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Title: The World Trade Center Building Designers: Pre-9/11 claims strongly implicate that the Towers should have remained standing on 9/11
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http://arabesque911.blogspot.com/2007/05/world-trade-center-
URL Source: http://arabesque911.blogspot.com/20 ... center-building-designers.html
Published: May 31, 2007
Author: Arabesque
Post Date: 2007-05-31 06:34:58 by Kamala
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Keywords: 911
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Thursday, May 3, 2007 The World Trade Center Building Designers: Pre-9/11 claims strongly implicate that the Towers should have remained standing on 9/11 The World Trade Center Building Designers: Pre-9/11 claims strongly implicate that the Towers should have remained standing on 9/11[1] By Arabesque[2] The World Trade Center (WTC) Towers were the largest buildings ever conceived in 1960.[3] This meant that there was a considerable amount of planning: “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… The building as designed is sixteen times stiffer than a conventional structure. The design concept is so sound that the structural engineer has been able to be ultra-conservative in his design without adversely affecting the economics of the structure.”[4] In July of 1971, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) presented a national award judging the WTC Towers to be “the engineering project that demonstrates the greatest engineering skills and represents the greatest contribution to engineering progress and mankind.”[5] Like many modern structures and buildings, the WTC Towers were over-designed to withstand weight distribution in the event of structural damage. According to calculations made by the engineers who helped with the design of the Twin Towers, “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.”[6] As well, “Live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs.”[7] In the planning of the buildings the designers considered potential attacks, and the WTC towers were designed to survive them. Between Early 1984 and October 1985 it was reported that: “The Office of Special Planning (OSP), a unit set up by the New York Port Authority to assess the security of its facilities against terrorist attacks, spends four to six months studying the World Trade Center. It examines the center’s design through looking at photographs, blueprints, and plans. It brings in experts such as the builders of the center, plus experts in sabotage and explosives, and has them walk through the WTC to identify any areas of vulnerability…”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.’”[8] One of these hypothetical examples was put to the test in the 1993 WTC bombing. This attack prompted more discussions about the safety of the WTC towers. In response to these concerns, WTC building designer John Skilling explained that they “looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side… 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.”[9] This indicates that the building designers considered Boeing 707 airplane impact speeds of 600 mph. It is likely that the designers considered this speed of impact for the reason that the cruse speed of a Boeing 707 is 607 mph.[10] Both of the planes that hit the WTC Towers on 9/11 were Boeing 767’s. The FEMA report indicates that Flight 11 flew at a speed of 470 mph into the North Tower, and that the second plane flew at a speed of 590 mph into the South Tower.[11] Not only were these speeds anticipated by the building designers, the Boeing 707 is similar in size to the ones flown into the towers on 9/11. According to Jim Hoffman, the planes used on 9/11 were “only slightly larger than 707s and DC 8s, the types of jetliners whose impacts the World Trade Center's designers anticipated.”[12] This statement is supported by the following chart: Boeing 707-340 Boeing 767-200 fuel capacity 23,000 gallons 23,980 gallons max takeoff weight 328,060 lbs 395,000 lbs empty weight 137,562 lbs 179,080 lbs wingspan 145.75 ft 156.08 ft wing area 3010 ft^2 3050 ft^2 length 152.92 ft 159.17 ft cruise speed 607 mph 530 mph In fact, Hoffman observes that “a 707 in normal flight would actually have more kinetic energy than a 767, despite the slightly smaller size.”[14] Commercial airliners typically fly with jet fuel, so it is not surprising that the designers would consider this. In 1993, Skilling explained that they performed an analysis that concluded that the WTC towers would survive the impact and jet fuel fires from 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… The building structure would still be there.”[15] In fact, no steel-framed building structures had ever collapsed due to fire before or since 9/11.[16] This further supports Skilling’s analysis about the possibility of jet fuel destroying the WTC towers. According to Paul Thompson, “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.”[17] This ‘white paper’ concluded that: “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.”[18] Thompson explains that “besides this paper, no documents are known detailing how this analysis was made.”[19] In fact, many of the building documents are unavailable because “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.”[20] The lack of access to WTC building documents remains a problem to this day. Indeed, in March of 2007, Steven Jones and Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice finally obtained the WTC blueprints from a ‘whistle-blower’.[21] Although the WTC was “over-designed to withstand almost anything including hurricanes, high winds, bombings and an airplane hitting it,” [22] the designers did not apparently consider controlled demolition: “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.’”[23] One week before 9/11, WTC building designer Leslie Robertson reiterated the fact that the towers were designed to survive plane crashes: “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.”[24] Also according to Robertson, the WTC towers were “in fact the first structures outside the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airplane.”[25] Not only were the towers designed to survive plane crashes, they were designed to potentially survive multiple plane crashes. This fact is supported by Frank A. Demartini, the on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center, who said 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.” [26] Demartini appeared to be so confident that the towers would not collapse that he stayed behind to help save at least 50 people.[27] As