121)
The pole smoking faggot saying "Guess who's going to jail? Guess who's going to jail?" needs that written on a night stick and shoved up his pooper...
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#125. To: Critter (#124)
I kept wanting our guy to say "sir, are you a licensed law enforcement officer or private investigator in the state of New York and if so, would you please show me your badge and license so I can file a complaint with the State about your conduct?" As I watched that, I concluded that in the future, guys like this need to have multiple cameras shooting the scene, some from a distance. It was clear to me that the rental cops wanted the cameras turned off so they could take actions against our guys without it being recorded.
#126. To: Paul Revere (#125)
Yep, every time I'm at the gas pump...'thank g-d for jews'...
attack orchestrated mainly by Zionists.
“Yes, but is this good for Jews?"
#127. To: Paul Revere (#125)
Yeah, our guys were somewhat intimidated. I would have been busy taking names and telling them all about how I'm going to enjoy suing them for conspiring to violate my rights. Yup, multiple cameras are in order.
A new truth movement friendly digg type site: Zlonk it!
#128. To: bluedogtxn, BeAChooser (#117)
[BAC-side #115] I suggest it is you who doesn't know what you are talking about. I suggest you look up the term "statue of repose". I suggest you look up the term "statue of repose". [bluedogtxn #117] I think you mean "statute of repose," beachy. No, beachy hasn't got a clue and has no idea what the hell he means. It appears that he should not be allowed to play with long words or legal terms of art. B. Possible Plaintiffs While the response to an inquiry about possible plaintiffs in personal injury actions occasioned by the September 11 attacks may seem fairly straightforward, recent developments are cause for alarm among insurers and New York City. Possible claims for toxic tort injuries have been noted recently in the media and among legal professionals. [34] In that regard, there is great uncertainty about possible adverse health effects from toxic agents released into the air following collapse of the buildings. The victims’ compensation fund does not entertain the possibility that large numbers of rescue workers, clean-up crews, construction workers and New York City residents may have been exposed to toxic chemicals that would increase their chances of contracting diseases such as cancer or suffering long term neurological defects. Researchers have identified asbestos, lead, fiberglass, PCBs, mercury and other potentially harmful substances in the air and dust that surround the disaster site. Thus, the list of potential defendants may grow commensurately with the list of harmful substances. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that one study found dust in the neighborhood as caustic as drain cleaner. [35] However, reports about the extent of contamination vary drastically. The Environmental Protection Agency has been monitoring the downtown area for asbestos, particulates and other contaminants typically found in large building fire and collapse situations since September 11. It has detected no pollutants from the fire and building collapses that are cause for concern to the general public. Within one block of the World Trade Center, the EPA is finding low levels of asbestos in the dust from the building collapse. [36] There have been approximately 1,300 notices of claim served on New York City by firefighters and other rescue workers who claim that breathing the air at the disaster site has made them sick. [37] With the high concentration of persons living and working in the downtown New York City area, the potential for toxic tort claimants could be staggering. There has been insufficient research to determine whether or to what extent people were exposed to toxic chemicals in the hours, days and months following the attack. Further scientific research should provide a clearer picture of potential toxic tort claims. IV. Theories of Recovery and Applicable Legal Standards Pursuant to the ATSSA, the law to be applied in suits arising from September 11th events will derive from state law (including choice of law principles), where the crash occurred. Thus, suits arising out of the World Trade Center attack will be governed by New York law. Negligence will likely predominate theories of action for civil suits brought against the above-mentioned parties. To sustain an action for negligence, the plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) a duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff; (2) a breach of that duty; (3) that the breach of duty proximately caused the plaintiff’s injuries, and (4) damages. The most critical elements applicable to any suit emanating from the September 11th attacks are duty and proximate causation. Generally, the law of negligence in New York is similar to the law of other jurisdictions. Thus, to the extent that the law of other states, such as Pennsylvania, is applied in lawsuits arising from the September 11th attacks, the foregoing legal principles will be generally applied. (Author’s Bio) Mr. Thurm, who is counsel to the firm of Molod, Spitz, DeSantis & Stark, P.C. in New York City, has been associated with the insurance industry as a practicing lawyer defending companies and their insureds for over 40 years. He is a graduate of Brooklyn Law School (1958) and is admitted to practice in New York (1959) and Florida (1975). He is also admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and all four federal district courts in the State of New York. He has actively litigated a broad spectrum of insurance-related matters including: primary and excess policies; direct and reinsurance contracts and coverage issues dealing with allocation of loss; late notice of claim and suit; and the assault and battery exclusion. He has defended dozens of municipal entities in all types of civil rights cases including land use, excessive force and employment discrimination. He has been a member of the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel since 1984 and is the immediate past Chair of its Excess and Surplus Line Section. He is an associate member of the Excess and Surplus Line Claims Association and NAPSLO. He also holds membership in the Defense Research Institute, the New York State Bar Association, the American Bar Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police (Legal Offices Section). He is a frequent speaker and contributor of articles on insurance-related matters. After a specified period of time following construction, the statute of repose will cut off a cause of action against an architect or engineer for product liability. THAT is WHY the actions regarding the WTC will not be brought against the architect or engineer for product liability. I suggest that beachy read about the statute of repose and learn why his purported cause of action is impossible. While the statute of repose tolls against an action for product liability against the architect or engineer, it does not prevent an action for negligence or violation of state statute. The New York statute of limitations for personal injury is 3 years, and for wrongful death it is 2 years from the date of death. This 2004 ruling http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/2nd/037698p.pdf describes a case brought by multiple plaintiffs against THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY and THE CITY OF NEW YORK, and WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPERTIES LLC, sued as SILVERSTEIN PROPERTIES. Product liability. ... However, the term "products liability" normally contemplates injury or damage caused by a defective product, and if loss occurs as a result of a condition on the premises, or as a result of a service, as distinguished from loss occasioned by a defective product, a products liability claim does not ordinarily arise, even though a product may be involved. For statutory time limits in bringing products liability actions, see Statute (Statute of repose). Black's Law Dictionary, 6th Edition Unless the Statute of Repose extends back to the construction of the building, beachy will have a very difficult time getting a court to accept his products liability argument. His argument may be stale by about 30 years. National Society of Professional Engineers Model Architect and Engineer Liability Laws Statute of Repose Summary Architects and engineers face a substantial degree of liability exposure for property damage, economic damages, bodily injury, and wrongful death resulting from their alleged negligence in the design of improvements to real property that have long since been completed and for which the architect or engineer should not be held responsible due to reasons outside their realm of control. Once insulated from liability exposure by the concept of "privity" (derivative rights and responsibilities based on contract), a 1957 decision by a New York appeals court, Inman v. Binghampton Housing Authority (3 N.Y. 2d 137, 143 N.E. 2d 895), stripped architects and engineers of this protection. In Inman, the court found an architect and engineer liable to parties to which they were not in privity. As a consequence of Inman, suits against architects and engineers proliferated. Architects and engineers found themselves owing a duty of care to a variety of parties to whom no duty had been previously owed, nor ever contemplated. Eventually, the state legislatures responded to this perilous situation by adopting laws known as statutes of repose. Statutes of repose bar actions against architects and engineers after a certain period of time following the completion of services or the substantial completion of construction. Statutes of repose do not totally absolve the architect and engineer of any liability, but merely prevent them from having to defend an action brought many years after they have completed the project. The statutes are based on the general legal principle that a potential defendant in a lawsuit should not be required to defend him/herself against "stale" claims that could easily be based upon faded memories, lost evidence, or witnesses who have since disappeared. "Stale" claims are a particular possibility in the construction industry where the real property for which services have been provided may last several decades and over which the designer has no effective control. Statutes of repose differ from statutes of limitations in terms of the point of time from which the limitation is measured. Statutes of limitation begin at the date of injury or discovery of the deficiency. Since the discovery of an injury or a deficiency could occur at any time, the exposure to a claim could theoretically run indefinitely. Statutes of repose, on the other hand, begin at a period of time following the completion of services or the substantial completion of construction. These statutes, therefore, limit the total period of time during which the architect or engineer is exposed to liability, and thus statutes of repose are preferable to, but not in lieu of, statutes of limitation. 1. Except as otherwise provided in Section 2, no action to recover damages for injury to a person or for wrongful death or for damage to property, nor any statute for contribution or indemnity for damages sustained on account of such injury or wrongful death or damage to property arising from any defect, error or omission in the structure or improvement resulting from the design, planning, supervision or observation of construction, or construction of an improvement to real property shall be brought against a registered architect or professional engineer more than seven years after the substantial completion of such improvement. 2. If by reason of such defect, an injury to the person or an injury causing wrongful death or an injury to property occurs during the seventh year after substantial completion, an action to recover damages for such injury or wrongful death or damage to property may be brought within one year after the date on which such injury occurred, but in no event may such action be brought more than eight years after the substantial completion of the improvement. 3. The limitations prescribed by this section shall not be asserted by way of defense by any owner, tenant, or other person in actual possession or control of such an improvement where the improvement constitutes the proximate cause of the injury or death. 4. For purposes of this section an improvement shall be deemed to be "substantially completed" when the construction is sufficiently complete so that an improvement may be utilized by its owners or lawful possessor for the purposes intended. In the case of a phased project with more than one substantial completion date, the seven-year period of limitations for actions involving systems designed to serve the entire project shall begin at the substantial completion of the earliest phase. Liability and Other Issues Arising Out Of the World Trade Center Tragedy † Milton Thurm I. Introduction The World Trade Center tragedy of September 11, 2001 has already spawned a number of lawsuits between the owners and operators of the World Trade Center and their various insurers. In the main, this litigation deals with insurance coverage issues; the most prominent among them is the number of occurrences involved in the incident. Other issues pending in related litigation concern arbitration clauses that exist in various policies, the extent of property damage coverage on the mall within the World Trade Center, and a host of business interruption issues. While this litigation is mammoth in proportion and involves hundreds of millions of dollars, it is probably just the tip of the proverbial iceberg in the continuum of insurance-related claims that the industry will face down the road. What has yet to surface are the thousands of claims for bodily injury brought by those who survived the horror of that day and the claims for conscious pain and suffering and wrongful death brought by the immediate kin of those who did not. This article seeks to examine some of these potential claims, thereby alerting the industry to what lies ahead. In this regard, federal legislation and prior litigation surrounding other terrorist attacks or disasters may provide the best outcome indicators. II. Federal Statutes Enacted in the Wake of September 11 Immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center, the federal government enacted the Airline Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act (“ATSSA”) on September 22, 2001. [1] The ATSSA provides $15 billion in subsidies to ensure the solvency of the airlines. It has been described by one scholar as “one of the largest tort reforms ever imposed by the federal government.” [2] The legislation affects litigation emanating from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in two ways. First, it limits the total liability of air carriers (the airlines) for claims arising out of the September 11 airline crashes and fixes the jurisdiction and applicable substantive law for litigation arising out of these attacks. [3] Second, it establishes a victims’ compensation fund which provides an alternative process by which any injured individual or the survivors of a deceased victim can seek compensation. The most important feature of the legislation is that it offers the victims of September 11 a choice: victims who opt to make claim against the victims’ compensation fund waive their right to “file a civil action (or to be a party to an action), in any Federal or State court for damages sustained as a result of the terrorist-related aircraft crashes of September 11, 2001.” [4] In the event victims choose to seek compensation in the courts, the ATSSA’s liability-limiting provisions are straightforward: “liability for all claims, whether for compensatory or punitive damages, arising from the terrorist related aircraft crashes of September 11, 2001, against any air carrier shall not be in an amount greater that the limits of liability coverage maintained by the air carrier.” [5] Additionally, the ATSSA provides that “the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York shall have original and exclusive jurisdiction over all actions brought for any claim (including any claim for loss of property, personal injury, or death) resulting from or relating to the terrorist-related aircraft crashes of September 11, 2001.” The ATSSA also provides that the applicable substantive law in the litigation “shall be derived from the law, including choice of law principles, of the State in which the crash occurred unless such law is inconsistent with or preempted by Federal law.” Finally, the ATSSA expressly precludes the waiver and liability-limiting provisions from compromising suits against “any person who is a knowing participant in any conspiracy to hijack any aircraft or commit any terrorist act.” [6] To date, there are at least three such lawsuits pending. One of them is a class action suit where victims have opted to sue the individuals and organizations, as well as their state supporters, who are widely acknowledged as responsible for the attack. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act (“ATSA”) was later enacted in November, 2001, amending the ATSSA. [7] The ATSA extended the tort reform provisions of the ATSSA, limiting liability resulting from the attacks for airplane manufactures, airports, and anyone with a property interest in the World Trade Center. The ATSA also limited New York City’s liability to the greater of the city’s insurance coverage or $350 million. [8] However, the new Act specifically states that its provisions will not extend to the private security agencies which checked bags and screened passengers on September 11, 2001. Immediately after the enactment of the ATSSA, however, one commentator noted that it is extremely vague regarding how victims will be compensated. [9] The details governing distribution of the victims’ compensation fund rest solely on the judgment of the special master, providing the special master with authority to design a system that allows victims to submit claims. In mid-November, Attorney General John Ashcroft appointed Kenneth R. Feinberg as special master for the victims’ compensation fund. Mr. Feinberg is perhaps best known for his role as special master in the Agent Orange cases. He brings a wealth of experience in mass tort resolution, including work on the asbestos litigation, a class action involving the Shoreham nuclear power plant in Suffolk County, New York, and breast implant litigation. Most recently, he filled the high profile role of arbitrating negotiations that led to the settlement of claims by victims of the German Holocaust. [10] On December 20, 2001, the United States Department of Justice released Mr. Feinberg’s Interim Final Regulations for the distribution of the victims’ compensation fund. [11] Following extensive public comment and meetings with victims, victims’ families and other groups, the Department of Justice then released the Final Regulations on March 13, 2002. [12] A list of claimants is accessible on the United State Department of Justice Victims’ Compensation Fund website and indicates that close to one thousand victims have filed claims under the federal victims’ compensation fund, waiving their right to bring suit in federal court. [13] While claims on the fund offer the advantage of monetary awards to the victims within months, public comments following release of the Interim Final Rules indicated widespread dissatisfaction with the special master’s compensation plan. [14] The most contentious and controversial aspects of the Interim Final Rules involved provisions dealing with the reduction of awards based on collateral sources. Among the critical voices was Elliot Spitzer, Attorney General of the State of New York, who issued a press release on December 20, 2001 calling the regulations “flawed.” [15] When likewise asked about the regulations, John Lynch, spokesman for the “9-11 Widows and Victims’ Families Association,” a group that represents families of civilians and rescue workers killed in the attacks, was quoted in the National Law Journal as saying, “I think it is a disgrace.” [16] Similarly reacting to the bitter sentiment of the victims, Senators Jon C. Corzine and Robert G. Torricelli introduced a bill to repeal the provisions of the ATSSA that allow for reduced compensation based on collateral source. [17] Despite criticism regarding the collateral source compensation rules, the Final Rule incorporated no drastic changes to the Interim Rule. Summarizing the Final Rule, Special Master Feinberg reiterated that he held no power to disregard the Congressional mandate factoring collateral sources into distribution of the fund. Moreover, the Final Rule specifically notes that collateral source compensation can include life insurance, pension funds, death benefits programs, and payments by federal, state, or local governments. However, several changes were made to the collateral source provisions of the rules demonstrating that discretion was available to the Special Master when distributing the fund. The Final Rule, for example, clarifies the definition of collateral source compensation, expressly noting that certain benefits, including tax relief, contingent Social Security benefits, and contingent workers’ compensation benefits are not to be treated as collateral source compensation. The Final Rule also clarifies the provision that excludes charitable donations from the definition of collateral source compensation. In most instances, money received from privately funded charitable entities will not constitute collateral source compensation. Lastly, the Final Rule affords significant discretion to the Special Master when valuing collateral sources. While the Special Master has indicated that “it will be very rare that a claimant will receive less than $250,000.00," there is a possibility, expressly acknowledged in the summary to the Final Rule, that a victim or a victim’s family would not recover any money from the victims’ compensation fund based on the collateral source rules. In light of this possibility, some victims or victims’ families with significant collateral sources may take their claims to court. In fact, it was reported recently that a suit was commenced against American Airlines on behalf of Ms. Bonnie Shihadeh Smithwick, a highly-paid portfolio manager who was killed when the first World Trade Center Tower collapsed. Apparently, Ms. Smithwick’s family would receive no compensation under the victims’ compensation fund because she held a large life insurance policy for her family. [18] The other predominant factor in determining whether victims will commence civil suits is their ability to prevail in such actions. Whether the plaintiffs can recover involves several questions, including: Finally, it is worth mentioning here the latest proposed federal legislation -- a bill to amend the Terrorism Risk Protection Act to ensure the continued financial capacity of the insurers in order to provide coverage risks for terrorism. The bill proposes that the federal government will cover up to 90% of claims exceeding $25 billion in the event of an “act of terrorism.” It also proposes to further amend the ATSSA to cover any tort claim arising out of or relating to an act of terrorism. The bill would bar recovery for punitive damages, eliminate joint and several liability for non-economic damages, require that all damages be off-set by collateral sources such as insurance or gifts, and limit lawyers’ fees to 20% of any award. [19] III. Suits Arising out of the World Trade Center Tragedy A. Possible Defendants There are numerous possible defendants for suits arising out of the September 11 terrorist attacks. As discussed above, the airline companies, the aircraft manufacturers, airport owners and operators, New York City [20] and anyone else with a property interest in the World Trade Center are protected by federal legislation, limiting their liability to the terms of their insurance coverage. However, as the victims grow less and less enamored with the special master’s plan under the federal victims’ compensation fund, even with its liability limitations, a lawsuit against those parties may become more attractive, especially since those parties generally are sufficiently insured to cover the kinds of injuries and loss of life that occurred on September 11th. For instance, the airlines have an estimated $1.5 billion worth of coverage for each airplane. [21] With $3 billion in coverage for the airplanes that were flown into the World Trade Center Towers, the airlines might prove an attractive target for victims. As noted earlier, federal legislation does not protect airline security firms or the actual individuals and parties who perpetrated the terrorist attacks. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which was amended in 1996, allows American citizens to sue specified nations for death or injuries arising out of terrorism. [22] Several nations currently are identified by statute as subject to suit. These include Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan. [23] The 1996 amendment was intended to permit suits on behalf of those killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, against the government of Libya, the alleged perpetrator. [24] This statute may be invoked to sue other nations if proof can be amassed that the terrorist attack was aided by that nation. There are currently at least two civil suits by victims of the September 11 attacks already pending against Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Doe v. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, [25] was commenced against Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and several members of the Taliban leadership. The plaintiff, “Jane Doe,” seeks recovery for the loss of her husband, who was killed while working at his job in the financial industry at One World Trade Center when Flight 11 struck the building. Smith v. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, [26] also filed in the Southern District of New York, is a suit brought against Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and several members of the Taliban leadership by Raymond Smith, the brother of George E. Smith, who was killed when U.S. Airways Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. [27] Both complaints allege state causes of action for wrongful death, survival, assault, battery, false imprisonment and civil RICO claims. The Doe suit also includes claims for negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Additionally, on February 20, a class action suit was filed by a mother and six widows of other victims, seeking billions of dollars. [28] Among other possible defendants mentioned in the media since the attacks are the architects who designed the World Trade Center, as well as asbestos manufacturers, companies involved in constructing the World Trade Center, elevator maintenance companies, the Florida flight schools that trained the terrorists, jet fuel producers, the City of Portland (ME), and manufacturers of the structural steel used in the World Trade Center. [29] There are at least two civil suits brought by passengers in the hijacked jets against the airlines. These include Mariani v. United Airlines, filed in the Southern District of New York on December 20, 2001, which names United Airlines as the defendant and alleges wrongful death, and a survival action against the same defendant based on the breach of duty of care for safety and security of its passengers. As discussed above, because of the collateral source compensation reductions in the victims’ compensation fund, more suits will follow. As noted further, the suit brought on behalf of Ms. Bonnie Shihadeh Smithwick was only initiated after issuance of the Final Rule. The fact that her family would not have received compensation under the victims’ compensation fund surely prompted the litigation. [30] Prior suits commenced in the wake of disasters demonstrate that a number of other unanticipated entities might be subject to suit. For instance, suits brought by the victims of the 1980 MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas, Nevada, included products liability claims against such defendants as B.F. Goodrich, Conoco, and Pantsaote, Inc. [31] The claims against these parties alleged that the gases produced by the combustion of PVC vinyl-coated materials were toxic and unreasonably dangerous. Similar claims surfaced in suits from the 1986 Du Pont Plaza Hotel fire in San Juan, Puerto Rico, that killed 97 people, [32] and from the 1990 arson fire of the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, New York that killed 87 people. [33] B. Possible Plaintiffs While the response to an inquiry about possible plaintiffs in personal injury actions occasioned by the September 11 attacks may seem fairly straightforward, recent developments are cause for alarm among insurers and New York City. Possible claims for toxic tort injuries have been noted recently in the media and among legal professionals. [34] In that regard, there is great uncertainty about possible adverse health effects from toxic agents released into the air following collapse of the buildings. The victims’ compensation fund does not entertain the possibility that large numbers of rescue workers, clean-up crews, construction workers and New York City residents may have been exposed to toxic chemicals that would increase their chances of contracting diseases such as cancer or suffering long term neurological defects. Researchers have identified asbestos, lead, fiberglass, PCBs, mercury and other potentially harmful substances in the air and dust that surround the disaster site. Thus, the list of potential defendants may grow commensurately with the list of harmful substances. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that one study found dust in the neighborhood as caustic as drain cleaner. [35] However, reports about the extent of contamination vary drastically. The Environmental Protection Agency has been monitoring the downtown area for asbestos, particulates and other contaminants typically found in large building fire and collapse situations since September 11. It has detected no pollutants from the fire and building collapses that are cause for concern to the general public. Within one block of the World Trade Center, the EPA is finding low levels of asbestos in the dust from the building collapse. [36] There have been approximately 1,300 notices of claim served on New York City by firefighters and other rescue workers who claim that breathing the air at the disaster site has made them sick. [37] With the high concentration of persons living and working in the downtown New York City area, the potential for toxic tort claimants could be staggering. There has been insufficient research to determine whether or to what extent people were exposed to toxic chemicals in the hours, days and months following the attack. Further scientific research should provide a clearer picture of potential toxic tort claims. IV. Theories of Recovery and Applicable Legal Standards Pursuant to the ATSSA, the law to be applied in suits arising from September 11th events will derive from state law (including choice of law principles), where the crash occurred. Thus, suits arising out of the World Trade Center attack will be governed by New York law. Negligence will likely predominate theories of action for civil suits brought against the above-mentioned parties. To sustain an action for negligence, the plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) a duty owed by the defendant to the plaintiff; (2) a breach of that duty; (3) that the breach of duty proximately caused the plaintiff’s injuries, and (4) damages. The most critical elements applicable to any suit emanating from the September 11th attacks are duty and proximate causation. Generally, the law of negligence in New York is similar to the law of other jurisdictions. Thus, to the extent that the law of other states, such as Pennsylvania, is applied in lawsuits arising from the September 11th attacks, the foregoing legal principles will be generally applied. A. Duty Negligence is not actionable unless it involves the invasion of a legally protected interest, i.e., the violation of a right. [38] The issue whether the defendant owes the plaintiff a duty is purely a legal question for the courts. The New York Court of Appeals has addressed the element of duty in a case alleging negligence and noted that: “ [t]he existence and scope of an alleged tortfeasor’s duty, at the threshold, is a legal, policy-laden determination dependent on consideration of different forces, including logic, science, competing socioeconomic policies, and contractual assumptions of responsibility.” [39] Thus, whether the victims can sustain causes of action in negligence against the potential defendants noted above will depend largely on a legal determination -- a policy-driven line of demarcation drawn around the concept of duty. In determining whether a duty exists and in determining its scope, New York courts have been influenced by public policy concerns such as avoiding limitless liability, mass litigation, and fraudulent claims. The court of appeals has even held that it is "bound to consider the larger social consequences of decisions” affecting duties in negligence under the law. [40] A duty may arise from a special relationship that requires the defendant to protect against the risk of harm to the plaintiff. For example, landowners have a duty to protect tenants, patrons and invitees from foreseeable harm caused by the criminal conduct of others while they are on the premises; their special relationship puts them in the best position to protect against that risk. [41] The duty to protect against foreseeable criminal activity, however, does not extend to members of the general public. [42] Furthermore, while the forseeability of harm may affect a determination of causation, the foreseeability of harm does not define duty. Absent a duty running directly to the injured person, there can be no liability in damages, however careless the conduct or foreseeable the harm. For instance, in Strauss v. Belle Realty Co., [43] the court of appeals considered whether a utility owed a duty to a plaintiff injured in a fall on a darkened staircase during a citywide blackout. While the injuries were logically foreseeable, there was no contractual relationship between the plaintiff and the utility to provide lighting for the common areas in the building. The court restricted liability for damages in negligence to direct customers of the utility in order to avoid a crushing exposure to suit by millions of electricity consumers in New York City and Westchester. B. Proximate Causation Beyond the existence of a duty, it is essential that the breach of a duty be the “proximate cause” of the injury suffered in order to sustain a cause of action for negligence. Generally, an act or omission is the proximate cause of an injury if it was a substantial factor in bringing about the injury. [44] Stated another way, an act or omission is the proximate cause of an injury if it had such an effect in producing the injury that reasonable people would regard it as the cause of the injury. [45] A proximate cause must be one which, in view of all surrounding circumstances, might readily have been foreseen by an ordinary and prudent person as likely to result in injury. While there can be more than one proximate cause of an injury, an intervening act will constitute a superseding cause of the injury and will sever liability when the act is extraordinary in nature. [46] Stated conversely, the causative link between the defendant’s act or omission and the plaintiff’s injury is not broken by the negligent or deliberate conduct of a third person when such conduct is normal or foreseeable under the circumstances. [47] The crucial aspect of this inquiry is a determination of how far the first wrongdoer should be charged with forecasting the future results of his or her conduct. V. Prior Litigation Arising out of Disasters or Injuries Caused by Terrorists A. Oklahoma City Bombing In Gaines-Tabb v. ICE Explosives, USA, Inc., [48] victims of the terrorist bombing brought a class action against the manufacturer of ammonium nitrate that was sold as fertilizer and allegedly used to construct the bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The plaintiffs’ principal causes of action were negligence and products liability. As their negligence claim, plaintiffs alleged that the manufacturer of ammonium nitrate was negligent in making explosive grade ammonium nitrate available to the perpetrators of the terrorist act. Without reaching the issue of whether the manufacturer owed a duty to the victims, the court held that the plaintiffs could not prevail on their claim for negligence because they could not show, as a matter of law, that the defendants’ conduct was the proximate cause of their injuries. The court held that “the conduct of the bomber or bombers was unforeseeable, independent of the acts of the defendants, and adequate by itself to bring about plaintiffs’ injuries [;] the criminal activities of the bombers acted as the supervening cause of the plaintiffs’ injuries.” [49] In rendering its decision, the court noted that ammonium nitrate bombs were used for illegal acts on only two occasions in the last twenty years, and that it was extremely difficult to properly manufacture ammonium nitrate bombs; only a small percentage of the population would possess the knowledge to do so. B. Hijacking In the case of Stanford v. Kuwait Airways Corp., [50] the plaintiffs were three American diplomats who were also passengers aboard Kuwait Airways Flight KU221 when the airplane was hijacked by four terrorists. Plaintiffs were tortured over six days, and one of the plaintiffs was murdered before Iranian commandos thwarted the hijacking. Plaintiffs commenced a negligence action against Middle East Airlines Airliban, S.A. (MEA), alleging that MEA had a duty to use due care to avoid the risk of hijacking. The facts are convoluted, but are worthy of brief mention considering the likelihood of claims against airline security firms arising out of the September 11th attacks. On December 2, 1984, four hijackers purchased “interline” tickets from MEA for travel from Beirut to Bangkok, Thailand, via the cities of Dubai and Karachi. At Dubai, the flight connected with another airline. The court was careful to note that the hijackers “had a stench about them.” [51] Their one-way tickets were purchased with cash on very short notice and the itinerary they chose was strange. There were regularly scheduled direct flights from Beirut to Bangkok. If the hijackers had taken the next flight from Beirut they could have avoided a 24-hour layover in Karachi and arrived in Bangkok at the same time. Perhaps the most suspicious aspect of the hijackers’ conduct was their failure to check baggage for the long-distance flight. On the first stopover in Dubai, the hijackers boarded the MEA flight, armed with pistols, explosives and other weapons. The hijackers and other passengers were held on the tarmac, which was poorly lit and largely unguarded, during the` stopover. The hijacking occurred after the flight departed Dubai. Addressing the plaintiffs’ negligence claims, the court first ascertained whether a duty existed on the part of MEA as owed to the victims. The court reiterated the broad legal principles discussed above, and held that MEA had a duty to protect the plaintiffs from the unreasonable risk of foreseeable harm. The court specifically held that MEA, as a first leg interline carrier, had a duty to protect passengers on other connecting interline flights from unreasonable risk or harm through the use of reasonable precautions in the face of reasonably foreseeable risks. The court also rejected MEA’s claim that, as a matter of law, the criminal acts of the hijackers and/or the negligence of the other interline carrier were intervening superceding causes of the plaintiffs’ injuries, leaving the issue to the jury for determination. VI. Conclusion The September 11th attacks were unprecedented in all respects. From a legal standpoint, the issue of compensating victims of the attack is fraught with uncertainty. The immediate issues concern whether victims will elect to participate in the victims’ compensation fund or take their chances pursuing compensation under tort law in civil litigation. As stated, the possibility of large scale litigation by the September 11 victims depends largely on the success of the victims’ compensation program. In the event the victims elect to litigate their claims, judicial application of such concepts as “duty,” “foreseeability” and “proximate causation” to the extraordinary factual circumstances of September 11 will take center stage. As set forth above, these decisions not only will have immediate financial consequences, they will also have larger social consequences for reasons articulated by the New York Court of Appeals. Because of the extraordinary nature of the September 11th attacks, prior litigation and cases such as the Oklahoma City bombing offer only limited precedent as models by which to predict success or failure in the courts. Under any circumstances, the insurance industry must be prepared to engage a host of claims from many different insureds on a panoply of legal theories. ENDNOTES † Submitted by the author on behalf of the FDCC Excess & Surplus Lines Section. Mr. Thurm acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Frank Santoro, Esq., in the preparation of this article. [1] P.L. 107-42 (2001) (full text of the statute available on the FDCC website at http://www.thefederation.org/index.html). [2] Anthony Sebok, Assessing the New Airline Law, http://Findlaw.com Commentary, at http://www.writ.news.findlaw.com.scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page+sebok/20010924.html (last visited 1/15/02). [3] “The term ‘air carrier’ means a citizen of the United States undertaking by any means, directly or indirectly, to provide air transportation and includes employees and agents of such citizen.” P.L. 107-42 § 402(1). [4] P.L. 107-42 § 405 (c)(3)(B)(i) (2001). [5] Id. § 408 (a) (2001). [6] Id. § 408 (c) (2001) (summary of the statute is available on the FDCC website). [7] P.L. 107-71 §201 (2001). [8] Id. § 201 (a)(3). [9] Sebok, supra note 2. [10] Tamara Loomis, Ashcroft Names Special Master for Sept. 11 Compensation Fund, N.Y. L. J., Nov. 27, 2001, at 1. [11] 28 CFR § 104, available at http://www.usdoj.gov/victimcompensation/viccompfedreg.htm (last visited January 29, 2002). [12] Id. [13] http://www.usdoj.gov/victimcompensation/victimrepresentatives.pdf (last visited April 8, 2002). [14] Robert F. Worth, Ground Zero: Compensation; Families of Victims Rally for Higher Federal Awards, N.Y. Times, Jan. 18, 2002, at B4. [15] Attorney General Spitzer's objections to the regulations are available at http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2002/dec/dec20c01.htm. He identified what he considered "numerous fundamental flaws in the DOJ regulations" contained in the Interim Final Rules. Several of his criticisms were addressed by the Final Rule. 1. Attorney General Spitzer was concerned that in order to be eligible for compensation, the Interim Final Rule required contemporaneous records demonstrating medical treatment within 24 hours after the attack, even though: (a) there are no records for the hundreds of injured victims treated at emergency triage locations on September 11th; and (b) many other victims first sought to reunite with their families and did not seek medical treatment for their injuries until September 12th. The Final Rule addressed this concern by expanding the time limits to 72 hours for victims and a time limit within the discretion of the Special Master for rescue workers. 2. Attorney General Spitzer was also dissatisfied that the Interim Final Rule effectively precluded recovery by unmarried life partners. The Final Rule was not altered to include recovery by unmarried life partners. The Final Rule relies on state law to determine who is a personal representative entitled to recover from the fund. This reliance is purportedly mandated for consistency, in order to avoid a situation where a representative as defined in the regulation recovers under the fund, and a representative under state law is still free to commence a lawsuit. The Preamble to the Final Rule suggests that criticism of state law concerning the determination of a personal representative is best directed to respective state legislatures. 3. Attorney General Spitzer also felt that the Interim Rule ignored the statutory mandate that victims be able to present evidence of their losses. Instead it determined that all individuals killed in the attacks were presumed to have suffered exactly $250,000 in "non-economic" losses, regardless of individual circumstances, and permitted increases only upon a showing of "extraordinary circumstances." The Final Rule remains the same. The Special Master recognized the problems inherent in placing a value on non-economic losses, but opted for consistency and fairness in order to avoid “playing Solomon” on a case-by-case basis. 4. Attorney General Spitzer also was concerned that under the Interim Rule, awards were reduced by the amount of collateral compensation that the claimant received, even if the collateral compensation was unrelated to the damages for which recovery was sought. The Interim Rule states that charitable donations will not be counted as "collateral source" payments resulting in reduced awards, but at the same time authorizes the Special Master to determine that charitable payments are collateral sources, which will deter charities from providing immediate payment to the victims. As to the how the Final Rule addresses these concerns, see text. [16] Bob Van Voris, Compensation Plan May Shut Out Sept. 11 Rescuers, Nat’l L. J., Jan. 7, 2002, at A1. [17] Senator Jon C. Corzine, Fix the Victims’ Fund, Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Times, Jan. 28, 2002, at A14. [18] Robert F. Worth, Airline Sued in Tower Death, N.Y. Times, Apr. 9, 2002, at A16. [19] H.R. 3210, 107th Cong. (2001). [20] Under the ATSA, the liability of New York City for suits arising out of the World Trade Center attacks is limited to the greater of its insurance coverage or $350 million. P.L. 107-71 § 201(a)(3). [21] Milo Geylin, Lawyers Wonder, Who is Liable for Sept. 11, Wall St. J., Oct. 18, 2001, at B1. [22] 28 U.S.C. § 1330 (2002). [23] The United States does not recognize the Taliban, and thus Afghanistan is not included on the list. [24] Jerry Adler, Suing Bin Laden, The American Lawyer, Nov. 2001, at 32. [25] 01 CIV 9074 (S.D.N.Y. filed Oct. 11, 2001). [26] 01 CIV 1013`(S.D.N.Y. filed Nov. 14, 2001). [27] Adler, supra note 24. [28] Neely Tucker, Bin Laden, Other Terrorists Sued, Wash. Post, Feb. 20, 2002, at A10. [29] See, e.g., Gregory Keisch, ‘Little Old Lady’ Denies Terrorizing Man, Portland Press Herald, Dec. 5, 2001, at 1B (reporting notice of claim filed with the City of Portland by a victim of the attack on the World Trade Center. Two of the hijackers boarded flights in Portland and the city retains some control over airport security); Seth Stern, Justice is Blind After All, Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 27, 2001, at 19 (mentioning Florida flight schools and architects of World Trade Center as defendants). [30] Worth, supra note 18. [31] See In re MGM Grand Hotel Fire Litig., 660 F. Supp. 522 (D. Nev. 1987). [32] See In re San Juan Dupont Plaza Hotel Fire Litig., 768 F. Supp. 912 (D. P.R. 1991). [33] See Clarendon Place Corp. v. Landmark Ins. Co., 587 N.Y.S.2d 311 (App. Div. 1992). [34] See Bob Van Voris, Are Toxic Lawsuits in the Air after Sept 11?, Nat’l L. J., Feb. 18, 2002, at A1; Associated Press, NYC Faces Trade Center Lawsuits, available at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/02/08/national/printable328742.shtml. [35] Van Voris, supra note 34. [36] See http://www.epa.gov/epahome/wtc/headline_092101.htm (last visited, April 5, 2002). [37] Van Voris, supra note 34. [38] 532 Madison Avenue Gourmet Foods, Inc. v. Finlandia Center, Inc., 750 N.E.2d 1097 (N.Y. 2001). [39] Milken & Co. v. Consolidated Edison Co., 644 N.E.2d 268, 271 (N.Y. 1994). [40] Waters v. New York City Hous. Auth., 505 N.E.2d 522 (N.Y. 1987). [41] Nallan v Helmsley-Spear, Inc., 407 N.E.2d 451 (N.Y. 1980). [42] Waters, 505 N.E.2d 522. [43] 482 N.E.2d 34 (N.Y. 1985). [44] Alexander v. Eldred, 72 N.E.2d 996 (N.Y. 1984). [45] Ferrer v. Harris, 434 N.E.2d 1342 (N.Y. 1982). [46] Huber v. Malone, 645 N.Y.S.2d 526 (App. Div. 1996). [47] Mull v. Ford Motor Co., 368 F.2d 713, 717 (2d Cir. 1966) (applying New York law). [48] 160 F.3d 613 (10th Cir. 1998). [49] Id. at 621. [50] 89 F.3d 117 (2d Cir. 1996). [51] Id. at 120-22. (Author’s Bio) Mr. Thurm, who is counsel to the firm of Molod, Spitz, DeSantis & Stark, P.C. in New York City, has been associated with the insurance industry as a practicing lawyer defending companies and their insureds for over 40 years. He is a graduate of Brooklyn Law School (1958) and is admitted to practice in New York (1959) and Florida (1975). He is also admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and all four federal district courts in the State of New York. He has actively litigated a broad spectrum of insurance-related matters including: primary and excess policies; direct and reinsurance contracts and coverage issues dealing with allocation of loss; late notice of claim and suit; and the assault and battery exclusion. He has defended dozens of municipal entities in all types of civil rights cases including land use, excessive force and employment discrimination. He has been a member of the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel since 1984 and is the immediate past Chair of its Excess and Surplus Line Section. He is an associate member of the Excess and Surplus Line Claims Association and NAPSLO. He also holds membership in the Defense Research Institute, the New York State Bar Association, the American Bar Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police (Legal Offices Section). He is a frequent speaker and contributor of articles on insurance-related matters. http://www.thefederation.org/documents/Thurm-F02.htm
Statute of Repose. "Statutes of limitations" extinguish, after period of time, right to prosecute accrued cause of action; "statute of repose," by contrast, limits potential liability by limiting time during which cause of action can arise. Kline v. J.I. Case Co., D.C.Ill., 520 F.Supp. 564, 567. It is distinguishable from statute of limitations, in that statute of repose cuts off right of action after specified time measured from delivery of product or completion of work, regardless of time of accrual of cause of action or of notice of invasion of legal rights. Universal Engineering Corp. v. Perez, Fla., 451 So.2d 463, 465.
http://www.nspe.org/liability/in2-repos.asp
Statute of Repose Model
http://www.thefederation.org/documents/Thurm-F02.htm
#129. To: nolu_chan, RickyJ, ALL (#128)
Curious. In what you posted, there is no mention of ANYTHING concerning the MANDATORY retention of documents for any period of time. Isn't that what RickyJ claimed and what started this little discussion? As far as negligence is concerned, just how is the builder or owner of the WTC negligent with regards to whether or not the towers were designed or analyzed in 1963-64 for a plane crash or plane crash induced fire? Afterall, that is also the issue that started this discussion. The issue was not whether the owner was negligent because he failed to evacuate people soon enough or allowed folks to breath harmful dust or had asbestos in the building. I think any plaintiff would have a difficult time proving negligence in the design for the issue that started this discussion ... since I know of no building code in existence in 1963 or 1964 that required such a plane crash load nor was it common practice to include one. It seems to me that only product liability (in other words, defective materials, defective design, etc) applies as far as the DESIGN of the towers (the issue at hand) was concerned. And so far nothing indicates the use of defective materials or defective design (for the loads that skyscrapers were supposed to be designed to resist back in the 1960s). You misunderstood, NC (although its difficult to see how). I said all along that the statute of repose would normally (in most states) prevent an action for product liability against the builders. But I pointed out that in cases of personal injury, NY state law has allowed (at least until recently) an indefinite period before the injury takes place before starting the clock on the statute of repose. You apparently overlooked that fact. And apparently you've overlooked the fact that nothing in what you posted talked about suing the builder or owner for not designing against a plane crash and plane crash induced fire. Now back to the original claim by RickyJ. Prove that it is MANDATORY (by law) that design calculations be kept any length of time (such as 40 years). Because that's the issue that started this little exchange. Don't take us off on another spam-filled detour. Prove what Ricky claimed. Say ... I notice he's left the thread. Wonder why?
After a specified period of time following construction, the statute of repose will cut off a cause of action against an architect or engineer for product liability.
THAT is WHY the actions regarding the WTC will not be brought against the architect or engineer for product liability. I suggest that beachy read about the statute of repose and learn why his purported cause of action is impossible.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#130. To: BeAChooser, nolu_chan, RickyJ, THE SKYDRIFTER, christine, robin, faithful fans of our saga... (#129)
A challenge issued! Who would have thought that after taking such a humiliating beating yesterday, the hermaphroditic super villain would have the hubris to arise, still stinging from the scornful destruction he suffered, to issue yet another challenge to the ever-victorious team of Nolu-Chan, his trusty sidekick RickyJ, and THE SKYDRIFTER? Yet, it is apparent that he may have learned some humility from his recent long stream of rhetorical defeats. Gentle reader, you will notice that not a single time in this diatribe has he issued his contemptuous battle cry of "ROTFLOL!" Can it be possible that the BeAChooser has learned a lesson in humility? Is it even conceivable that he may be forced to turn from the arrogance his Legion of Neocon programmers built into his spam-shooter and take a more conciliatory tack? Or is this yet another sinister Neocon plot? What will happen next? Find out in a moment, after a word from our sponsor: Monsanto. Bringing our happy children pus in milk since 2000!
Prove that it is MANDATORY (by law) that design calculations be kept any length of time (such as 40 years). Because that's the issue that started this little exchange. Don't take us off on another spam-filled detour. Prove what Ricky claimed. Say ... I notice he's left the thread. Wonder why?
Paranoia is a survival trait in a Decidership.
#131. To: BeAChooser, bluedogtxn, RickyJ, THE SKYDRIFTER, christine, robin (#129)
[BAC-side #129] Now back to the original claim by RickyJ. Prove that it is MANDATORY (by law) that design calculations be kept any length of time (such as 40 years). RickyJ said it. Take it up with RickyJ. For my part, I would presume that the design calculations, if any existed, would have been retained by the corporate entity and not by the employee of the corporate entity. It may be that that particular corporate entity no longer exists. Skilling is dead so we cannot very well ask him about it. [BAC-side #129] Say ... I notice he's left the thread. Wonder why? RickyJ posted on 4/22 (#55) and on 4/24 (#102 #106 #107 #108). That is not exactly prolific. Perhaps he left because he does not find you as entertaining as I do, perhaps he is laughing at you too hard to type, or perhaps he just does not like to debate someone who gets his "facts" from a magic 8-ball. [BAC-side #129] Because that's the issue that started this little exchange. Don't take us off on another spam-filled detour. Prove what Ricky claimed. ----- No, that is NOT the bullshit that got this started. Let us review to remind you how you got this started. ----- [nc #86] ROBERTSON now claims he cannot find the ROBERTSON study analysis report. ----- [BAC-side #87] It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really? ----- [nc #101] Had I done an analysis 40 years ago proving that the WTC, the most important project of my lifetime, could withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph, and "that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact," if I could not find the paperwork today, I would be able to replicate the analysis and prove the point again. The towers withstood the impact just as Titanic withstood the impact with the iceberg. Aye cap'n, it wasn't the iceberg got 'er, it was the water! It's been 40 years. Do you believe that Robertson not only lost the report but has forgotten how to do the analysis? ----- [RickyJ #106] For such a project it is mandatory BAC. If you knew much about the legal requirements of such projects you would know this. ----- [BAC-side #109] It's probably a good idea to keep such documents, but I challenge you to prove there is any legal requirement that calculations in the design phase of a skyscraper must be kept at all or kept indefinitely. And have you ever heard of a "statute of repose"? It's the number of years after a project is completed after which the designers and contractors cannot be held responsible for damages or problems that may subsequently occur. THAT is the period during which engineering firms PROBABLY SHOULD (again, show me where it says MUST) keep all records if they are smart. Now for New York the statute of limitations/repose on product liability is 3 years, however, personal injury cases currently have an indefinite liability in that for three years after an injury the building builder/owners can be sued. However, that has been successfully contested in court cases recently and architects in New York are currently trying to get a maximum 10 year repose statute passed for personal liability cases. So yes, it would be smart if builders under the current NY laws kept important design documents for a long time ... perhaps indefinitely ... but I know of no laws that state it is mandatory. Go ahead, Ricky ... prove me wrong. So, this got started by my questioning Robertson's "The dog ate my homework" explanation, and your defense of his Gonzo-like explanation. And we got off on this detour by your inane injection of a Statute of Repose. I will note that in my #101 is questioned you as follows, "Do you believe that Robertson not only lost the report but has forgotten how to do the analysis?" The silence is deafening. WHY has Robertson not simply recreated the analysis? I guess we will just have to go with the White Paper and the New York Times article. They actually seem to exist.
#132. To: BeAChooser, bluedogtxn, RickyJ, THE SKYDRIFTER, christine, robin (#129)
Well, duhhhhhh, the owner is "liable for injuries caused by foreseeable dangerous conditions on their property. Considering the White Paper and the Robertson analysis, and the New York Times newspaper article from 1964, one might argue that the dangerous condition was not only foreseeable but was actually foreseen and the people were given assurances that the buildings would be safe in the event of the foreseen condition. PERSONAL INJURY LIABILITY OF OWNERS AND OCCUPIERS Bernard J. Garbutt, III * * * Why Building Owners And Occupiers Are Sued In The First Place As a building owner or occupier you may be asking “why me?” You did not have anything to do with manufacturing or distributing ACMs, you probably did not even know exactly what materials were actually used in the construction and/or renovation of your building and you almost certainly did not know what those materials contained, let alone that they contained asbestos. The answer to the “why me” question is two-fold. First, as the universe of traditional manufacturer and distributor defendants shrinks due to bankruptcy, plaintiffs’ attorneys are forced to be more creative in targeting and selecting other types of defendants in an attempt to maximize recovery for their clients. Since the Johns-Manville Corporation filed for bankruptcy in 1982 in the face of thousands of asbestos claims, many other manufacturers have been forced to seek bankruptcy protection. Most recently, in October 2000, Owens-Corning filed for bankruptcy, and two other manufacturers filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Given the thousands of new asbestos personal injury cases filed every year, it is highly likely that such litigation will force other manufacturers and distributors into bankruptcy as well. Therefore, plaintiffs’ attorneys will be forced to seek new sources for recovery, and large, solvent corporations that owned or occupied buildings constructed or renovated during the relevant time period are particularly appealing. Second, with respect to more traditional types of claims arising out of injuries to individuals occurring on real property (such as a “slip-and-fall”), the law typically has held owners and occupiers liable for injuries caused by foreseeable dangerous conditions on their property. Because this rule of law is itself so seemingly basic and its application so simple, plaintiffs' attorneys have seized upon it and attempted to stretch the rule to cover the more novel scenario of asbestos-related personal injuries. [BAC-side #129] As far as negligence is concerned, just how is the builder or owner of the WTC negligent with regards to whether or not the towers were designed or analyzed in 1963-64 for a plane crash or plane crash induced fire?
http://www.envinfo.com/webcasts/toxic-tort/gar-hof.pdf
FOR CONSTRUCTION-RELATED ASBESTOS EXPOSURE
IN NEW YORK
Melinda E. Hofmann
New York
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP
#133. To: BeAChooser, bluedogtxn, RickyJ, THE SKYDRIFTER, christine, robin (#129)
Upon further review, it appears that your "Statute of Repose" does not truly exist, and that New York has a 3-year Statute of Limitations which is merely strengthened somewhat by Chapter 682 of the Laws of 1996 which is not a pure Statute of Repose. Your documentation for this is curiously missing. Mine is not. Here is my documentation. Show me what you relied upon for your blather. CURRENT NEW YORK STATE STATUTES OF LIMITATIONS In an action brought by an owner/client against a design professional or contractor for damages resulting from a personal injury based on negligence, a three year statute of limitations applies and the cause of action accrues at the time of injury. A malpractice claim against a design professional or contractor by owner/client carries a three year statute of limitations and the cause of action accrues upon completion of the project. Third party suits, however, where the design professional has never had a contract with or contact with the third party, is the real issue of why we have perpetual liability. Under current law, a cause of action grounded on a theory of simple negligence brought by a third party (not an owner of building or structure) against a design professional or contractor is governed by a three year statute of limitations and the cause of action does not accrue until the injury takes place -- even if the plaintiff is injured 20, 30, 50 or 100 years after the design professional has completed work on the building or structure. As a result, design professionals or contractors are answerable to alleged negligence claims commenced indefinitely after project completion. Basic Provisions of Chapter 682, Laws of 1996 — This is the law that AIA/NYS was successful in enacting in 1996. It is not a "pure" statute of repose, but it amends and strengthens the 3-year statute of limitations, and: The claimant (third party) has 90 days before commencing suit to prepare and submit his/her case before a court. Within those 90 days, the claimant has to demonstrate to a court that there is a substantial basis of evidence showing negligence on the part of the design professional and that that negligence is also a proximate cause of the injury. Also, within those 90 days, the design professional must provide the documentation requested. After the expiration of 90 days, the claimant may commence an action against the design professional. However, the design professional then has 30 days to make a motion to the court to dismiss the suit because the 90 day requirement was not followed or because the claimant failed to establish that a substantial basis in evidence exists to prove that the design professional’s actions were a proximate cause of the injury. The law includes architects, landscape architects and professional engineers regardless of whether they practice individually or in a firm. DESIGN PROFESSIONALS LIABILITY REFORM: AIA NEW YORK STATE STRATEGY The Problem The Design Professionals' Liability Reform issue is about the perpetual amount of time that design professionals stand liable for potential actions by third parties for improvements to real property which they have planned or designed. Since 1961, 47 jurisdictions have responded to this extended liability by enacting statutes of limitations or statutes of repose for third party suits. However, New York State is not one of the 47 jurisdictions (nor is Vermont or Ohio). New York State has never enacted a statute of repose to relieve design professionals from perpetual liability. Now, after over 35 years of seeking relief, the AIA New York State believes it is still about time that the New York State Legislature enact a solution to the problem. The Solution - A Statute of Repose for Third Party Suits The AIA New York State supports a 10-year statute of repose bill for third party suits bill for third party suits which incorporates a ten-year plus one year limit for any suit brought against a licensed design professional. Based on studies (Schinnerer and Cardozo Law Review), a statute of repose rather than a statute of limitations is fair to design professionals without imposing an unfair burden on the injured party who would continue to have redress to the courts by bringing suit against the owner or occupier of the building. With the passage of time, the probability increases that improper maintenance, rather than faulty design, is the proximate cause of injury. Thus, some reasonable time limitation for suit is a fair compromise, and statistical data (Schinnerer and Cardozo) suggest a ten year statute as fair and reasonable. The Strategy The AIA New York State’s Board of Directors voted this again as the Association’s top legislative priority. The AIA/NYS continues to introduce a "pure" statute of repose bill with a 10-year statute. By doing so, we want to remind the Legislators that the law enacted in 1996, Chapter 682, Laws of 1996, is but an intermediary step to our over-arching goal of enacting a statute of repose. The Association also believes it is important to support other design professional liability legislation in addition to its ten-year statute of repose for third party suits and supports the following three legislative initiatives as part of its "Design Professionals Liability Reform" package.. Design Professionals Liability Reform We support the initiatives of the New Yorkers for Civil Justice Reform for comprehensive tort reform, which will restore fairness, balance and common sense to our civil justice system and which includes the following Design Professionals Liability Reform issues: 10-year Statute of Repose for third party suits brought against design professionals and a Certificate of Merit provision before commencing suit. The legislative initiatives would extend to design professionals protection from perpetual liability exposure to third party suits in the case of a statute of repose and in the case of a certificate of merit process, protection from non-meritorious litigation in a manner similar to that currently provided for health professionals. THE NEVER ENDING EXPOSURE OF AN ARCHITECT In a decision rendered more than two decades ago by the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, the Court observed that "[e]xcept in the middle of a battlefield, nowhere must men coordinate the movement of other men and all materials in the midst of such chaos and with such limited certainty of present facts and future occurrences as a huge construction project." In considering issues related to construction litigation, the Court was merely recognizing the inherent problems associated with construction, and the likelihood that such projects will invariably lead parties to the steps of the courthouse. Given the inherent conflicts associated with construction, it must be understood that architects face risks every time they undertake to perform professional services. Unfortunately for design professionals, unlike other professionals in New York State, their exposure never ceases. Although New York State has a Statute of Limitations of three (3) years for claims of negligence by an owner, design professionals are never truly relieved of responsibility for projects for which they performed services at any time during their careers. Specifically, the law allows third-parties who have suffered injuries as the result of improper professional services to institute a lawsuit against architects, engineers and land surveyors subject to limited exceptions, within three (3) years of the date of personal injury, wrongful death or property damage. In effect, architects who design buildings in New York State any time during their career remain exposed to claims by parties other than the party who hired them. Notably, most claims asserted against design professionals are by parties other than their clients. In many neighboring states, including Connecticut and New Jersey, legislatures have enacted laws creating definitive limitations to the time frame to pursue claims against design professionals. No other New York State professionals face the same continuous exposure which effectively serves to haunt architects and engineers well into their retirement years. In an effort to minimize the exposure of design professionals, New York State promulgated Section 214-d of the Civil Practice Law and Rules known as the Statute of Repose. By virtue of this statute, a third-party pursuing claims against an architect or engineer, who last provided services more than 10 years ago, must establish by substantial evidence the existence of a valid claim in order to pursue an action against the architect or engineer. Although this statute is helpful, it can be easily overcome, thus creating a continuous exposure for the design professional. Conversely, the State of New Jersey has adopted a Statute of Repose which provides that no claim can be pursued against a design professional who last provided services more than 10 years ago. The State of Connecticut has a similar State of Repose precluding claims against design professionals for services provided more than eight (8) years ago. The clear language of the legislation adopted in New Jersey and Connecticut ultimately serves to free the design professional from the never ending exposure currently facing design professionals in New York. Absent a meaningful modification to the current state of the law in New York, the design professional will never be relieved from potential exposure for any project. It is for this reason that architects would be well advised to press the legislature to address this apparent inequity. David B. Kosakoff, the author of this article, is a partner with the law firm of Sinnreich Safar & Kosakoff LLP, and is the General Counsel to the Westchester/Mid-Hudson Chapter of the AIA. He specializes in construction litigation and has represented design professionals by negotiating contracts, and litigating complex cases in court and through arbitration. He can be requested as counsel by your insurance carrier in the event of a claim. Mr. Kosakoff is also available to discuss issues related to businesses practices, and can be reached at 631-650-1200 or by e-mail at DKosakoff@ssklaw.net. [BAC-side #129] But I pointed out that in cases of personal injury, NY state law has allowed (at least until recently) an indefinite period before the injury takes place before starting the clock on the statute of repose. You apparently overlooked that fact.
http://www.aia.org/static/state_local_resources/liabilityreform/Repose-AIA%20NY%20.pdf
Limits the ability to bring third party suits against architects, professional engineers, and landscape architects after a period of ten years has elapsed from the time of their design. Acknowledges in statute that the design professionals do deserve some consideration to limit their perpetual exposure.
An owner/client claim based on breach of contract is governed by a six year statute of limitations and the cause of action accrues upon completion of the contractual duties.
http://www.aiaarchitect.net/site/news/05/03/neverending.htm
#134. To: BeAChooser, bluedogtxn, RickyJ, THE SKYDRIFTER, christine, robin (#129)
No, I did not misunderstand or overlook anything. You have your head up your butt again and are trying to, once more, your way out of responsibility for your bullcrap. Cases of personal injury are not cases of product liability. It is manifestly clear that cases of personal injury are being brought and are being processed by the courts as we speak. Upon further review, it appears that your "Statute of Repose" does not truly exist, and that New York has a 3-year Statute of Limitations, is merely strengthened somewhat by Chapter 682 of the Laws of 1996 which is not a pure Statute of Repose. THE NEVER ENDING EXPOSURE OF AN ARCHITECT [Excerpt] In an effort to minimize the exposure of design professionals, New York State promulgated Section 214-d of the Civil Practice Law and Rules known as the Statute of Repose. By virtue of this statute, a third-party pursuing claims against an architect or engineer, who last provided services more than 10 years ago, must establish by substantial evidence the existence of a valid claim in order to pursue an action against the architect or engineer. Although this statute is helpful, it can be easily overcome, thus creating a continuous exposure for the design professional. Conversely, the State of New Jersey has adopted a Statute of Repose which provides that no claim can be pursued against a design professional who last provided services more than 10 years ago. The State of Connecticut has a similar State of Repose precluding claims against design professionals for services provided more than eight (8) years ago. The clear language of the legislation adopted in New Jersey and Connecticut ultimately serves to free the design professional from the never ending exposure currently facing design professionals in New York. Absent a meaningful modification to the current state of the law in New York, the design professional will never be relieved from potential exposure for any project. It is for this reason that architects would be well advised to press the legislature to address this apparent inequity. A "statute of repose" applies to architects and engineers. Your documentation for this is curiously missing. This is complete, utter, total bullshit. "Statutes of Repose" toll from the time of the completion of a project. That is what distinguishes them from a "Statute of Limitations." "Personal injury" claims are not controlled by a "Statute of Repose" which applies to actions against architects and engineers. "Personal injury" claims are controlled by a "Statute of Limitations" which does not begin to run until the time of the injury, or in some cases, until the injury becomes known, such as injury from toxic substances. You appear to be unable to tell the difference between a "Statute of Respose" and a "Statute of Limitations." (Appearances can be deceiving. Actually you know the difference full well, but you are trying to lie your way out of your previous bullcrap.) As you stated in BAC-side #109 You clearly stated that personal injury cases currently have an indefinite liability in that for three years after an injury the building builder/owners can be sued. Personal injury cases are not barred by a statute of repose pertaining to architects and engineers. Such a statute bars claims against the architect or engineer a specified number of years after completion of the project. Some states, such as California, have adopted a 10-year statute of repose for product liability cases involving architects or engineers. No state has a statute of repose greater than 10 years. ALL statutes of repose run from the time of completion of the project, not from the time of an injury. Had there been a 10-year statute of repose in New York, actions subject to the statute of repose would have been barred for about the last 25 years. New York appears to have NO true Statute of Repose which bars an action by third parties against an architect or engineer. In New York, the "ten year" statute provides that a third party need show substantial evidence of an existing claim before the architect or engineer needs to defend the case. There is no absolute bar to proceeding. Personal injury claims can be brought for three years after an injury, even if the injury occurs 30 years after completion of the construction. At nolu_chan #112 I asked: The BAC-side #113 response was: Having been caught in one BAC-side , you now attempt to extricate yourself with Now at BAC-side #129 you again as follows: A statute of repose does not apply to builders but to designers - architects and engineers.
You misunderstood, NC (although its difficult to see how). I said all along that the statute of repose would normally (in most states) prevent an action for product liability against the builders.
http://www.aiaarchitect.net/site/news/05/03/neverending.htm
But I pointed out that in cases of personal injury, NY state law has allowed (at least until recently) an indefinite period before the injury takes place before starting the clock on the statute of repose. You apparently overlooked that fact.
Now for New York the statute of limitations/repose on product liability is 3 years, however, personal injury cases currently have an indefinite liability in that for three years after an injury the building builder/owners can be sued. However, that has been successfully contested in court cases recently and architects in New York are currently trying to get a maximum 10 year repose statute passed for personal liability cases.
You do not seriously purport that there is a product liability issue, do you?
You are claiming the building was designed for plane impact and fire so it shouldn't have collapsed. If it was, then yes, this would be a product liability issue.
yet another BAC-side . I said all along that the statute of repose would normally (in most states) prevent an action for product liability against the builders.
#135. To: BeAChooser (#129)
You cling to your discredited Republican spin like a dingle berry on a dogs butt.
Bunch of internet bums ... grand jury --- opium den ! ~ byeltsin
#136. To: nolu_chan, beachooser, Christine, Jethro Tull, Robin, Minerva, Honway, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, Eoghan, tom007, lodwick, Arator, IndieTX, Mekons4, Critter (#134)
BAC is one huge LIE. His queerness thinks he's something 'special,' on the planet. With people like him around, the term "QUEER" will never go away.
#137. To: SKYDRIFTER, BeAChooser (#136)
Documenting his nonsense can be entertaining. From the positive point of view, if I make him waste 20-30% of his post quota with me, he has that much less opportunity to be a pest elsewhere.
BAC is one huge LIE. His queerness thinks he's something 'special,' on the planet.
#138. To: Minerva (#135)
You cling to your discredited Republican spin like a dingle berry on a dogs butt. HAHAHAHAHA And it's glued to the hair so bad nothing short of a good waterboarding will get it off.
To: BeAChooser
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. Albert Einstein
#139. To: nolu_chan (#137)
I gotta admit - you've done that quite well. Most of the rest of us have figured "screw him/her/it. It's not worth the time". Prodigies of satan never are.
Documenting his nonsense can be entertaining. From the positive point of view, if I make him waste 20-30% of his post quota with me, he has that much less opportunity to be a pest elsewhere.
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. Albert Einstein
#140. To: nolu_chan, RickyJ, ALL (#131)
The original corporation was named Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson. That became Skilling, Helle, Christiansen & Robertson. And that became Skilling Ward Christiansen Robertson And that became Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire Inc. And that became Magnusson Klemencic Associates And you can contact them here: http://en.structurae.de/firms/data/index.cfm?id=f005335 So I'm not surprised if some documents have gotten lost in all the intervening years. It's not the conspiracy Ricky and you have made it out to be. Did he ever supply any proof, whatsoever, that it is legally mandated that documents like design calculation be retained for 40 years like he claimed? No???? To which Ricky claimed it was mandatory, by law. Which it isn't. You are presuming the assertion that the analysis assumed the plane impacted at 600 mph is correct. But Robertson said it is not. And indeed, the only plane to hit a building in NY did so at a much lower speed because it was lot in fog. And that's the situation Robertson said he assumed in his analysis. Which seems rational. Furthermore, you are unable to name an instance where commercial jets fly 600 mph at 1000 feet altitude ... unless they are crashing ... which is a VERY rare event. And we know they weren't considering the possibility of hijackers deliberately crashing a plane into structures at full speed back in 1964. But we do know that commercial jets fly at lower speeds ... landing speeds ... over large cities when at low altitude. So Robertson's assertion that he assumed that makes sense ... whereas the claim the building was analyzed for 600 mph impacts back in 1964 simply does not. No matter how much you want to pretend it does.
For my part, I would presume that the design calculations, if any existed, would have been retained by the corporate entity and not by the employee of the corporate entity. It may be that that particular corporate entity no longer exists.
[BAC-side #129] Say ... I notice he's left the thread. Wonder why?
RickyJ posted on 4/22 (#55) and on 4/24 (#102 #106 #107 #108).
Let us review to remind you how you got this started.
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[nc #86] ROBERTSON now claims he cannot find the ROBERTSON study analysis report.
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[BAC-side #87] It's been 40 years. Do you keep everything you've ever written, Nolu? Really?
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[nc #101] Had I done an analysis 40 years ago proving that the WTC, the most important project of my lifetime, could withstand a hit by a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 mph,
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#141. To: nolu_chan, RickyJ, ALL (#134)
Well then go ahead, NC ... bring it to court and see how far you get. ROTFLOL! Call it what you want. Like I said, in cases of personal injury, NY allows folks to sue within that 3 years of injury no matter how long ago the structure was built. However, there have been recent NY court cases that overuled that and architects are working to establish a firm 10 year Statute of Repose. In any case, there doesn't appear to be a legal requirement that design documents be retained during that period or any period. One is wise to do so but I've yet to see any proof that it is legally mandated. So Ricky is just plain wrong. Just like I originally said. Ok. Now go ahead and try to prove negligence in not designing a skyscraper (or any building for that matter) back in 1964 for a high speed impact by commercial jet hijacked by terrorists. Or a high speed impact by a commercial jet, PERIOD. You will only be wasting your money if you try. But it's your money. Good ... looks like what I mentioned has been passed. And it looks like you have your work cut out for you. I never said they were. But not for the architect/engineers being negligent by not designing the WTC towers to withstand a high speed commercial jet impact. You are being dishonest if you claim that's the basis of those cases.
[BAC-side #129] As far as negligence is concerned, just how is the builder or owner of the WTC negligent with regards to whether or not the towers were designed or analyzed in 1963-64 for a plane crash or plane crash induced fire?
Well, duhhhhhh, the owner is "liable for injuries caused by foreseeable dangerous conditions on their property.
Considering the White Paper and the Robertson analysis, and the New York Times newspaper article from 1964, one might argue that the dangerous condition was not only foreseeable but was actually foreseen and the people were given assurances that the buildings would be safe in the event of the foreseen condition.
[BAC-side #129] But I pointed out that in cases of personal injury, NY state law has allowed (at least until recently) an indefinite period before the injury takes place before starting the clock on the statute of repose. You apparently overlooked that fact.
Upon further review, it appears that your "Statute of Repose" does not truly exist, and that New York has a 3-year Statute of Limitations which is merely strengthened somewhat by Chapter 682 of the Laws of 1996 which is not a pure Statute of Repose.
CURRENT NEW YORK STATE STATUTES OF LIMITATIONS
* Three-year statute of limitations.
In an action brought by an owner/client against a design professional or contractor for damages resulting from a personal injury based on negligence, a three year statute of limitations applies and the cause of action accrues at the time of injury.
Third party suits, however, where the design professional has never had a contract with or contact with the third party, is the real issue of why we have perpetual liability. Under current law, a cause of action grounded on a theory of simple negligence brought by a third party (not an owner of building or structure) against a design professional or contractor is governed by a three year statute of limitations and the cause of action does not accrue until the injury takes place -- even if the plaintiff is injured 20, 30, 50 or 100 years after the design professional has completed work on the building or structure. As a result, design professionals or contractors are answerable to alleged negligence claims commenced indefinitely after project completion.
Limits the ability to bring third party suits against architects, professional engineers, and landscape architects after a period of ten years has elapsed from the time of their design. Acknowledges in statute that the design professionals do deserve some consideration to limit their perpetual exposure.
Within those 90 days, the claimant has to demonstrate to a court that there is a substantial basis of evidence showing negligence on the part of the design professional and that that negligence is also a proximate cause of the injury.
Cases of personal injury are not cases of product liability.
It is manifestly clear that cases of personal injury are being brought and are being processed by the courts as we speak.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#142. To: BeAChooser, RickyJ (#140)
Are you SURE you are from New York and know New York history??? When last I checked, New York City included Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Where you get the notion that only one plane ever hit a building in New York is beyond me. It is just about impossible to crash a jetliner in New York City and not hit a building. Just last year, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle flew into a building between the 39th and 40th floor. In 2001, there was the flight that crashed in Queens. And who could forget the story of Stephen Baltz who initially survived the midair collision which crashed one jetliner in Staten Island and the other in Brooklyn. That was in 1960 and would have been bright in the memories of all New Yorkers in 1964. http://www.fdnewyork.com/lidle.asp On October 11, 2006, New York Yankee baseball player Cory Lidle crashed into a building in New York between the 39th and 40th floors. http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/12/newyork.crash/index.html Feds eye engines in air crash November 12, 2001 Posted: 10:07 p.m. EST (0307 GMT) NEW YORK (CNN) -- Investigators suspect a catastrophic engine event as the likely cause of an airline crash Monday in New York that likley claimed the lives of everyone on board, a Transportation Department official told CNN. Investigators have not definitively ruled out terrorism in the crash American Airlines flight 587, but think some sort of engine failure caused the disaster, the official said. Officials said the flight, which crashed in Rockaway, a Queens neighborhood, carried 260 people - 246 ticketed passengers, nine crewmembers and five unticketed infants sitting on their parents' lap. At least six to eight people in Rockaway also have been reported missing immediately following the crash, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said. By late Monday, searchers had recovered 265 "relatively intact bodies," police said. The flight was an Airbus A300-600. The jet was propelled by General Electric engines that have been the subject of past National Transportation Safety Board recommendations. Last December, the agency recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration require airlines with the same GE engines as those on flight 587 to review repairs made on cracked engine blades. That recommendation followed an incident in which an engine erupted and caught fire during maintenance on a U.S. Airways plane. A year earlier, the NTSB recommended that airlines with Airbus A300s improve their engines' fire detection system. An engine on an American Airlines flight that caught fire on takeoff from Puerto Rico prompted that recommendation. This June, the FAA issued an airworthiness directive, telling airlines to examine specific parts of the GE engine. A GE spokesman told CNN the company complied with the directive, but could find nothing to change. New York Gov. George Pataki said there were "inconclusive" reports the pilot dumped fuel into Jamaica Bay, an indication he may have known of a problem on board. Officials said the Coast Guard had found no evidence of a fuel slick in the waters off John F. Kennedy Airport, which would indicate flight 587's pilot deliberately dumped fuel from the aircraft as it headed toward earth. Just before the crash, the Airbus broke up in mid-air. A sizable portion of the vertical stabilizer from the tail section landed in Jamaica Bay, while most of the fuselage plunged into Rockaway. One engine landed at a gas station, while other engine pieces crushed a boat parked in the driveway of a home that caught fire. Giuliani said the fuselage destroyed up to six houses and severely damaged another six. Pataki said the main crash site suggested the plane dropped at a steep angle, if not vertically. "It's clear that the plane did come down very much in a straight level, which was horrible for that particular site, but minimized what could have happened had the plane glided across the Rockaways," he said. The cockpit voice recorder from American Airlines Flight 587 has been recovered and was flown to Washington for analysis, the National Transportation and Safety Board said. Investigators are still searching for the flight data recorder that will give information about how the different systems, including the engines, were performing. The plane was en route to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. American Airlines said the plane was carrying 251 passengers and nine crewmembers. The plane had not been delayed by mechanical problems, said American Airlines Chairman Don Carty. http://psreader.com/article44.html Pillar of Fire Recalling the Day the Sky Fell, December 16, 1960 by Nathaniel Altman Few Park Slope residents know that our neighborhood was once the scene of the country’s worst air disaster. At about 10:30 in the morning, on Friday, December 16, 1960, a United Airlines DC-8 jet en route from Chicago to Idlewild (now JFK) airport collided with a TWA Super Constellation propeller plane flying from Columbus to LaGuardia. The TWA plane broke into pieces and plunged onto Miller Field, a former military airport in the New Dorp section of Staten Island, killing all 44 on board. The crippled United plane managed to remain in the air for another eight and a half miles before crashing onto Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue, setting fire to over a dozen buildings and killing five pedestrians. In all, 135 people died as a result of the crash. The crash and its aftermath bore the traits of a classic American tragedy: tremendous loss of life and homes and businesses destroyed. It was also a time of individual acts of kindness and powerful heroism. Many also believed that it was a day of miracles, as the two crashes could have been far worse. Government investigations sought to pinpoint the reason for the collision, but were accused of mounting a coverup. The real story remains unresolved to this day. Ironically, the crash was also a possible turning point for a declining Brooklyn neighborhood, and sparked a preservation movement that grew to include much of the city. The Neighborhood While still similar to the neighborhood that today’s residents would recognize, at the time the area around Sterling Place and Seventh Avenue was called “a neighborhood in transition.” While good shopping could be found on Seventh Avenue, middle-income families were moving out and banks began redlining the neighborhood, making it difficult for people to buy homes here. While some neighbors would still visit on their stoops during the warmer months, dozens of buildings-mostly between Fifth and Seventh avenues-were abandoned by their owners, who boarded them up and fled to suburbia. Commenting on the neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights Paper in 1995, Joe Ferris wrote, “There were abandoned and derelict buildings on every block from Flatbush Avenue to 15th Street. St. John’s Place between 5th and 6th Avenues looked as if it had been hit by heavy artillery.” Many of the brownstones became rooming houses, and once-large apartments were divided into smaller ones. On the morning of December 16, the snow on the ground had turned to slush. The grey sky was heavy with low clouds and a wet snow was falling throughout the area. The New York Times reported that “about the only sound on Sterling Place from Sixth to Seventh avenues was the slushing passage of an occasional car.” Due to the bad weather, few pedestrians made their way along Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place, where two men were selling Christmas trees for the upcoming holiday. The Aircraft Trans World Airlines N6907C was a Lockheed Super Constellation delivered to TWA in 1952. Considered one of the most beautiful airliners ever built, the graceful “Super Connie” was powered by four propeller engines and featured a slightly serpentine shape and a unique tri-rudder tail section. The plane’s cruising speed was 325 mph and it could carry 64 passengers nonstop for 3250 miles. United Airlines N8013U was a new Douglas DC-8 jet delivered to United Airlines barely a year before the crash. At that time the largest commercial jet in the air, the DC-8 was equipped with four turbojet engines. This long-range (5720 mile) transport had a cruising speed of 579 mph and could carry up to 189 passengers. The Events TWA flight 266 originated in Dayton, Ohio and stopped in Columbus, where a change of aircraft took place and most of the passengers boarded for the trip to New York. Leaving Columbus at 9 in the morning under the command of Capt. David A. Wollam, the Super Constellation carried five crew and 39 passengers, including two infants. Among the passengers were seven specialists in missile and aircraft development from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton; Richard Bitters, an Ohio University executive; four Ohio State University athletes; Gary Myers, president of the magazine Highlights for Children and his wife Mary, parents of five; and Louella Bricker, who was traveling to the Perkins Institute in Watertown, MA to bring her deaf son George back to Ohio for the holidays. At least one of the passengers had a premonition of death. Before she boarded the plane, Nancy Briggs, a student at Ohio State University, told her boyfriend Leonard Hart that she had a dream she was going to die and was afraid that she would never see him again. As his plane approached the New York area in limited visibility, Air Traffic Control advised Capt. Wollam to stand by in an area known as the Linden Intersection (a five-by-ten mile oval-shaped holding area stretched from East to West above Linden, NJ and the northwest section of Staten Island) before heading towards LaGuardia at an altitude of 5000 feet. Like the route of many of today’s flights into LaGuardia, the plane would have crossed Staten Island into Brooklyn, turned left and flown over Prospect Park and into the airport. After being given permission to land at 10:33:14, the captain began heading toward LaGuardia. Twelve seconds later, LaGuardia Approach Control advised that there “appears to be jet traffic off your right.” Communications with TW 266 then abruptly ended. United flight 826 was on nonstop service between Chicago’s O’Hare Airport and New York’s Idlewild. It left Chicago at 9:11 with 76 passengers and seven crew members under the command of Capt. Robert H. Sawyer. The best-known passengers included Dr. Jonas Kamlet, a leading chemist; Raymond Walsh, President of Wesleyan University Press; and Allen E. Braun, Vice President of North Advertising. Dorothy Miner, head nurse at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, was flying here to assist her stepmother who was to undergo surgery, and Elsie Platt was traveling from Illinois to see her newborn granddaughter for the first time. Many others were coming home for the holidays, like Frank R. Dileo, a senior at the University of Utah; Darnell Mallory, a student at Omaha University, and Enrique Bustos, Jr., son of the former Consul General of Chile. Some were on trips abroad, like Edwige Dumalskis and her children Patrick and Joelle, who were en route to France to visit relatives. At approximately 10:21, the crew reported to Aeronautical Radio, Inc., operator of United’s aeronautical communications system, that one of their navigation receiver units was inoperative, which was relayed to United Airlines. Unfortunately, the crew failed to report the problem to Air Traffic Control, which probably would have provided extra radar assistance. At 10:32, the crew was told to enter the Preston intersection, an oval-shaped holding area 10 miles west of Red Bank, NJ, and well to the south of Linden. Its border was separated from the Linden intersection by five miles. The last transmission from the United crew was at 10:33:33. “Idlewild Approach Control, United 826, approaching Preston at 5000 [feet].” “I think we have trouble...” An instant later, at 10:33:34, LaGuardia radar observations showed that two targets merged over Miller Army Air Field, in New Dorp, Staten Island. The controller exclaimed, “I think we have trouble here with a TWA Connie...He’s not moving or anything. He might have got hit by another airplane.” Flying 11 miles off course and traveling at a speed of 500 mph- far faster than permitted by Air Traffic Control-the United jet slammed into the slower Super Constellation before the TWA pilot was able to react to the warning from the LaGuardia tower. The right wing of the DC-8 sheared through the upper right section of the Connie’s passenger compartment, causing the smaller plane to break into three pieces and spin out of control. Rev. Milton Perry, a Staten Island resident, told a reporter from the New York Times that he “felt the earth shake” and saw the plane fall in flames and smoke. At that moment, a Mrs. Weber of New Dorp heard an explosion, went to her window, and witnessed the crash. “It seemed to fall a few feet and there was another huge burst of flame... It went down in a terrible way, one wing gone, and it turned over very slowly. You could watch it all the way and it was always red from the flames.” Others reported that the plane had broken into “millions of pieces,” with both airplane debris and bodies falling from the sky. One TWA passenger was sucked into an engine of the DC-8. Narrowly missing a housing development, what was left of TWA plane and its occupants (along with the engine and wing debris from the United jet) fell onto the vacant airfield, recently abandoned by the Army (it is now part of the Gateway National Park). Local residents rushed to the scene and began pulling bodies from the flaming wreckage until rescue workers and soldiers arrived. Pillar of Fire While the tragedy was over for the TWA passengers and crew, the terrible events awaiting those on the United flight and residents of Park Slope were still unfolding. Losing altitude, the crippled DC-8, which was missing its right engine and part of the right wing, managed to continue northeast in the direction of LaGuardia airport and towards Prospect Park, where witnesses speculated that the pilot was attempting to make an emergency landing. Slope residents first saw the plane heading directly for St. Augustine’s Academy on Sterling Place below Sixth Avenue, with over a hundred students in class, when it was able to bank to the right. After barely clearing the school, the jet lost altitude above Sterling Place between Sixth and Seventh avenues. At an estimated speed of 200 mph, the plane’s right wing struck the roof of a brownstone at 126 Sterling Place, causing the fuselage of the plane to veer to the left and crash directly, with tragic irony, into Pillar of Fire Church across the street. The aircraft and the church exploded in flames, killing dozens of passengers and Wallace E. Lewis, the church’s 90-year-old caretaker, as he lay in bed. The left wing, now on fire, sheared into an apartment building next door to the church, while another section of the cabin, filled with screaming passengers, crashed into McCaddin’s Funeral Home on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place. The severed tail section, mostly intact, fell upright into the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place. Several buildings were totally destroyed and at least ten were damaged. For those on the ground, the scene was as if taken from a horror movie. Interviewed by a reporter from The New York Times, a Mr. Manza said, “All of a sudden, the right wing dipped: It hooked into the corner of the apartment house [122 Sterling Place], and the rest of the plane skimmed into the church and the apartment house across the street. All at once everything was on fire, and the fire from the plane in the street was as high as the houses.” Mrs. Robert Nevin lived at 122, and was in her nightgown standing in the front room of her top floor apartment doing her hair when she heard a shattering crash. “The roof caved in and I saw the sky.” Henry and Pauline McCaddin, owners of the McCaddin Funeral Home, were enjoying a mid-morning cup of coffee in their second-floor kitchen while their one-year-old daughter played under the table. Ms. McCaddin reported, “We were having our coffee and I said to Henry, ‘My goodness, that plane sounds awfully low!’ And just then the whole house shook like it had been hit by a bomb, and the room was all in flames.” The McCaddins escaped with the help of Robert Carter, owner of a hairdressing establishment on Seventh Avenue, who ran into the burning building to rescue them. A burning section of the plane’s left wing landed on top of 124 Sterling Place, and soon a fire spread to the roofs of numbers 122, 120 and 118. The jet also set fire to six buildings on Seventh Avenue, including numbers 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 and 28. Repairs can still be seen on the upper floors of many of these buildings. The crash scene was described by reporters as “an orderly kind of pandemonium,” with screaming residents rushing from their shattered buildings into the snow, sirens wailing, emergency radios crackling, and firefighters spraying water on the flaming wreckage. Members of Fire Department Rescue Company No. 2 worked continuously for almost 72 hours at the crash scene, deploying their specialized equipment to both combat the fire and search through the wreckage for bodies. In addition to chunks of airplane and brick, the debris included broken dolls and wrapped presents destined as Christmas gifts, as well as mailbags bulging with holiday cards. In addition to Mr. Lewis, five people on the ground were killed. The unlucky five were Charles Cooper, a sanitation worker who was shoveling snow, Joseph Colacano and John Opperisano, who were selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk, Dr. Jacob L. Crooks, who was out walking his dog, and an employee at a butcher shop located on Sterling Place. About a dozen others were injured, including several firefighters and residents of neighborhood buildings. The Brave Little Boy All of the occupants of the DC-8 were killed instantly, except Stephen Baltz, an 11-year old redhead from Wilmette, Illinois, who planned to spend Christmas with relatives in Yonkers. His father delivered him to O’Hare that morning, and he was to meet his mother and sister at Idlewild; they had flown in the day before. As the plane hit the ground and exploded in flames, Stephen was thrown from the tail section and onto a snowbank, where residents rolled him in the snow to put out his burning clothing. Though conscious and repeatedly calling for his mother and father, Stephen had inhaled flames and smoke, and also sustained severe burns and broken bones. Dorothy M. Fletcher, who lived at 143 Berkeley Place, rushed to Stephen’s side. Knowing that he was in shock, she called on neighbors to throw down some blankets, and was photographed in a leopard-patterned coat holding an umbrella over the boy to shield him from the falling snow. The photo appeared on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Daily News the following morning. It was Ms. Fletcher who brought Stephen to Methodist Hospital. (See sidebar interview.) Still conscious after his ordeal, Stephen Baltz later described the crash to doctors at the hospital. “I remember looking out the plane window at the snow below covering the city. It looked like a picture out of a fairy book. Then all of a sudden there was an explosion. The plane started to fall and people started to scream. I held on to my seat and then the plane crashed. That’s all I remember until I woke up.” Newspaper reports said that people all over the country prayed for Stephen, whose courage and sweet disposition won the hearts of everyone who met him. In spite of heroic efforts by doctors and nurses at Methodist, Stephen Baltz died peacefully at 1 o’clock the following afternoon, his mother and father by his side. A small bronze memorial to the crash victims containing the boy’s blackened pocket change-65 cents-was set up at the hospital, where Ms. Fletcher places flowers on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of Stephen’s death. (The memorial is now in storage, to be reinstalled after new construction at the hospital is complete). Recalling the event recently, the 91-year-old great-grandmother said, “What broke my heart was when he asked me if he was going to die. I couldn’t do all I wanted to do. I couldn’t save him.” Cause and Responsibility Faced with the biggest air disaster in American history, the Civil Aeronautics Board (now the National Transportation Safety Board) undertook an extensive investigation into the causes of the crash and made recommendations so that similar events never happened again. On June 18, 1962-about a year and a half after the crash-the CAB released its report, which stated that the probable cause of the accident was that United 826 proceeded beyond the clearance limit allocated by Air Traffic Control, with contributing factors including a high rate of speed and a change of clearance which reduced the en route distance by approximately 11 miles. Critics of the report called it a whitewash designed to prevent lawsuits resulting in punitive damages not covered by the airlines’ insurance. In an updated edition of Unfriendly Skies: Revelations of a Deregulated Airline Pilot, by “Captain X” and Reynolds Dodson (Doubleday, 1989), the authors wrote that FAA inspectors had previously complained that the United Airlines training program was dangerously unsatisfactory, that many crew members were denied training, and that United routinely falsified air safety records. Those who were critical of airline policy and government collusion were often transferred. “FAA inspectors who discovered serious fraud relating to violations of the government air safety requirements were blocked from taking corrective actions. Obstructing compliance with the air safety laws were FAA and United Airlines officials, and pressure from members of Congress.” Documentation related to these earlier charges were suppressed from the CAB report. Overall, verdicts concerning the lawsuits (which exceeded $300 million) stipulated that United was responsible for 61 percent of the claims, Trans World Airlines 15 percent, and the U.S. government 24 percent, because the planes’ instrument landing approaches were being guided by FAA controllers. In addition to the families of the deceased passengers and crew, local residents received settlements from United Airlines, some of which were considered unsatisfactory. Mr. And Mrs. Andrew Boyle, who owned a brownstone at 130 Sterling Place, received $3,700 in compensation, less $900 in lawyers’ fees. In an interview with the New York Times four months after the crash, Mrs. Boyle said, “We settled for peanuts. We’ll be in debt for the next ten years over that crash.” One woman told a different story. Her husband was also given a settlement of several thousand dollars, and the windfall (remember that $3000 went a lot farther in 1960 than it does today) caused him to go on a spending spree. “He went haywire with it-bought a television set, snappy clothes. Then he took off with the rest. He hasn’t been around for two months.” The four-story building containing the McCaddin Funeral Home was demolished and was soon replaced with a nondescript one-story building; it is now the site of a new multi-story construction that will contain both commercial and living space. While other families eventually moved back to the site of the crash, others simply left the area. Jimmy Moy, who owned a laundry on the parlor floor at 26 Seventh Avenue, decided to move to Manhattan. The vacant lot on which the building housing his laundry once stood is now also the site of new construction. Saving the Neighborhood In his article in Brooklyn Heights Paper, Joe Ferris addressed the danger the neighborhood faced after the crash: the government’s answer to dealing with damaged buildings in an already declining neighborhood was urban renewal: level the area and construct high-rise housing projects. This threat was a wake-up call for many local residents. Though many worked to save the neighborhood, Ferris cited a number of community leaders who helped save Park Slope at that critical time: Robert Makla, who helped found the Park Slope Civic Council; Irene Wilson, publisher of the monthly Park Slope Civic Council News; Evelyn and Everett Ortner, founders of the Brownstone Revival Movement and who helped secure landmark status for many local buildings; Herb Steiner, whose organization helped force the banks to stop redlining urban neighborhoods; and George Lovgren, who saved a local firehouse from closing. Today, the area around Seventh Avenue and Sterling Place is one of the most vital in the neighborhood. Though scars from the crash still can be seen on some of the buildings and a vacant lot remains where Pillar of Fire Church and an apartment house once stood on Sterling Place, few would recognize the quiet intersection as a scene of the nation’s worst aircraft disaster. With each new family that moves to Park Slope, the memory of the crash fades from the neighborhood’s collective consciousness. Yet the memories remain for many of the neighborhood’s long-time residents. Dorothy Fletcher, recalling the events over coffee at a neighborhood restaurant, said, “The crash remains so vivid in my mind. It’s like it happened just this morning.” PSR http://history1900s.about.com/od/1940s/a/empirecrash.htm The Plane That Crashed Into the Empire State Building On the foggy morning of Saturday, July 28, 1945, Lt. Colonel William Smith was piloting a U.S. Army B-25 bomber through New York City. He was on his way to Newark Airport to pick up his commanding officer, but for some reason he showed up over LaGuardia Airport and asked for a weather report. Because of the poor visibility, the LaGuardia tower wanted to him to land, but Smith requested and received permission from the military to continue on to Newark. The last transmission from the LaGuardia tower to the plane was a foreboding warning: "From where I'm sitting, I can't see the top of the Empire State Building." Avoiding Skyscrapers Confronted with dense fog, Smith dropped the bomber low to regain visibility, where he found himself in the middle of Manhattan, surrounded by skyscrapers. At first, the bomber was headed directly for the New York Central Building but at the last minute, Smith was able to bank west and miss it. Unfortunately, this put him in line for another skyscraper. Smith managed to miss several skyscrapers until he was headed for the Empire State Building. At the last minute, Smith tried to get the bomber to climb and twist away, but it was too late. The Crash At 9:49 a.m., the ten-ton, B-25 bomber smashed into the north side of the Empire State Building. The majority of the plane hit the 79th floor, creating a hole in the building eighteen feet wide and twenty feet high. The plane's high-octane fuel exploded, hurtling flames down the side of the building and inside through hallways and stairwells all the way down to the 75th floor. World War II had caused many to shift to a six-day work week; thus there were many people at work in the Empire State Building that Saturday. The plane crashed into the offices of the War Relief Services of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Catherine O'Connor described the crash: Joe Fountain died several days later. Eleven of the office workers were burned to death, some still sitting at their desks, others while trying to run from the flames. One of the engines and part of the landing gear hurtled across the 79th floor, through wall partitions and two fire walls, and out the south wall's windows to fall onto a twelve-story building across 33rd Street. The other engine flew into an elevator shaft and landed on an elevator car. The car began to plummet, slowed somewhat by emergency safety devices. Miraculously, when help arrived at the remains of the elevator car in the basement, the two women inside the car were still alive. Some debris from the crash fell to the streets below, sending pedestrians scurrying for cover, but most fell onto the buildings setbacks at the fifth floor. Still, a bulk of the wreckage remained stuck in the side of the building. After the flames were extinguished and the remains of the victims removed, the rest of the wreckage was removed through the building. The plane crash killed 14 people (11 office workers and the three crewmen) plus injured 26 others. Though the integrity of the Empire State Building was not affected, the cost of the damage done by the crash was $1 million. [BAC]
The plane exploded within the building. There were five or six seconds - I was tottering on my feet trying to keep my balance - and three-quarters of the office was instantaneously consumed in this sheet of flame. One man was standing inside the flame. I could see him. It was a co-worker, Joe Fountain. His whole body was on fire. I kept calling to him, "Come on, Joe; come on, Joe." He walked out of it.
#143. To: BeAChooser (#141)
ROTFLOLPIMP!!!!! You do it. The line is too long for me. There's thousands of cases, such as: This 2004 ruling http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/2nd/037698p.pdf describes a case brought by multiple plaintiffs against THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY and THE CITY OF NEW YORK, and WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPERTIES LLC, sued as SILVERSTEIN PROPERTIES. 1 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS 2 FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT 3 - - - - - - 4 August Term, 2004 5 (Argued: January 13, 2005 Decided: July 14, 2005) 6 Docket Nos. 03-7698(L), -7736, -7699, -7700, -7724, -7743, -7749, 10 _________________________________________________________ 11 In re: WTC Disaster Site 12 VINCENT MCNALLY, GINA MCNALLY, FRANCIS LAVERY, KATHRYN 20 Plaintiffs-Appellees-Cross- 22 DAVID HENDRICKSON, LYNN HENDRICKSON, DEWARDRANTH 1 HAVEL III, ROBERT HENRI, PELOPS IRBY, AUSTIN JOHNSON, JASON 9 Plaintiffs-Appellees*, 10 - v. - 11 THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY and THE 13 Defendants-Appellants-Cross- 15 WORLD TRADE CENTER PROPERTIES LLC, sued as SILVERSTEIN 17 Defendant-Appellant. 19 Before: KEARSE and CABRANES, Circuit Judges, and KORMAN, Chief District Judge**.
Well then go ahead, NC ... bring it to court and see how far you get. ROTFLOL!
7 -7756, -7757, -7758, -7760, -7761, -7778, -7782, -7784, -7785, -7786,
8 -7789, -9157, -9163, -9165, -9167, -9173, -9175, -9177, -9183, -9187,
9 -9193, -9195
13 LAVERY, JOSEPH ARIOLA, COLLEEN ARIOLA, JAMES BLAKE, JOHN M
14 DENEAU, LISA DENEAU, JOSEPH HEALY, JANET HEALY, GEORGE
15 LAMOREAUX, INGRID LAMOREAUX, THOMAS MAGEE, PATRICK
16 MALLOY, LORI MALLOY, JON J MCGILLICK, ARLENE MCGILLICK,
17 MICHAEL SPILLER, LEAH SPILLER, TIMOTHY VILLARI, MARIA
18 VILLARI, ANTHONY R LAROSA, ANGELA LAROSA, ROGER DANVERS,
19 JAMES MASCARELLA, JOHN F TAGGART, and THERESA TAGGART,
21 Appellants,
23 SAMAROO, TERESA HARTEY, EDWARD GALANEK, ROBERT
24 ESPOSITO, DENISE ESPOSITO, JAMES MELENDEZ, MAUREEN MCCUE,
25 JOSEPH BERARDI, JOHN BAIANO, JACK BIGGS, JOHN BONVICINO,
26 JOHN BOU, KEVIN BRANNICK, WAYNE BROWN, ROBERT
27 CARANNANTE, VICTOR CARPENTIER, ALAN CESERANO, MICHAEL
28 CONLON, PHYLISS COSTARELLA, GERALD DAMITZ, ANTHONY
29 DELBIANCO, LENNY DINOTTE, DANIEL DONOVAN, ROY EDWARDS,
30 JOSEPH FALCONE, NELSON GARCIA, ANTHONY GIORDANO, ROBERT
31 GOFFREDO, MICHAEL GUIDICIPIETRO, RAFAEL GUTIERREZ, OTTO
2 KEENAN, KEVIN KEMPTON, OMAR MALAVE, DANIEL MALDONADO,
3 JOHN MENONI, MARTIN MULLANEY, MICKEY NARDIELLO, FRANK
4 OZELLO, JOHN PANKEY, NICHOLAS PARASCANDOLA, VINCENT
5 PARISE, THOMAS PERRY, JERRY PIZZARELLO, JUAN RULLAN,
6 RAYMOND RUSSO, JOHN SALOMONE, GEORGE SNYDER, ALEXIS
7 SOLOMON, CHRISTIAN TREMBONE, CLINTON BEYER, JOAN BEYER,
8 PETER BLAKE, SHARON BLAKE, and JASON MAKSIMOWICH,
12 CITY OF NEW YORK,
14 Appellees,
16 PROPERTIES,
18 _________________________________________________________
#144. To: BeAChooser (#141)
Just like I originally said. ----------------- [BAC #129] You misunderstood, NC (although its difficult to see how). I said all along that the statute of repose would normally (in most states) prevent an action for product liability against the builders. Well, it is either prevented or perpetual, and you have always said one or the other. Which, of course, makes it BAC-true.
[BAC #141]
Third party suits, however, where the design professional has never had a contract with or contact with the third party, is the real issue of why we have perpetual liability.
#145. To: BeAChooser (#141)
No, there are NO cases which overrule the Statute of Limitations. The statute of limitations for personal injury remains 3 years. There is NO firm statute of repose, and a statute of repose only applies to designers - architects and engineers. A statute of repose would not prevent a personal injury suit which falls within the statute of limitations.
[BAC] Call it what you want. Like I said, in cases of personal injury, NY allows folks to sue within that 3 years of injury no matter how long ago the structure was built. However, there have been recent NY court cases that overuled that and architects are working to establish a firm 10 year Statute of Repose.
#146. To: beachooser, Christine, Jethro Tull, nolu_chan, Robin, Minerva, Honway, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#140)
BAC, you're doing a great job of wasting everyone's time with your hair splitting trivia - drawing energy away from the important truth. The fact of the matter is that a stopwatch says that the WTC buildings were brought down with controlled demolition, add the corroborating video captures and witness testimony. That's all that's important, here. The forum deserves much more than you and your damned spamming!
#147. To: BeAChooser (#141)
In the complete absence of any evidence, Ricky may be right or wrong.
[BAC] In any case, there doesn't appear to be a legal requirement that design documents be retained during that period or any period. One is wise to do so but I've yet to see any proof that it is legally mandated. So Ricky is just plain wrong.
I have yet to see you provide anything whatever besides hot air.
#148. To: SKYDRIFTER, beachooser, Christine, Jethro Tull, nolu_chan, Robin, Minerva, Honway, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala (#146)
It at least deserves that he stop inventing his "facts."
The forum deserves much more than you and your damned spamming!
#149. To: nolu_chan (#143)
I was
talking about at the time the WTC towers were designed. At THAT time the only
NY skyscraper that had been hit by a large plane was the Empire State ... when
that plane was lost in fog. NC, surely you understand that the designers of
the WTC towers had to base their design loadings on past history and what was
LIKELY given how planes were used at that time. In 1964, large commercial jets
weren't being hijacked and then flown into skyscrapers. NOONE was considering
that as a design load. In 1964 (and even today) large commercial planes didn't
fly 600 mph at 1000 feet above a city. So NOONE was considering that a design
load for buildings until 9/11. But you are talking about a very rare event. Surely you
aren't suggesting that we design all structures to survive and protect
occupants from this sort of very rare accident. Especially since the chance of
debris from such a rare event ... or the chance that one of the planes
involved in such a rare event ... hitting a skyscraper is almost nil. And keep
in mind that the crew of flight 826 (the plane that survived the collision and
came down intact) would have been able to avoid a skyscraper.
NONE of them assert
the designers should have designed the towers to survive and protect their
occupants from a high speed impact by a commercial jet. The one case you
linked certainly doesn't. You are being dishonest if you are claiming it does.
Just last year, New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle flew into
a building between the 39th and 40th floor.
And who could forget the
story of Stephen Baltz who initially survived the midair collision which
crashed one jetliner in Staten Island and the other in Brooklyn. That was in
1960 and would have been bright in the memories of all New Yorkers in 1964.
Well then go ahead, NC ... bring it to court and see how far
you get. ROTFLOL!
ROTFLOLPIMP!!!!!
You do it. The line is too long for me.
There's thousands of cases, such as:
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#150. To: BeAChooser (#149) (Edited)
Do you use the 25 or 100 page notepads?
''the messianic side of Americans can be tiresome.'' - Nicolas Sarkozy
#151. To: BeAChooser (#141)
[nc quoting at #133] Within those 90 days, the claimant has to demonstrate to a court that there is a substantial basis of evidence showing negligence on the part of the design professional and that that negligence is also a proximate cause of the injury. [BAC #141 to nc #134] And it looks like you have your work cut out for you. The first quote is not from the post being responded to by BAC. The below is from #134. [nc at #134 to BAC] According to the American Institute of Architects: THE NEVER ENDING EXPOSURE OF AN ARCHITECT [Excerpt] In an effort to minimize the exposure of design professionals, New York State promulgated Section 214-d of the Civil Practice Law and Rules known as the Statute of Repose. By virtue of this statute, a third-party pursuing claims against an architect or engineer, who last provided services more than 10 years ago, must establish by substantial evidence the existence of a valid claim in order to pursue an action against the architect or engineer. Although this statute is helpful, it can be easily overcome, thus creating a continuous exposure for the design professional. It would appear there is a reason they want a true statute of repose.
http://www.aiaarchitect.net/site/news/05/03/neverending.htm
#152. To: beachooser, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#149)
BAC, there is no 'official' assertion that the towers fell due to the aircraft impacts and jet fuel fires. Not even the NIST report says that, versus the fuel burned off quickly. The official line is that it was "...all those OTHER fires" which caused the purported collapsing floors. Make up your mind; what's the 'cause' you're getting behind. The essence of your assertions is that the buildings were not designed to be tolerant of arson. Do you want everyone to believe that?? Well .....? C'mon girly-man, let's hear your position, versus your spamming. About that stopwatch .......
#153. To: BeAChooser (#149)
The Chief Engineer wrote a White Paper that said it. NONE of them assert the designers should have designed the towers to survive and protect their occupants from a high speed impact by a commercial jet.
The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.
#154. To: nolu_chan (#153)
He was NOT the chief engineer. Robertson was the Lead
Structural Engineer of record. Skilling simply owned the design company and
had a strong interest in making potential occupants feel safe. The White Paper
contained ONLY that statement. Nothing else to back it up. That they would
have looked at a 600mph crash as a design load is ridiculous. They didn't
really have the tools back in 1963 to confidently determine what would happen
in that case. And guess what, NIST isn't claiming that the damage done by the
plane collapsed the towers. It was the damage PLUS the fires. And Skilling
also is on record saying fires were "THE PROBLEM". So you continue your
circus act, NC. At this point I think I'll simply link folks to this: http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?
ArtNum=51045&Disp=0 "The 9/11 Truther Credo" Because your debating
tactics are listed there.
The Chief Engineer wrote a White Paper that said it.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#155. To: BeAChooser (#154)
Prove it from a contemporary official record from the construction. If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record," produce that record.
He was NOT the chief engineer. Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer of record.
#156. To: BeAChooser (#154)
http://wtc.nist.gov/media/Public%20Transcript%20021204%20Final1_withlinks.pdf Transcript of NIST Public Meeting in New York City - February 12, 2004 Table of Contents Jim Hill, National Institute of Standards and Technology ......... 1 Shyam Sunder, National Institute of Standards and Technology ..... 2 * * * Dr. Sunder: Good morning. Jim has already introduced me as the lead investigator for the federal building and fire safety investigation of the World Trade Center disaster, and I will take this time this morning to explain to you our overall goals, our objectives, and where we are in terms of status and progress on the investigation. * * * I'm going to touch on a number of aspects of our investigation which I think it’s worth for the public to know at this point in time. First of all the issue with regard to the safety of the towers in an aircraft collision. Buildings are not designed to withstand the impacts of fuel laden commercial airliners. However, in the case of the World Trade Center, it was a consideration. The structural safety of the towers in an aircraft collision was considered in the original design. We have some documents from 1964 that suggest that. The impact scenario that was considered is a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour. There's another document a month later that considers an aircraft impact at the 80th floor of one of the towers. When you put those two together, the events of September 11th look strikingly similar. The analysis that was reported from that time indicated that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the buildings. We now know that the buildings withstood the initial impact of the aircraft. The loss of life would have been far greater had the buildings collapsed upon impact. The large size of the buildings, the 208 x 208 feet floor plan area, and the dense exterior grid of columns, enabled the buildings to withstand the initial impact of the airplanes. But when you go beyond the initial impact to look at fire safety and life safety, we find that there are some contradictory views. [BAC] The White Paper contained ONLY that statement. Nothing else to back it up. That they would have looked at a 600mph crash as a design load is ridiculous. They didn't really have the tools back in 1963 to confidently determine what would happen in that case.
#157. To: nolu_chan (#155)
Let's see. Scientific American
says he was. NIST says he was. American Society of Civil Engineers
says he was. Columbia University says he was. PBS says he was. http://www.skyscraper.org says he was.
The MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering says he was.
McGraw-Hill Construction / ENR magazine says he was. The American Council
of Engineering Companies says he was. http://www.cenews.com says he was. The
National Academy of Engineering says he was. en.structurae.de says he was.
The BBC says he was. The Stanford Engineering Department says he was.
http://www.construction.com says
he was. http://www.istructe.org says
he was. http://www.wtc.com says he was.
http://www.americanscientist.org
says he was. The NYTimes says he was. The University of Berkeley says
he was. Right, NC. We have every reason to doubt them. ROTFLOL!
If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record,"
produce that record.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#158. To: BeAChooser (#157)
Explain a symmetric collapse of a building with asymmetric damage. It cannot be done without explosives to make it happen.
#159. To: Paul Revere (#158)
Then you should have no
trouble naming structural engineers and demolitions experts who agree with you
that the WTC towers were brought down by explosives. You can name some,
right? Can you name even one? No????
Explain a symmetric collapse of a building with asymmetric
damage.
It cannot be done without
explosives to make it happen.
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#160. To: BeAChooser, all (#159)
You can name some, right? Can you name even one? No???? You are such a fag. Only because it serves my purpose to hoist you on your own retard, I'll give you one, Beach hoser: Van Romero. ------------------------------------------ Three days after 9/11, The Albuquerque Journal interviewed Demolition Scientist Van Romero. Explosives Planted In Towers New Mexico Tech Expert Says By Olivier Uyttebrouck Journal Staff Writer Televised images of the attacks on the World Trade Center suggest that explosives devices caused the collapse of both towers, a New Mexico Tech explosion expert said Tuesday. The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. "My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Romero said. Romero is a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures.
Then you should have no trouble naming structural engineers and demolitions experts who agree with you that the WTC towers were brought down by explosives.
#161. To: BeAChooser, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, honway, SKYDRIFTER, Critter, innieway, Paul Revere, Ferret Mike, RickyJ, bluedogtxn (#157)
[nc #155] If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record," produce that record. Looking at your non-response SPAM, I accept that you CANNOT produce any actual record showing that Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record." SPAM is not substance. NONE of the links you provided goes to a web page that says anything about Robertson or his being the Lead Structural Engineer of record. Robertson is now a licensed Structural Engineer in California. He is not now, nor has he ever been, a licensed Structural Engineer in New York. There is no such thing as a licensed Structural Engineer in the state of New York. Robertson is a licensed Professional Engineer in New York. Robertson was yet a licensed Professional Engineer in New York in 1964. As Robertson was not a licensed Professional Engineer in New York in 1964, it was impossible for him to have been any engineer "of record" in 1964. All that going on, and Leslie Robertson was NOT even a LICENSED Professional Engineer. Without that license he could not have been the Lead Structural Engineer of record as you have claimed. That is correct. In 1964, Leslie Robertson had not yet acquired his license as a Professional Engineer in the State of New York. However, in 1964, John B. Skilling WAS a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of New York. In 1964, of the two, ONLY John Skilling could have been the Engineer of record. When must I employ a licensed PE? Generally, you will need the services of a licensed design professional such as a PE any time you need the approval of a government agency or official for a construction project; these officials can only accept engineering plans signed and stamped with the seal of the PE. Check with that official to determine what you are required to submit. You will also need a PE when the complexity of the design of a project requires the skills of a professional engineer or when the services fall within the legal definition of professional engineering. Note: Requirements vary slightly from state to state. The requirements listed below are based on the requirements of the State of New York. Only when all requirements have been met can an individual be considered a Licensed Professional Engineer. Becoming a Licensed Professional Engineer requires at least 12 years of acceptable education/experience credit. Some of this is often obtained through four years of college study, although there are other ways of obtaining the required credit. After obtaining six years of acceptable education/experience credit, the candidate takes the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. After passing the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, and obtaining at least 12 years of acceptable engineering/education experience, the engineer must pass the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam. Only when all requirements have been met can an individual be considered a Licensed Professional Engineer. ROTFLOL!!!!!!!!!!! Your guy was not licensed and could not sign or stamp a damn thing in 1964, and you said at BAC #35, "The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964." Damn. Just Damn!!!! Ohhhh... my side thingEYs
http://www.heimer.com/frameset/offsite.asp?url=http://www.op.nysed.gov/profengb.htm
http://www.heimer.com/pe/index.html
#162. To: Paul Revere, ALL (#160)
Which just proves you don't really know what you are talking about, Paul. First of all, Van Romero retracted his statement just a short while later. That fact was carried in the Albuquerque Journal, too. He said he changed his mind after looking at more detailed videos and the rest of the information that was gathered. Futhermore, Romero is NOT an demolition expert. Here is his resume: ************* http://infohost.nmt.edu/~red/van.html "Van D. Romero, Ph.D. ... snip ... Current Employment Since 1997: Vice President for Research and Economic Development, New Mexico Tech., Serves as chief official of the Research and Economic Development Division responsible for the encouragement, leadership, and support of research at the Institute and for the administrative and policy making activities of the division; offers dynamic research and administrative leadership to stimulate, coordinate, and provide support for the research at New Mexico Tech; acts as advocate for research within the Institute; serves as director of the Geophysical Research Center; manages the research support functions of the Research Division; serves as the Institute's representative and on-campus administrator for the Waste-Management Education and Research Consortium; acts as an external advocate and representative for New Mexico Tech's research activities; serves as mentor to new faculty to help them establish their research programs at the Institute; strongly encourages diversity and affirmative action; identifies research opportunities and actively encourages development of interdisciplinary research at the institute; ensures that high quality proposals are submitted by the Institute." Previous Experience 1995-1997: Director, Energetic Materials Research & Testing Center, Direct and manage a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and staff involved in RDT&E programs in energetic materials. EMRTC provides a working laboratory for conducting research in support of both government and commercial programs in the areas of ordnance, explosives, propellants and other energetic materials. Facilities include over 30 separate test sites, gun ranges and research labs located within a 32 square mile field laboratory. Developed and implemented counter-terrorist program that benefits research and academic programs. 1994 - 1995: Senior Member Technical Staff, Sandia National Lab, Albuquerque, NM. Conducted Environmental Impact Assessment for Medical Isotope Production program. Program consisted of converting weapons program facility to produce radio-isotopes for medical usage. 1993 - 1994: Deputy Director of Environmental, Safety and Health Oversight; Manager, Hazardous Waste Programs, Superconducting Super Collider, Dallas, TX. Developed and implemented radiation protection policies compatible with DOE orders and CFR regulations, performed liaison activities with DOE, and provided technical direction to radiation and hazardous waste program. Responsible for the development and review of radiation transport calculations, shielding design, health physics procedures, mixed waste procedures, and environmental monitoring activities. Served as Chairman of the Laboratory's ALARA committee and member of DOE's R&D Laboratory Working Group (RADWG) Health Physics Procedures Committee. Responsible for RCRA compliance during project closure. 1979 - 1993: Manager, Thermal Hydraulic Programs, General Electric Knolls Atomic Power Lab, Schenectady, NY. Responsible for both the technical and personnel management of the group. Key participant in the long term planning and direction of both the research and the facilities construction and maintenance. Group responsibilities included thermodynamic and materials testing and analysis of fuel channels, steam generators, and in-core materials. This work determined the thermodynamic limits for the nuclear reactor which will power the next generation submarine scheduled for delivery at the turn of the century. In previous work as Lead Engineer, was responsible for the experimental fluid mechanics effort and developed LASER instrumentation and techniques for flow visualization and quantitative flow measurements. Additional experience includes the development, execution, and analysis of environmental impact testing of nuclear sub marines which includes radiation transport analysis, neutron detection, and gamma ray spectroscopy." Current Funded Research Activities * Experimental verification of the alpha-omega effect for galaxy formation with Los Alamos National Laboratories. Courses Taught * Graduate and undergraduate courses in Solid State Physics and Particle Physics for the Physics Department Patents Held * Procedure to study Bubble Evolution by correcting scattered LASER light and dynamic pressure signals ********** At the time of 9/11 he wasn't even working in the field of explosives. For ONLY 2 or 3 years he ran a group that focused on ordnance, explosives and energetic materials ... and not so much the effects of them on structures but the characteristics of the explosives themselves. Certainly there is no mention of him working on explosive demolition of structures or buildings. And we learn that prior to 1995, he conducted Environmental Impact Assessments, implemented radiation protection policies and investigated thermodynamic limits for the nuclear reactors. That's hardly the resume of the explosives, demolition and structures *expert* you present. In fact, take a look at his publications. You won't find one word about demolition or structures in those titles. And hardly a mention of explosives. You seem to live in a world of misinformation, Paul. Not a good foundation for finding the truth.
Only because it serves my purpose to hoist you on your own retard, I'll give you one, Beach hoser: Van Romero.
* Develop groundwater activation model that can be used to optimize the design for acceleration production of tritium with DOE.
* Seismic source investigation, modeling and characterization of currently deployed explosive sources, design and computational testing of improved explosive sources, experimental verification and validation of improved sources - Western Geophysical (students - recruiting, post-doc and graduate in Geophysics).
* Resusable blast test fixture, investigate explosive impact on wide-body aircraft with FAA.
* Course in Explosives Surety for the Chemical Engineering Department
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#163. To: nolu_chan (#161)
SPAM is not substance. His SPAM IS without substance all right... His link in response #154 is invalid - it doesn't work - it leads to nothing. And at least 1 of the "links" in his #157 produced the same results... It's impossible for me to tell what side of the fence he's truly on (ignorant as that may sound). Let me explain. (As an aside - I find the NORAD stand-down to be of key significance in bearing forth the "official 9/11 lie"... When famed golfer Payne Stewart's charter flight went off course and started going north from the Panhandle of Florida, within 20 minutes NORAD had 2 fighters scrambled and on that situation like flies on shit. They were looking into the cockpit of the charter flight and reporting that the crew was unconscious - and stayed with that flight until it crashed. Yet for some reason, on 9/11 NORAD cannot manage to get even one fighter scrambled when 4 commercial airliners are flying off course for over an hour and a half - AND headed towards some of the most highly restricted airspace in the world????? BULLSHIT!!!!! Yet this is a topic BAC adamantly avoids.) For the sake of argument, lets pretend the collapses occurring on 9/11 happened exactly for the reasons given in the "official story" and for no other reason. That still does NOT explain any of the other "serious questions" such as those I posed to him in the link above. And his refusal to address ANY of them speaks volumes. That is why I say it's hard to tell what side of the fence he's on. Based upon the fact that he ONLY wants to discuss the collapses, and tries to divert everything else to that subject (and touts the "official story of it) - the most logical conclusion would have to be that he's a shill... One thing is certain: the ONLY way a person can successfully be a liar is to always tell a mix of lies with truth. If someone only tells truth, then we know what they say is true. If someone only tells lies, then we always know what truth is (the opposite of what they say). But when lies are mixed with truth - we're always left guessing. And that's exactly where BushCo and the likes of BAC leave us. From this, one other thing can be gathered:Looking at your non-response SPAM, I accept that you CANNOT produce any actual record showing that Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record."
On the surface, it clearly seems he's a BushCo/government shill as evidenced by his undying support of the "official story" of the 9/11 tragedy, and subsequent "war on terror". HOWEVER, he READILY admits that there are SERIOUS UNANSWERED QUESTIONS concerning the "entirety" of the event (aside from the actual building collapses). I posed some of these "serious questions" to him in this reply, (along with some common sense logic and reasoning raising doubts about the "official collapse story"); and he totally REFUSES to answer or even ATTEMPT to answer any ONE of them. This can only be construed as an admission to himself (if nothing else) that there is something seriously wrong with the "official story of 9/11"...
BushCo/BAC are children of Satan...
John 8:44 Ye are of [your] father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man. Albert Einstein
#164. To: BeAChooser (#162)
You said ONE, Douche bag. You don't get to prattle on and on to try to change that. Oh, and I didn't read your post, so I'm glad you wasted all that time and energy on it.
#165. To: BeAChooser (#157)
http://physics911.net/kevinryan Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories This paper appeared in 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, ed. David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006). Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories Kevin Ryan “Already there is near-consensus as to the sequence of events that led to the collapse of the World Trade Center.”- Shankar Nair, as quoted in the Chicago Tribune September 19, 2001 Turn on C-Span, or “Meet The Press,” or any other media program presenting federal officials. Whatever the issue, it always comes back to the same thing. Our government really has nothing else to offer us but protection from another 9/11. It uses this painful story to cut public services, eliminate our basic rights, and plunder the national coffers. But for many of us, it is not entirely clear from whom we most need protection.[1] As our debt explodes and our freedoms diminish, it would be wise to maintain focus on the origins of our War on Terror. No matter where this war leads us, we will need to keep the beginning in mind if we ever hope to see an end. The Point of Origin: The Collapse of the WTC Many have found that the 9/11 Commission not only failed to help us understand what happened; it also omitted or distorted most of the facts.[2] But if we really want to zero in on the exact turning point around which we plunged into chaos, we need to focus in particular on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. This is where our hearts were wrenched and our minds were made ready for never-ending war, torture, and apparently the end of everything that was American. If we are ever to emerge from this insanity, we need to know how three tall buildings collapsed due to fire, all on the same day, when no such thing has ever happened before. The Twin Towers and Why They Fell It would help to begin with an accurate description of the WTC towers in terms of quality of design and construction. In July of 1971, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) presented a national award judging the buildings to be “the engineering project that demonstrates the greatest engineering skills and represents the greatest contribution to engineering progress and mankind.”[3] Others noted that “the World Trade Center towers would have an inherent capacity to resist unforeseen calamities.” This capacity stemmed from the use of special high-strength steels. In particular, the perimeter columns were designed with tremendous reserve strength whereby “live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs.”[4] One would expect that any explanation for the destruction of such buildings would need to be very solid as well. Four years after 9/11, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally did give us their version of “why and how” two of the buildings collapsed, but its explanation may be even less effective than the 9/11 Commission report.[5] Now that the official story has been given, however, we can see just how weak and ill-defined our basis for this War on Terror has been all along. Additionally, we can track the evolution of official comments about collapse and see who was involved. Selling the Official Story: Some Key Players Shankar Nair, whose statement quoted above is quite telling, was one of those “experts” on whom the government depended to support what turned out to be an ever-changing, but always flimsy, story. Many of the scientists involved in the investigation were asked to examine ancillary issues, like escape routes and other emergency response factors. But those few who attempted to explain what really needed explaining, the unique events of fire-induced collapse, appear to have engaged in what can only be called anti-science. That is, they started with their conclusions and worked backward to some “leading hypotheses.” Not surprisingly, many of the contractors who contributed to the NIST investigation, like the company for which Nair works, just happen to depend on good relationships with the government in order to earn their living. What may be a surprise is just how lucrative these relationships can be. For example, Nair’s company, Teng & Associates, boasts of Indefinite Quantity Contracts, long-term relationships with federal government agencies, and federal projects worth in excess of $40 million.[6] Others who worked so hard to maintain the official story included Gene Corley, a concrete construction expert listed by the National Directory of Expert Witnesses as a source for litigation testimony.[7] Corley was more than just a witness, however. He had led the Oklahoma City bombing investigation and then was asked to lead the initial ASCE investigation into the WTC disaster. Perhaps someone else, with less experience in bombings and more experience in fires, would have been a better choice. But without authority to save samples or even obtain blueprints, the ASCE investigation was ineffective anyway. Corley himself ended up being a very versatile resource, however, providing testimony supporting the pre-determined conclusions many times, and even posing as a reporter during an NIST media session.[8] There was really no need for phony media coverage. As with The 9/11 Commission Report and the lead-up to the Iraq War, the major media simply parroted any explanations, or non-explanations, given in support of the official story. One example is from a television program called “The Anatomy of September 11th,” which aired on the History Channel. Corley took the lead on this one as well, but James Glanz, a New York Times reporter, was also interviewed and helped to spread what is probably the worst excuse for collapse given. He told us that the fires heated the steel columns so much (the video suggested 2500 F) that they were turned into “licorice.” Other self-proclaimed experts have been heard promoting similar theories.[9] They will probably come to regret it. This is because the results of physical tests performed by NIST’s own Frank Gayle proved this theory to be a ridiculous exaggeration, as some people already knew. The temperatures seen by the few steel samples saved, only about 500 F, were far too low to soften, let alone melt, even un-fireproofed steel. Of course that result could have been calculated, knowing that 4,000 gallons of jet fuel[10]-not 24,000 gallons or 10,000 gallons, as some reports have claimed-were sprayed into an open-air environment over several floors, each comprised of more than 1,000 metric tons of concrete and steel. Another expert who served on NIST’s advisory committee was Charles Thornton, of the engineering firm Thornton and Tomasetti. Thornton’s partner, Richard Tomasetti, was reported to be behind the unprecedented and widely criticized decision to destroy most of the steel evidence.[11] Early on Thornton said: “Karl, we all know what caused the collapse.” He was talking to Karl Koch, whose company erected the WTC steel. Koch attempted to clarify as follows. “I could see it in my mind’s eye: The fire burned until the steel was weakened and the floors above collapsed, starting a chain reaction of gravity, floor falling upon floor upon floor, clunk - clunk - clunk, the load gaining weight and momentum by the nanosecond, unstoppable. Once enough floors collapsed, the exterior walls and the core columns were no longer laterally supported and folded in.”[12] This is a description of what was called the Pancake Theory, the most widely accepted version of what happened. The Pancake Theory was promoted by an influential 2002 NOVA video called “Why the Towers Fell,” in which Corley (yet again) and Thornton were the primary commentators. Both of them talked about the floors collapsing, and Thornton described how the perimeter columns buckled outward, not inward as Koch had described. The video made a number of false claims, including exaggeration of the temperatures (2000 F), remarks about melting steel, and the incredible statement that two-thirds of the columns in WTC1 (the North Tower) were completely severed. NIST’s report now indicates that only about 14% of the columns in WTC1 were severed, and in some photos we can count most of these for ourselves.[13] NIST and Underwriters Laboratories In August 2004, Underwriters Laboratories evaluated the Pancake Theory by testing models of the floor assemblies used in the WTC buildings. Despite all the previous expert testimony, the floor models did not collapse. NIST reported this in its October 2004 update, in a table of results that clearly showed that the floors did not fail and that, therefore, pancaking was not possible.[14] NIST more succinctly stated this again in its June 2005 draft report, saying: “The results established that this type of assembly was capable of sustaining a large gravity load, without collapsing, for a substantial period of time relative to the duration of the fires in any given location on September 11th.”[15] At the time of the floor tests, I worked for Underwriters Laboratories (UL). I was very interested in the progress of these tests, having already asked some sensitive questions. My interest began when UL’s CEO, Loring Knoblauch, a very experienced executive with a law degree from Harvard, surprised us at the company’s South Bend location, just a few weeks after 9/11, by saying that UL had certified the steel used in the WTC buildings. Knoblauch told us that we should all be proud that the buildings had stood for so long under such intense conditions. In retrospect it is clear that all of us, including Knoblauch, were ignorant of many important facts surrounding 9/11 and did not, therefore, see his statements as particularly important. Over the next two years, however, I learned more about the issues, like the unprecedented destruction of the steel evidence and the fact that no tall steel-frame buildings have ever collapsed due to fire. And I saw video of the owner of the buildings, stating publicly that he and the fire department made the decision to “pull”-that is, to demolish-WTC7 that day,[16] even though demolition requires many weeks of planning and preparation. Perhaps most compelling for me were the words of a genuine expert on the WTC. This was John Skilling, the structural engineer responsible for designing the towers.[17] (The NOVA video, incidentally, gave this credit to Leslie Robertson. But Robertson, who never claimed to have originated the design, was only a junior member of the firm [Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson], and Skilling was known at the time to be the engineer in charge.) In 1993, five years before his death, Skilling said that he had performed an analysis on jet plane crashes and the ensuing fires and that “the building structure would still be there.”[18] By 2003, all of this information was available to anyone who cared. The details were, without a doubt, difficult to reconcile with testimony from officials, reporters, and scientists who were supporting the official story. But in November of that year, I felt that answers from UL were needed. If, as our CEO had suggested, our company had tested samples of steel components and listed the results in the UL Fire Resistance Directory almost forty years ago, Mr. Skilling would have depended on these results to ensure that the buildings were sufficiently fire resistant. So I sent a formal written message to our chief executive, outlining my thoughts and asking what he was doing to protect our reputation. Knoblauch’s written response contained several points. He wrote: “We test to the code requirements, and the steel clearly met those requirements and exceeded them.” He pointed to the NYC code used at the time of the WTC construction, which required fire resistance times of 3 hours for building columns, and 2 hours for floors. From the start, his answers were not helping to explain fire-induced collapse in 56 minutes (the time it took WTC2, the South Tower, to come down). But he did give a better explanation of UL’s involvement in testing the WTC steel, even talking about the quality of the sample and how well it did. “We tested the steel with all the required fireproofing on,” he wrote, “and it did beautifully.”[19] This response was copied to several UL executives, including Tom Chapin, the manager of UL’s Fire Protection division. Chapin reminded me that UL was the “leader in fire research testing,” but he clearly did not want to make any commitments on the issue. He talked about the floor assemblies, how these had not been UL tested, and he made the misleading claim that UL does not certify structural steel. But even an introductory textbook lists UL as one of the few important organizations supporting codes and specifications because they “produce a Fire Resistance Index with hourly ratings for beams, columns, floors, roofs, walls and partitions tested in accordance with ASTM Standard E119.”[20] He went on to clarify that UL tests assemblies of which steel is a component. This is a bit like saying “we don’t crash test the car door, we crash test the whole car.” In any case, Chapin suggested that we be patient and wait for the report from NIST, because the investigation into the “collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2, and 783; was an ongoing process and that “UL is right in the middle of these activities.”[21] For the most part, I did wait, although I shared my concerns with Chapin again at UL’s Leadership Summit in January 2004. I encouraged him to ask for a company news release on our position, but this did not happen and I never heard from him again. By the time UL tested the floor assembly models in August of that year, I had been promoted to the top management job in my division, Environmental Health Laboratories, overseeing all company functions. Two months later, NIST released an official update that included the floor test results, as well as Frank Gayle’s results, in which steel temperatures were predicted. These results clearly invalidated the major theories of collapse, because pancaking could not occur without floor collapse and steel does not turn to licorice at the temperatures discussed. After reviewing this update, I sent a letter directly to Dr. Gayle at NIST. In this letter, I referred to my experiences at UL and asked for more information on the WTC investigation and NIST’s soon-to-be-published conclusions. NIST had planned at the time to release its final report in December, with time allowed for public comment. After I allowed my letter to become public,[22] this date was moved to January 2005, and then nothing was heard from NIST for several months. Other than UL’s involvement in testing the steel components, the facts I stated had all been reported publicly, but when I put them together plainly, they were considered outrageous. Five days after I sent my letter, I was fired by UL for doing so. The company made a few brief statements in an attempt to discredit me, then quickly began to make it clear that its relationship with the government, perhaps due to its tax-exempt status, was more important than its commitment to public safety. For example, in spite of Tom Chapin’s previous statements, UL suggested that it had played only a “limited” role in the investigation. Despite what our CEO, Loring Knoblauch, had written and copied to several executives, UL said there was “no evidence” that any firm had tested the steel used in the WTC buildings.[23] In doing so, UL implied that its CEO not only had fabricated this story about testing the WTC steel but had also spoken and written about it for several years without anyone in the company correcting him. As I see it, the only other option was that the company claiming to be our “Public Safety Guardian” was lying to us about the most important safety issue of our lives. My experiences give a taste for the delicate nature of our critical turning point. But to keep our focus, we should examine what NIST did with the results of its physical tests, which had failed to support its conclusions. Did NIST perform more tests, at least to prove its key argument that much of the fireproofing on the steel in the Twin Towers popped off due to the impact of the airliners? No, it did not. Instead, NIST put together a black box computer model that would spit out the right answers. This black box model was driven by initial parameters that could be tweaked. When the parameters that had initially been considered “realistic” did not generate results that “compared to observed events,” NIST scientists performed their final analysis using another set of parameters they called “more severe.”[24] When they were finished, their model produced video graphics that would enable anyone to see the buildings collapse without having to follow a train of logic to get there. Tom Chapin of UL was one of those doomed to make public comments in support of NIST’s final report. His comments were innocuous enough but he did hint at something of value. “The effect of scale of test assemblies…,” Chapin said, “requires more investigation.”[25] This may be the closest thing to a straightforward statement that we will ever see from UL on the matter. But it seems clear enough that results showing zero floor collapse, when scaled-up from the floor panels to a few floors, would still result in zero floor collapse. Perhaps a more direct version of Chapin’s comment might be that test results negating predetermined conclusions should not be used to prove them. Other than the video, NIST left us with only some vague statements about a few sagging floors suddenly destroying two hundred super-strong perimeter columns and forty core columns. But since sagging floors do not weigh more than non-sagging floors, it is difficult to see how this might occur, especially so uniformly. NIST claimed the perimeter columns saw increased loads of between 0 and 25% due to the damage, but it never reconciled this with the original claim that these columns could resist 2000% increases in live load. And the outward-buckling theory, suggested by Thornton, was changed again to inward buckling-apparently the forces involved were never well defined. Additionally, NIST suggested that the documents that would support testing of the steel components, along with documents containing Skilling’s jet-fuel-fire analysis, could not be found.[26] Ultimately, NIST failed to give any explanation for the dynamics of the towers as they fell, about how and why they dropped like rocks in free-fall. For both buildings, NIST simply stated that “once the upper building section began to move downwards . . ., global collapse ensued,” as if just saying so was enough.[27] As for WTC7, NIST as of yet has not elaborated on its “working collapse hypothesis,” which was vaguely presented in June 2004.[28] The bottom line is that, after more than four years, it is still impossible for the government even to begin to explain the primary events that drive this War on Terrorism. So much has been sacrificed, and so much has been invested in this story, that we all have a need for supportive answers. But when we look for those answers, all our “mind’s eye” can see is this smoky black box, where scientific results are reversed to support politically correct, pre-determined conclusions. That critical point of divergence, where our lives were turned upside down and all logic followed, has always been too painful to imagine. But now, without expert accounts of pancaking floors and licorice steel, it cannot be imagined at all. Some of us remain hopeful that we can still achieve a critical mass awareness of the need for truth, and in doing so pull the support out from under what John McMurtry calls “the 9/11 Wars.”[29] But if we cannot, even as the hopes for peace fade and the number of 9/11 families continues to grow, we should remember how we got this story and how it was propped up despite all the evidence against it. Because whatever happens next, after the smoke clears, our children may have a need to know. [1] Richard Heinberg, “Götterdämmerung,” Museletter, No.144, March 2004 (http://www.museletter.com/archive/144.html). [2] David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2005). Griffin summarizes the omissions and distortions in “The 9/11 Commission Report: A 571-Page Lie,” 911 Visibility Project, May 22, 2005 (http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2005-05-22-571pglie.php). [3] Angus K. Gillespie, Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1999), 117. [4] “How Columns Will Be Designed for 110-Story Buildings,” Engineering News-Record, April 2, 1964: 48-49. [5] Jim Hoffman, “Building a Better Mirage: NIST’s 3-Year $20,000,000 Cover-Up of the Crime of the Century,” http://911Research.wtc7.net, December 8, 2005 (http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/index.html). [6] Website for Teng & Associates (http://www.teng.com/teng2k3/mainframe.asp). [7] Website for National Directory of Expert Witnesses (http://national-experts.com/members2/witness.asp?d_memnum=07572&d_lnum=2). [8] Archived webcast video of NIST press briefing, NIST News Release website, June 23, 2005 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_briefing_june2305.htm), 01:15:10. [9] Sheila Barter, “How the World Trade Center Fell,” BBC News, September 13, 2001 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1540044.stm). [10] Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), “World Trade Center Building Performance Study,” May 2005, Chapter 2. [11] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center (New York: Times Books, 2003), 330. [12] Karl Koch III with Richard Firstman, Men of Steel: The Story of the Family that Built the World Trade Center (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), 365. [13] Eric Hufschmid, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, Calif.: Endpoint Software, 2002), 27. [14] Table of results from Underwriters Laboratories August 2004 floor model tests, as presented by NIST in October 2004 (http://wtc.nist.gov/media/P6StandardFireTestsforWeb.pdf), 25. [15] NIST, Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers(Draft) (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1draft.pdf), 195. [16] Silverstein’s statement is contained in “America Rebuilds,” PBS documentary, 2002 http://(www.pbs.org/americarebuilds). It can be viewed http://(www.infowars.com/Video/911/wtc7_pbs.WMV) or heard on audio file (http://VestigialConscience.com/PullIt.mp3). [17] “Structures Can Be Beautiful, World’s Tallest Buildings Pose Esthetic and Structural Challenge to John Skilling,” Engineering News-Record, April 2, 1964: 124. [18] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, 138. [19] Underwriters Laboratories email correspondence, December 1, 2003. [20] Samuel H. Marcus, Basics of Structural Steel (Reston, Va.: Reston Publishing 1977), 20. [21] Underwriters Laboratories email correspondence, December 1, 2003. [22] Kevin Ryan, “The Collapse of the WTC,” 911 Visibility Project, November 11, 2004 (http://www.septembereleventh.org/newsarchive/2004-11-11-ryan.php). [23] John Dobberstein, “Area Man Stirs Debate on WTC Collapse,” South Bend Tribune, November 22, 2004 (http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041124095100856). [24] NIST, Final Report, 196. [25] Comments from Underwriters Laboratories on NIST WTC report, NIST website (http://wtc.nist.gov/comments/ULI_Ganesh_Rao_8-5-05.pdf). [26] Archived webcast video of NIST press briefing, NIST News Release website, June 23, 2005 (http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_briefing_june2305.htm), 01:18:50. [27] NIST, Final Report, 197. [28] NIST presentation on WTC7 collapse investigation, NIST website (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/June2004WTC7StructuralFire&CollapseAnalysisPrint.pdf). [29] John McMurtry, “9/11 and the 9/11 Wars: Understanding the Supreme Crimes.” In David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2006). My present essay will also appear in this volume.
#166. To: BeAChooser (#157)
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc05-07-03.htm NIST has been unable to locate any fire endurance tests conducted on the WTC floor system to determine its fire rating. The Architect of Record and the Structural Engineer of Record stated in 1966 and 1975, respectively, that the fire rating of the floor system of the WTC towers could not be determined without testing. Transcript of NIST Public Meeting in New York City - February 12, 2004 68 Dr. Hill: Thank you, Roger. Next we'll hear from Leonard Crisci, FDNY family member. Is Leonard here? Leonard Crisci: Yes. Dr. Hill: Okay. L. Crisci: Thank you. John Napolitano: I’m standing here with Leonard. Everybody has their bag of logs to tote, and Lenny has me. L. Crisci: My brother, as you remember from before, is Lt. John Crisci from the Hazardous Material Unit who perished at the World Trade Center. But what I would like to bring - just throw this out. I'm not an architect nor am I an engineer, but I'm a reasonable man. And I use that as a way of doing life. What a reasonable man would think and do. And part of it is this. When you look at the World Trade Center as a whole, this - the Port Authority and it’s construction, and you read about it and you look into it, you see that what happened here, what occurred, was that the Port Authority took a - and the word is bad, conspiracy, because then everybody puts their head down. But they conspired to build this building using unorthodox ways. And here, follow me, Yama, the architect, a small guy in a Midwest city who never had a big project, yet he is the one who sought out to build the Trade Center. He gets the job. Skilling, an engineer, again from a small firm out west, out on the west coast, he gets the job to be the engineer. And he brings in a guy by the name of Leslie Robertson, who’s a college graduate, but at the time is not an engineer. Yet he designs the structure of the outer walls with the interior walls, the thin construction. [nc note: Mr. Crisci should have said "not a licensed Professional Engineer."] Then you watch what happens. Where do you get the steel to build this building? Well, you get it from United States Steel or Bethlehem Steel, the two number one in the world at that time. Remember, we were dealing in the 1960s. Japan and Korea were not a factor then. Yet, they go out and get bids from those two giants of steel are turned down because they say excessive. Yet they go out and get ten smaller companies, each one fractured all throughout the country, from Texas, to Seattle, to New York. They build the Trade Centers and they compartmentalize the building of the Trade Center. A Pullman coach, who builds railroad cars, builds part of the World Trade Center. They get the contract. They build it. Now you’ve gone and you find the erector, Koch. Koch erects the building. When they bid out the process for the erecting, Koch is the only bidder. Why? Because no one else wanted to - they knew they couldn't get involved in it. Plus they were a small company with a lot of good background in the erecting business. They go on and erect the building. It was a foregone conclusion that they were going to go bankrupt, and which they did. They - well at least not totally, later on they went bankrupt. But they built the building. The Trade Center was constructed at 60% of the steel in the first 12 floors. If you’re getting paid by the tonnage, your money is gone by the time you reach the 13th floor. The next 100 floors were built with only 40% of the steel. The steel gets progressively thinner, up to a quarter of an inch when it reached the 110th floor. Then you bring this innovative - if you went out to buy a washing machine today, and the salesman told you that it's innovative, never tried before, never done before, you’d probably walk out of the store. You don’t want to buy it. Yet everything in the World Trade Center was innovative, never done before, new concept, excellent idea. The bottom line was that the Port Authority made a concerted effort to go and get small companies that were dependent upon the Trade Center either for their fame, fortune, or glory. That's how these guys - because everyone who was involved in it, except the big guys, Skilling and Leslie Robertson, they all went bankrupt. In the book, "Men of Steel," by Koch, he brings out a very, very pointed story. He's in the business 100 years erecting steel. He brings his grandfather into the topping out ceremony. They pull his 90-year-old grandfather in a wheelchair out onto one of the floors in the mid building. This 90-year-old man who’s been erecting steel for all of his life looks around and says to his son, “Where’s the steel? Where is it?” And then the son explains, Dad - you know, Grandpa, it’s on the outside and the inside. There's no steel in this building. What's holding it up? Well, what’s holding it up was this innovative idea of truss floors, spanning 60 feet across, held onto by 5/8-inch bolts. This is what our loved ones were standing on and doing business on. That's why we're here. J. Napolitano: No dedicated fire escapes. No cement. No concrete. Sheet rock walls to stop an airplane. L. Crisci: You build a structure with high-speed elevators; encase them in sheet rock. Sure, it was a great - my thing has always been that if Robertson was a student at MIT, and he designed the World Trade Center as his Masters for his graduation class, he would have got an A from his professor. And he would have said, this is great. One of the best ideas I’ve ever seen. But on the bottom it would have said, it ain’t gonna work. It’s not gonna work. It can’t happen. J. Napolitano: And it didn't work. L. Crisci: And you know what, it didn’t work, because they murdered our family members by putting them in a building that they couldn't get out of when it came. By the way, everybody who went and built that World Trade Center, all the contractors, nobody made money. The only ones who made money were the Port Authority. And why did they make it? Because they gave their tenants beautiful views with wide open, 209 feet of open views. They gave them - when that fire - when that plane hit, that plane, there was nothing to stop the spread of that fuel. It went across the floors. It ignited. It ignited everything on it. Nothing was done to help us. When they built those stairwells, you know, they didn't give you a way out. They gave you 3, but no way out. You were dead if something cut off one of those stairwells. And they died. They died horribly. J. Napolitano: The steel had a two-hour fire rating that they felt that it wouldn’t fail and the building would stay up. But they knew from 1993, that it took over ten hours to evacuate. Do the math. And they sent first responders up there, and give them a window of two hours to get up 80, 90 floors to try to rescue people and get them out. All within two hours. L. Crisci: What I ask you sir, and I know you’re not investigating, you’re not a criminal liability, but I say this to you. This was a - Austin Tobin, he designed this with the full intent, knowing what was going to happen. He did it economically then the Port Authority went with him. Those buildings should have never been inhabited out there. All of our people who were - and you have to say that when it comes down. All these icons of industry, they gotta know. Because if - just think of the magnitude of that building. Why wasn’t it full of New York architects and New York engineers? Why did they have to go out of town to get these people? Because those are the only people that could be brow beaten by the developers. They did what they had to do because that’s what made them famous. And that has to be said. Dr. Hill: Len? Okay, Leonard. Thank you for your comments. I appreciate it. L. Crisci: Thank you for letting me have my comments. John Napolitano: Thank you very much. I just want to say something really brief. My son was a first responder. He was with Rescue Two, Lieutenant John P. Napolitano. He was a husband, a father; two little girls. Lenny, his brother, John Crisci, Lieutenant with HazMat, also a father; three sons. On the morning of September 12 Lenny and I got down there to search for our loved ones and some of the loved ones of you people here in this room today, and we never found them. At what they were calling “ground zero” at a triage area, I wrote a message in the ashes to my son. I thought if he was hurt and they brought him there that he’d see it and he’d know we were there. I just simply wrote "Rescue Two, John Napolitano, I'm here and I love you, Dad." I'm sure he saw it. Well, I’m here today on his behalf and his name, because if he could be here, he’d be saying what I'm saying today and what Lenny’s saying today. Gentlemen, listen, we know the buildings failed. There was a lot of expert testimony here. We know what we saw. We saw the buildings come down. The question is, was it an honest mistake on how they were made or was it criminal? And that's the question that has to be asked. Thank you. Dr. Hill: Thank you.
#167. To: nolu_chan, all (#161)
That's false. But you continue with your circus act, NC. Go ahead, continue with your circus act, NC. New York allowed a licensed Professional Engineer in California to legally practice in New York. Ever hear of "comity"? Apparently not. So you claim. Prove it. With a source we can both believe. And do something more than quote CURRENT regulation and rules, NC. Quote the regulations as they stood back in 1964. You can do that, can't you? Or perhaps all those organizations I listed who state that Robertson was the lead structural engineer on the project actually know something that you do not.
NONE of the links you provided goes to a web page that says anything about Robertson or his being the Lead Structural Engineer of record.
He is not now, nor has he ever been, a licensed Structural Engineer in New York. There is no such thing as a licensed Structural Engineer in the state of New York. Robertson is a licensed Professional Engineer in New York.
However, in 1964, John B. Skilling WAS a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of New York. In 1964, of the two, ONLY John Skilling could have been the Engineer of record.
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#168. To: beachooser, nolu_chan, Robin, Minerva, Christine, Honway, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, All (#157)
Hey BAC, does your standard of 'proof' apply to Dr. Rokke and the DU issue? Well ...... C'mon asshole, you can't have it both ways! Oh, other than third-party citation, what were the professional qualifications of your engineer guy, relative to 1964? Hey BAC, you asshole, I'm talking to you!
#169. To: BeAChooser, Jethro Tull, Christine, Honway, Robin, Aristeides, Red Jones, Diana, Kamala, honway, SKYDRIFTER, Critter, innieway, Paul Revere, Ferret Mike, RickyJ, bluedogtxn (#167)
Go ahead, continue with your circus act, NC. New York allowed a licensed Professional Engineer in California to legally practice in New York. Ever hear of "comity"? Apparently not. So you claim. Prove it. With a source we can both believe. And do something more than quote CURRENT regulation and rules, NC. Quote the regulations as they stood back in 1964. You can do that, can't you? Or perhaps all those organizations I listed who state that Robertson was the lead structural engineer on the project actually know something that you do not. http://www.lera.com/robertson.htm Education University of California at Berkeley, B.Sc., 1952 Professional Licenses Structural Engineer - California http://www.cee.princeton.edu/people/e21/robertson/profile.html BS, University of California at Berkeley, 1952 Honorary degree, Doctor of Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1986 http://www.heimer.com/pe/index.html Note: Requirements vary slightly from state to state. The requirements listed below are based on the requirements of the State of New York. Only when all requirements have been met can an individual be considered a Licensed Professional Engineer. Becoming a Licensed Professional Engineer requires at least 12 years of acceptable education/experience credit. Some of this is often obtained through four years of college study, although there are other ways of obtaining the required credit. After obtaining six years of acceptable education/experience credit, the candidate takes the Fundamentals of Engineering exam. After passing the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, and obtaining at least 12 years of acceptable engineering/education experience, the engineer must pass the Principles and Practice of Engineering exam. Only when all requirements have been met can an individual be considered a Licensed Professional Engineer. Source: New York State Education Department http://www.nysed.gov/coms/op001/opscr2?profcd=16&plicno=034360 Name : ROBERTSON LESLIE E http://www.nysed.gov/coms/op001/opscr2?profcd=16&plicno=039286 Name : SKILLING JOHN B [BAC #167]
However, in 1964, John B. Skilling WAS a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of New York. In 1964, of the two, ONLY John Skilling could have been the Engineer of record.
Source: Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA)
Professional Engineer - New York. Licensed or eligible in all 50 states. N.C.E.E.
Civil Engineer - California. Licensed or eligible in all 50 states.
First Class Architect and Professional Engineer, Japan
Honorary degree, Doctor of Science, University of Western Ontario, 1989
Honorary degree, Doctor of Engineering, Lehigh University, 1991
Honorary degree, Doctor of Engineering, Notre Dame University, 2003
Office of the Professions
License Information
04/29/2007
Address : NEW YORK NY
Profession : PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
License No: 034360
Date of Licensure : 01/06/
Additional Qualification :
Status : REGISTERED
Registered through last day of : 01/09
Address :
Profession : PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
License No: 039286
Date of Licensure : 06/08/62
Additional Qualification :
Status : DECEASED 03/05/98
Registered through last day of :
#170. To: BeAChooser, ALL (#169)
Before moving to New York, Robertson was a resident of Washington, not California. As you have reminded everyone many times, Robertson had moved to New York. He was not an out-of-state resident. An engineering license is only valid in the state in which it is issued. While it may be easier for someone who holds a license in one state to obtain a license in another state, said engineer must nevertheless obtain a license in each state for which he chooses to practice. Robertson obtained his New York State license on January 6, 1965. Until he was licensed as a Professional Engineer in the state of New York, he could not act as a Licensed Professional Engineer.
New York allowed a licensed Professional Engineer in California to legally practice in New York. Ever hear of "comity"? Apparently not.
#171. To: innieway, ALL (#163)
What's the problem? Couldn't figure out that there shouldn't be a space between the ? and ArtNum? Here: http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=51045&Disp=0 "The 9/11 Truther Credo" By the way, innieway that article describes your debating tactics to a T. Try this: http://www.skyscraper.org Guess you missed what I posted about that too. Too bad. Perhaps not. But I guarantee that you folks won't be taken seriously as long as you continue to mix the easily debunked nonsense like bombs in the towers and no Flight 77 at the Pentagon in with the legitimate questions. And you won't be taken seriously as long as you continue to use the tactics listed in http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=51045&Disp=0 .
His link in response #154 is invalid - it doesn't work - it leads to nothing.
And at least 1 of the "links" in his #157 produced the same results...
(As an aside - I find the NORAD stand-down to be of key significance in bearing forth the "official 9/11 lie"... When famed golfer Payne Stewart's charter flight went off course and started going north from the Panhandle of Florida, within 20 minutes NORAD had 2 fighters scrambled and on that situation like flies on shit. They were looking into the cockpit of the charter flight and reporting that the crew was unconscious - and stayed with that flight until it crashed. Yet for some reason, on 9/11 NORAD cannot manage to get even one fighter scrambled when 4 commercial airliners are flying off course for over an hour and a half - AND headed towards some of the most highly restricted airspace in the world????? BULLSHIT!!!!! Yet this is a topic BAC adamantly avoids.)
For the sake of argument, lets pretend the collapses occurring on 9/11 happened exactly for the reasons given in the "official story" and for no other reason. That still does NOT explain any of the other "serious questions" such as those I posed to him in the link above.
BushCo/BAC are children of Satan...
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#172. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#166)
So you consider Kevin Ryan a credible source, NC? Even after all that has been pointed out about him? Even after all the instances where his dishonesty, misrepresentations of fact, and lack of understanding about structures, demolition, fire, steel and physics have been pointed out in thread after thread on the internet? If he is what your side of the debate calls an credible expert 5 years after 9/11, your side is really in trouble. You need to face the truth. In 5 years, your side has been unable to get anyone (well, maybe one or two, but one can easily show they aren't reliable or credible either) with appropriate credentials to support your accusations. And all Ryan does in this latest article is rehash a few dozen claims that have already been shown to be untrue, gross distortions of the truth or based on false logic. This regurgitation of claims that have already been discredited is just a "9/11 Truther" tactic. What can I do at this point in time but laugh? NC, it is difficult to take you serious when the likes of Kevin Ryan, water treatment expert, is the best you can offer. After more than 5 years.
Propping Up the War on Terror: Lies about the WTC by NIST and Underwriters Laboratories
Kevin Ryan
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#173. To: BeAChooser (#171)
Beach hoser, the only way NORAD doesn't stop the Pentagon attack is if the White House STOPPED THEM. I know you hate to see it, but Norm Manetta did. Mineta on Cheney stand down http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRJAI4- e7Xw&mode=related&search=
#174. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#169)
Interesting research, NC. Happen to know who actually signed the drawings? And what are you going to do with this info? Try and prove that the towers shouldn't have collapsed in a court of law? That should be interesting. ROTFLOL!
Before moving to New York, Robertson was a resident of Washington, not California.
As you have reminded everyone many times, Robertson had moved to New York. He was not an out-of-state resident.
An engineering license is only valid in the state in which it is issued. While it may be easier for someone who holds a license in one state to obtain a license in another state, said engineer must nevertheless obtain a license in each state for which he chooses to practice.
Robertson obtained his New York State license on January 6, 1965.
Until he was licensed as a Professional Engineer in the state of New York, he could not act as a Licensed Professional Engineer.
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#175. To: BeAChooser (#174)
Can't answer for the Mineta video, can you, beach hoser? So, you'll keep slamming any person who offers an opinion about 9-11, because you worship authority and wrongly think they'd treat you any differently than they would the rest of us.
#176. To: BeAChooser (#174)
John Skilling went to the Port Authority Headquarters in New York in the summer of 1962 - unaccompanied - and pitched the design. [Glanz & Lipton, City in the Sky, p. 118] John Skilling obtained his New York Professional Engineer license on June 8, 1962. The contract was awarded to Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson on September 12, 1962. [Glanz & Lipton, City in the Sky, p. 119] Jack Christiansen was the firm's "resident master of thin concrete structures." [Glanz & Lipton, City in the Sky, p. 120] Jack Christiansen obtained his New York Professional Engineer license on May 24, 1963. Harold Worthington obtained his New York Professional Engineer license on October 7, 1963. Leslie Robertson obtained his New York Professional Engineer license on January 6, 1965. I don't reckon they figured junior non-partner Robertson needed one until 1965. Let us not forget that according to BAC #45: "The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964." http://www.nysed.gov/coms/op001/opscr2?profcd=16&plicno=040112 Name : CHRISTIANSEN JOHN V http://www.nysed.gov/coms/op001/opscr2?profcd=16&plicno=040201 Name : WORTHINGTON HAROLD L
Address : SEATTLE WA
Profession : PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
License No: 040112
Date of Licensure : 05/24/63
Additional Qualification :
Status : NOT REGISTERED
Registered through last day of :
Address : NOT ON FILE
Profession : PROFESSIONAL ENGINEERING
License No: 040201
Date of Licensure : 10/07/63
Additional Qualification :
Status : NOT REGISTERED
Registered through last day of :
#177. To: BeAChooser (#174)
Not Robertson as he was not legally qualified to do so. Skilling, Worthington and Christiansen were the ones lawfully qualified to sign documents.
Interesting research, NC. Happen to know who actually signed the drawings?
#178. To: BeAChooser (#174)
Repeat it every time you make the FALSE claim that the UNLICENSED Robertson was the "Lead Structural Engineer of record."
And what are you going to do with this info?
#179. To: BeAChooser (#172)
What can I do at this point in time but laugh?
#180. To: nolu_chan (#177)
Depends on when the final drawings were signed.
"Happen to know who actually signed the drawings?"
Not Robertson as he was not legally qualified to do so.
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#181. To: BeAChooser (#180)
According to BAC #45: "The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964." Robertson was not licensed until 1965. Of course, Skilling was licensed in 1962, and Worthing and Christiansen were licensed in 1963. Perhaps later on Daddy [Chief Engineer Skilling] threw some crumbs to Robertson. Perhaps after Skilling signed for and submitted all of the MAJOR structural elements of the tower design about a year before Robertson was eligible to sign anything, Robertson was permitted to supervise the construction of the towers according to the drawings signed by Skilling and Robertson could have signed for some MINOR modifications. Of course, at all times Chief Engineer Skilling could have said to Robertson, "Who's your Daddy?" And let us not forget what Dr. Sunder said about documents NIST obtained from 1964: The impact scenario that was considered is a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour. There's another document a month later that considers an aircraft impact at the 80th floor of one of the towers. When you put those two together, the events of September 11th look strikingly similar. There is not one documented study but TWO. Each considers an aircraft hit into the towers. The impact scenario was a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles per hour. They are strikingly similar to the actual events of 9/11. Let us not forget the 1964 press conference to counter the claims in the NYT that the towers were vulnerable to aircraft strikes: According to BAC delusion #149, that translates to, "In 1964 (and even today) large commercial planes didn't fly 600 mph at 1000 feet above a city. So NOONE was considering that a design load for buildings until 9/11." Or in BAC delusion #154, "That they would have looked at a 600mph crash as a design load is ridiculous."
Depends on when the final drawings were signed.
http://wtc.nist.gov/media/Public%20Transcript%20021204%20Final1_withlinks.pdf
February 14, 1964: The Port Authority held a press conference to counter Wien’s contention the WTC Towers would be unsafe if hit by a plane. They produced countless engineering reports on the subject. The book’s authors [Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky] indicate the press was quite unkind to Wien and others that questioned the WTC design.
#182. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#181)
How else could Skilling have reported in the white paper dated February 1964 that they'd investigated whether a plane crash would collapse the towers? That doesn't mean he wasn't the one who did the analysis Skilling mentioned. Doesn't mean they reviewed and signed the final drawings. That's not what source after source says. Wonder why they got it wrong? Afterall, some of them ... unlike you or I have actually seen the drawings. Sorry, but that is just plane (sic) silly. There is no rationale reason to look at an 600 mph impact scenario. Not unless one is considering a deliberate crash ... and they weren't doing that in 1963. Because the only circumstances where such a large plane might accidently hit the towers is if it was lost in fog at low level (in which case it is highly doubtful that it would be flying at it's maximum velocity) or if a mechanical problem or a collision causes the plane to fall from a higher altitude (which is a very rare event and again something that codes and building designers back then simply did not consider a reasonable design load). Far more likely is that both Skilling and the Port Authority architect misrepresented (either deliberately or through miscommunications) what sort of analysis was actually done in order to allay public concern brought about by someone who didn't want the towers built and who was exaggerating the threat from such events. Really? Can you produce this document? No? The truth is that we don't really know what was or wasn't done. Or whether there were one or two *studies*. The only person who is still alive who seems to remember anything is Robertson. Absolutely true.
According to BAC #45: "The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964."
Robertson was not licensed until 1965.
Of course, Skilling was licensed in 1962, and Worthing and Christiansen were licensed in 1963.
Perhaps after Skilling signed for and submitted all of the MAJOR structural elements of the tower design about a year before Robertson was eligible to sign anything, Robertson was permitted to supervise the construction of the towers according to the drawings signed by Skilling and Robertson could have signed for some MINOR modifications.
The impact scenario that was considered is a Boeing 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour.
There's another document a month later that considers an aircraft impact at the 80th floor of one of the towers.
According to BAC delusion #149, that translates to, "In 1964 (and even today) large commercial planes didn't fly 600 mph at 1000 feet above a city. So NOONE was considering that a design load for buildings until 9/11."
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#183. To: BeAChooser (#182)
[nc] Robertson was not licensed until 1965. [BAC #182] That doesn't mean he wasn't the one who did the analysis Skilling mentioned. It -does- mean that he was not the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or "Head Structural Engineer or Record" which is the LIE you repeatedly told. While Robertson may have been assigned to perform analysis, or fetch coffee and donuts for his Daddy, he was not the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or "Head Structural Engineer or Record" which is the LIE you repeatedly told. It also means that your entire spam list consists of discredited sources. [BAC #1] First of all John Skilling was NOT the head structural engineer for the WTC towers. Leslie Robertson is the head structural engineer of record. [BAC #154] Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer of record. Skilling simply owned the design company and had a strong interest in making potential occupants feel safe. ----- [BAC #155] Let's see. Scientific American says he was. NIST says he was. American Society of Civil Engineers says he was. Columbia University says he was. PBS says he was. http://www.skyscraper.org says he was. The MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering says he was. McGraw-Hill Construction / ENR magazine says he was. The American Council of Engineering Companies says he was. http://www.cenews.com says he was. The National Academy of Engineering says he was. en.structurae.de says he was. The BBC says he was. The Stanford Engineering Department says he was. http://www.construction.com says he was. http://www.istructe.org says he was. http://www.wtc.com says he was. http://www.americanscientist.org says he was. The NYTimes says he was. The University of Berkeley says he was. -----
[nc] If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record," produce that record.
#184. To: BeAChooser (#182)
"The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964." Robertson was not licensed until 1965. Skilling was licensed in 1962. Worthing and Christiansen were licensed in 1963. Robertson obviously had no need for a license until 1965, a year after BeAChooser determined that "[t]he design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed." Until a year after BeAChooser determined that "[t]he design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed," Robertson could not sign a damn thing.
-- BAC #45
#185. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#184)
Now how could that be a lie when I cited source after source (see post #157) that ALL said Robertson was the lead or head structural engineer (and "of record" in some of those cases). Perhaps you don't really know what a lie is, NC. Well that may be. Or perhaps they know something you do not. Who signed the final engineering drawings? You can't answer that question? Who was the project engineer on that job? It was Robertson, wasn't it? And by the view of many, that would indeed make him the head or lead structural engineer on that job. Do you have any sources that said Skilling was the engineer who worked on a day to day basis on the design of the towers? No? Do you have any sources that say Skilling was the one who directly supervised the team of engineers in New York? No? Well again, maybe all those sources in that list know something you do not. I don't think you really understand what signing the drawings means, NC.
[nc] Robertson was not licensed until 1965.
[BAC #182] That doesn't mean he wasn't the one who did the analysis Skilling mentioned.
It -does- mean that he was not the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or "Head Structural Engineer or Record" which is the LIE you repeatedly told.
It also means that your entire spam list consists of discredited sources.
Robertson obviously had no need for a license until 1965, a year after BeAChooser determined that "[t]he design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed."
Until a year after BeAChooser determined that "[t]he design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed," Robertson could not sign a damn thing.
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#186. To: BeAChooser (#185)
Robertson was not licensed until 1965. Robertson could not sign anything but the receipt for donuts and coffee until 1965 after "The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed."
"The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964."
-- BAC #45
#187. To: BeAChooser (#185)
[nc] Robertson was not licensed until 1965. [BAC #182] That doesn't mean he wasn't the one who did the analysis Skilling mentioned. It -does- mean that he was not the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or "Head Structural Engineer o[f] Record" which is the LIE you repeatedly told. Now how could that be a lie when I cited source after source (see post #157) that ALL said Robertson was the lead or head structural engineer (and "of record" in some of those cases). Perhaps you don't really know what a lie is, NC. The question posed at #157 was, "If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record," produce that record." You cited source after source that you purported said "Lead Structural Engineer of record." Now your SPAM list is reduced to, "'of record' in some of those cases." Of course, you posted no quote or citation to anything but the name of an organization. For example, "Columbia University" did not say anything unless it issued from the organization and not just some internet comment from someone at Columbia University. So it is with all those unidentified purported "citations." As for your links, not a solitary one provides so much as a mention of Robertson or the lead structural engineer of anything. Each merely goes to the homepage of some site or other. Let us review that #157 to show that your purported links and cites are just empty bullshit. Let's see. Scientific American says he was. [nc - the editorial staff of Scientific American says he was what? The "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or the coffee and donut fetcher?] NIST says he was. American Society of Civil Engineers says he was. Columbia University says he was. PBS says he was. http://www.skyscraper.org says he was. The MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering says he was. McGraw-Hill Construction / ENR magazine says he was. The American Council of Engineering Companies says he was. http://www.cenews.com says he was. The National Academy of Engineering says he was. en.structurae.de says he was. The BBC says he was. The Stanford Engineering Department says he was. http://www.construction.com says he was. http://www.istructe.org says he was. http://www.wtc.com says he was. http://www.americanscientist.org says he was. The NYTimes says he was. The University of Berkeley says he was. Right, NC. We have every reason to doubt them. ROTFLOL! [BAC #185]
If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "," produce that record.
#188. To: BeAChooser (#185)
The firm of Worthington, Skilling, et. al., was awarded the contract on 9/12/1962. Skilling was licensed in New York in June 1962. The design of the major structural elements of the towers surely had to have been completed by February 1964. Otherwise, Skilling could not possibly have completed an analysis of the structure's ability to survive a high speed plane crash that he published a White Paper about on February 3, 1964. ... Either the White Paper is simply nonsense based on an incomplete design or the design (as far as what would be necessary to determine the resistance of the towers to plane impact) was completed by February 3, 1964. And since it must have taken some time to do the analysis that is claimed and write the White Paper, that would imply the design was essentially finished before January 1964. ... But he didn't change the essential structure during that revision. The revision must have consisted of very few changes because the articles you linked and quoted from 1964 and earlier show design details (size of columns, spacing, steel strengths, etc) that agree quite well with the final design. And indeed, the article you quote doesn't say the revision involved changes in the major structure. Assume arguendo that the major structural elements of the towers had to have been competed by February 1964, as claimed by BAC. Assume the design was essentially finished before January 1964 as claimed by BAC. Assume subsequent revision consisted of very few changes because the design details from 1964 agree quite well with the final design, as claimed by BAC. QUESTION: In what year was somebody, anybody, first designated as the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record?" (a) 1962
Worthington and Christiansen was licensed in New York in 1963
Robertson was licensed in New York in 1965. [BAC #45]
(b) 1963
(c) 1964
(d) 1965 or later
(e) None of the above, there was no "Lead Structural Engineer of Record."
#189. To: nolu_chan, ALL (#188)
A response that's right out of the book http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/01/11/wtc_forum.html "Columbia News, the Public Affairs and Record Home Page, Columbia Hosts Nov. 12 Forum of World Trade Center Engineers, by Suzanne Trimel, ... snip ... Among the participants will be Leslie Robertson of Leslie Robertson Associates, the engineer of record for the Twin Towers; ... snip ... Published: Nov 06, 2001" http://www.civil.columbia.edu/wtcforum/ "Forum on the Technical Implications of the World Trade Center Collapses ... snip ... Organizer: Professor Rene B. Testa ... snip ... Sponsored by the Department of Civil Engineering & Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University through the Center for Hazards and Risk Research at Columbia University together with the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS) at New York University ... snip ... Speakers: ... snip ... Leslie Robertson, Leslie E. Robertson Associates, Mr. Robertson is the engineer OF RECORD for the World Trade Center Towers" Care to try again, NC? Your problem is that you are just too lazy to go look at what each of those organizations has said about Mr Robertson. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000B7FEB-A88C-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21 "Robert Fowler, senior engineer at the structural engineering firm of McNamara and Salvia. Fowler was then a junior member of the WTC's engineering firm of record, Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson, later renamed Skilling Helle Christiansen Robertson. ... snip ... Leslie E. Robertson, then the project manager, was the engineer most responsible for the superskyscraper's design, Fowler noted." "THE ENGINEER MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SUPERSKYSCRAPER'S DESIGN." Now if that isn't the lead or head engineer, what is that?
The question posed at #157 was, "If Robertson was the Lead Structural Engineer "of record," produce that record."
You cited source after source that you purported said "Lead Structural Engineer of record."
Now your SPAM list is reduced to, "'of record' in some of those cases."
Of course, you posted no quote or citation to anything but the name of an organization. For example, "Columbia University" did not say anything unless it issued from the organization and not just some internet comment from someone at Columbia University. So it is with all those unidentified purported "citations."
As for your links, not a solitary one provides so much as a mention of Robertson or the lead structural engineer of anything.
Scientific American says he was. [nc - the editorial staff of Scientific American says he was what? The "Lead Structural Engineer of Record" or the coffee and donut fetcher?]
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Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#190. To: BeAChooser (#189)
(a) 1962 Despite all your SPAM, you either "forgot" or you were unable to answer the question. Try again. Perhaps Chooser, unable to choose, needs more choices. QUESTION: In what year was somebody, anybody, first designated as the "Lead Structural Engineer of Record?"
(b) 1963
(c) 1964
(d) 1965 or later
(e) None of the above, there was no "Lead Structural Engineer of Record."(f) BeAChooser does not know.
(g) BeAChooser cannot choose.
(h) BeAChooser refuses to choose.
(i) BeAChooser cannot admit that there must have been a Lead Engineer before 1965 and it could not have been Robertson.
#191. To: nolu_chan (#190)
He never converses, listens and answers and provides interesting threads of thought on 9 11, he just spams and rants. He is oblivious to anything but his hatred of this forum, his ego, and core agenda of supporting the war on terror. He appreciates the false flag operations beause the perpetrator's motives to change the climate of the United States to make it condusive to stripping rights and creating war are his motives too.
#192. To: BeAChooser (#189)
BAC - please explain how the major structural designs in the WTC were incorporated into previous structures designed by John Skilling. "City in the Sky, The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center," James Glanz and Eric Lipton, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003, First paperback edition 2004, ISBN: 0-8050-7691-3, pp. 123-4 The World Trade Center, the agency said, "required engineering ingenuity from foundation to roof." The truth was a little more prosaic. As outlandish as his design sounded to the Eastern engineering establishment, including the Port Authority's own hardheaded engineering department - which was deeply offended by Mal Levy's decision to have an outside firm do the work - every facet of the design was almost a photographic expansion of something that Skilling and his staff had used on earlier jobs. As far back as 1957, Skilling and Nathaniel Curtis, the New Orleans architect, designed a thirteen-story office tower in Pittsburgh that was among the first modern high-rises whose exterior walls would be built to resist all the lateral forces caused by wind - a system close to the "tube" concept of the World Trade Center. This design let Skilling and his engineers build fifty-seven-foot "clear spans," or floor spaces unencumbered by columns, just like the trade center. The design also used newly available high-strength steel, as the trade center would. Even the conversion of Yamasaki's pinstripes into structural elements had already been done in the IBM Building in Seattle, a twenty-story, 272-foot high-rise completed in 1963. The steel pinstripes, separated by less than 3 feet, were encased in prefabricated concrete covers, like the prefabricated steel panels of the trade center. Perhaps the most striking parallel, though, was embedded deep inside the Washington Building in Seattle. Ordinarily, the steel girders and beams supporting the floors get in the way of the ductwork, plumbing, and electrical wiring that must thread their way through the space between the ceiling of one story of the building and the floor of the next. From other engineers, Skilling borrowed the idea of using torches to cut a zigzagging pattern along the length of the support beams, sliding one of the halves a few inches horizontally and welding the pieces back together again. This "castellated beam" method left gaps for the ductwork to fit through, and it let Skilling reduce the total height of each story in the Washington Building by nearly a foot. He and his staff took the idea a step further in their design for the World Trade Center: they proposed replacing the beams entirely with airy, weblike networks of thin steel bars and angle irons called bar-joist trusses. Corrugated decking would be placed atop these floor trusses so that concrete could be poured on it to create the floors. The ductwork could run without obstruction, and the diaphanous floor trusses would complete a design for the World Trade Center without precedent in its feathery, ethereal lightness. Skilling engineers calculated that for every cubic foot of space inside the Empire State Building, that skyscraper weighed 17 pounds; the World Trade Center would weigh just 10.5 pounds a cubic foot, lighter by an amazing 38 percent. As with all of the Skilling innovations, the trusses came with several twists. First of all, the trusses that actually went into the building would be stouter than any similar support system ever devised, with cross-bracing and a redundant design unknown in the ordinary bar-joist trusses that are common in warehouse construction. Second, the trusses would be built in such away that the concrete of the floors would also add to the structural integrity of the system. Still, Skilling and his engineers had, once again, gone into a structural realm where no one else had been.
#193. To: BeAChooser (#189)
"City in the Sky, The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center," James Glanz and Eric Lipton, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003, First paperback edition 2004, ISBN: 0-8050-7691-3, pp. 131-3 "Salient points with regard to the structural design of The World Trade Center towers" was the low-key title on the white paper in the Port Authority's files. Below the title were eleven numbered points on the structure, beginning with: "1. The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure. The preliminary calculations alone cover 1,200 pages and involve over 100 detailed drawings." At the end of the three-page document was the notation "MPL.fg" above the date "2-3-64" - meaning that the white paper had been typed for Malcolm P. Levy by his secretary, Florence Grainger, on February 3,1964. Some of the numbered points gave routine summaries of the expected characteristics of the twin towers' engineering design. But halfway down the first page, the paper contained this astonishing statement: Whatever the origin of the white paper, it suggests clearly that the Skilling firm - whether with or without the assistance of Port Authority engineers is not specified - looked at what would happen if a Boeing 707 or a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 rammed the World Trade Center. What those engineers discovered - and failed to discover - would become fateful nearly forty years later. The engineers found, in essence, that the Skilling firm's "total concept" would not just give the twin towers a huge margin of reserve strength to help them survive the initial impact: the peculiarities of their design would let them act almost like a living being to resist overall failure and collapse even when grievously damaged by the plane. But those same engineers, all of them either working for the Port Authority or, like Skilling, under contract to it, did not think through the doubts that Rosaleen Skehan and her Fire Department friends were already starting to raise. That could hardly be a surprise, considering that Levy was seemingly orchestrating the entire operation. Levy had made his views on fire safety painfully clear to Skehan. Exactly how the notion of studying a plane impact originally came about remains uncertain. Except for the three-page white paper, there is no known description of the study that might reveal the detailed calculations that the engineers carried out and the assumptions that they made. But over the years, Skilling and others said enough about the calculations that a little mathematical sleuthing easily fills in at least some of the gaps. There were probably two basic phases to the study. The first looked at the force that the impact of a Boeing 707, the largest commercial plane flying at the time, would exert on the structure and compared it to the force produced by the kind of windstorm that the towers were engineered to withstand. (Damage inflicted by the smaller DC-8 would most likely be less severe than what the 707 could deliver.) The second phase took into account the hole the plane would cut and tried to figure out whether the tower would collapse because of that breach. The first part of the calculation would have been quite simple. The towers had been designed to withstand the forces of windstorms with gusts of at least 120 miles an hour. Specifically, they were supposed to hold up against at least forty-five pounds of lateral force on every square foot without shearing off and toppling. Each tower would be about 1,350 feet tall and 209 feet across on each face: 282,150 square feet. So if a wind sufficient to exert forty-five pounds per square foot of force was blowing directly against one of the faces, that would be about 13 million pounds, all told. And the tower should stand, with a standard safety margin of perhaps 30 to 40 percent to spare. To figure out if the plane had a chance of tipping the tower over, Mal Levy's engineers needed to estimate how much force the collision might produce. A Boeing 707 made a B-25 look like an insect by comparison. With a tip-to-tip wingspan of 131 feet and a fuel capacity of more than twenty thousand gallons, a fully loaded 707 can weigh 300,000 pounds on takeoff, and its cruising speed is about 600 miles per hour. The engineers knew that parts of the little B-25 flew all the way through the limestone-encased Empire State Building and out the other side. So it might have been reasonable to assume that the bigger, faster 707, after plowing into the much more compliant facade of a World Trade Center tower, would not come to a complete stop before it reached the opposite side of the floor, 209 feet away. It is a complicated problem to figure out precisely how hard the plane might push on the tower during a collision, but given the plane's known weight, initial speed, and stopping distance, any freshman engineering student could come up with a rough estimate. The number turns out to be 17 million pounds, probably within the safety margin. Levy's engineers had discovered that not even a speeding 707 would shear off one of the towers. But would the hole punched out by the plane cause the tower to collapse? If the hole ran from wingtip to wingtip, then more than half the columns on one entire facade could be cut - more than thirty crucial structural supports - potentially endangering the stability of the structure. The engineers found that the tower would have an even more remarkable kind of resiliency to protect it against a total collapse because of those lost supports. The tightly spaced columns above the damage, each connected to the next by the spandrel plates, would spontaneously form an arch over the hole. The technical term is a Vierendeel truss - the same type of archlike structure that supports many pedestrian bridges or other light bridges. The Vierendeel trusses would be so effective, according to the engineers' calculations, that all the columns on one side of a tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and several columns on the adjacent sides, and the tower would still be strong enough to withstand 100-mile-per-hour winds. The basic study had been completed by February 3, 1964, the day Levy's white paper was typed.
3. The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 70/ - DC 8) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.
#194. To: BeAChooser (#189)
Now if that isn't the lead or head engineer, what is that? To answer your question, what you stated was more diversionary bullshit. The question you keep avoiding is your claim that Robertson was the "Lead Structural Engineer of record." You said it, and it has a specific connotation. During 1962, 1963, and 1964, Robertson was not eligible to be a licensed Professional Engineer in New York, much less the "Lead Structural Engineer of record" for the WTC project. "Men of Steel, The Story of the Family that Built the World Trade Center," Karl Koch III with Richard Firstman, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2002, First Paperback Edition, ISBN: 1-4000-4950-4, pp. 194-5. Robertson had dropped out of high school and joined the Navy at sixteen, eventually returning home and going to college at Berkeley. He turned the training he'd received in electronics in the service into an early career designing electrical systems for factories. Then he advanced to structural engineering and spent some time designing offshore oil-drilling rigs before returning to the West Coast and joining the Skilling firm in 1958. "Then John Skilling, almost beyond belief, was willing to entrust the design for the World Trade Center to me, when no one in their right mind would entrust a thirty-four-year-old engineer with it." Not to mention a thirty-four-year-old who had no degree in engineering, structural or otherwise. Robertson had gotten a bachelor's degree in science and everything else was on-the-job training. [nc - Robertson born 1928. Joined Navy at 16, 1944. Exit Navy 1948. Four years college exit 1952. 12 years experience as engineer not earlier than 1964. For licensing as a Professional Engineer, NY permitted 4 years of education in the engineering field to be counted toward experience, otherwise required 12 years experience. It appears Robertson obtained a license in 1965 when he had enough experience (training under John Skilling) to meet the minimum qualifications to be a licensed Professional Engineer in the state of New York.] THE ENGINEER MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE SUPERSKYSCRAPER'S DESIGN."
#195. To: BeAChooser (#189)
BAC - where the hell did the steel go? "Men of Steel, The Story of the Family that Built the World Trade Center," Karl Koch III with Richard Firstman, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2002, First Paperback Edition, ISBN: 1-4000-4950-4, pp. 375-6. Until it stopped taking regular deliveries in March of 2001, the 3,000-acre Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island was the largest garbage dump in the world. Six months later, it became almost a city of misery and destruction, the place to bring the wreckage and remains of all the life that was obliterated that Tuesday morning in September. One day a few months after the attack, I drove out there and met up with a friend, a trucker who had been hired by the city to haul away all the scrap metal. I had called him with two purposes in mind. Seeing the landfill was only the second one. Mainly, I wanted him to tell me his recollections of how he had gotten the floor panels to the Trade Center during the tugboat strike of 1969. It was none other than Tom Petrizzo, the man who stopped traffic on half the bridges in the metropolitan area for twenty-two straight nights. Tom picked me up at the gate and started driving around the landfill, pointing out the sobering sights. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of crushed vehicles, including row after row of destroyed fire trucks. There had to be enough to outfit the entire fire department of a medium-sized city. We passed pieces of wreckage from one of the jets. "The fuselage of the plane, the motors, and the wheels are back there," Tom said. "See those guys inside here?" He pointed to a tent. "They're all FBI agents, NYPD, or ATF. They're finding wallets, watches, all kinds of jewelry and personal belongings. This is the coroner's area here. There was so much being found at the beginning they had refrigerator trailers." Tom drove on to an area that he said had been a mountain of steel a couple of months earlier. "It was about thirty feet high," he said. Now most of it was gone, shipped out to Hugo Neu Schnitzer in Jersey City, the biggest scrap metal dealer in the country. By now a lot of it was on its way to China to be melted down and recycled. "There had to be three hundred thousand tons," Tom said. "How many tons in the two buildings?" "Two hundred thousand," I said. "In both buildings? Impossible." "That's what it was," I assured him. "That's what I got paid for." "Some of the columns that came in here were bent like U-turns," Tom said. I asked him if he'd seen any floor sections. "No, that's what I don't understand," Tom said. "I didn't see one goddamn floor deck come here with a bar joist in it. They must have disintegrated. Because they did not get here. And I handled this from day fuckin' one." "Did they send you any decking that was loose, no joists?" I asked. "None," Tom said. "None? Well, that's impossible. There were six thousand of them." "There's stuff crumpled up, but go identify it as a floor deck if you can. Impossible. A lot of guys come and ask me, they know I was involved in bringing 'em over, but Karl, not one came where I could say, 'Oh, here's one.' I could not show anybody a floor deck and say, 'This is what I hauled over.'" I couldn't believe it. Not one goddamn floor panel.
#196. To: BeAChooser (#189)
Damn... it must be humbling to find that David Ray Griffin is right and BAC is out to lunch again. "Debunking 9/11 Debunking, An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory," David Ray Griffin, Olive Branch Press, 2007, ISBN: 978-1-56656-686-5 p. The PM authors next suggest that the engineers, in constructing the towers, perhaps forgot to think about the fact that any planes hitting the towers would have fuel that would start big fires. They quote Leslie Robertson, called "(John] Skilling's chief colleague in the WTC project," as saying: "We... designed for the impact of [a Boeing 707]. The next step would have been to think about the fuel load, and I've been searching my brain, but... I don't know if we considered the fire damage that would cause." [138] However, perhaps Robertson, instead of simply searching his brain, should have searched to see what Skilling said. At least the PM authors should have done this, because, although they present Robertson as "Skilling's chief colleague in the WTC project," Skilling was the one in charge. Robertson was at the time a junior member of the firm (Worthington, Skilling, Helle, and Jackson). And Skilling, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, had thought about the fire damage, saying that if one of the towers were to be hit by a plane loaded with jet-fuel, "there would be a horrendous fire" and "a lot of people would be killed," but "the building structure would still be there." [139] [138] D9/11M 31, quoting Robertson's statement as provided in the New Yorker, 19 November 2001. [139] John Skilling's statement is quoted in Eric Nalder, "Twin Towers Engineered to Withstand Jet Collision," Seattle Times 27 February 1993. It is partially quoted in James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center (New York: Times Books,/Henry Holt, 2003) 138. 
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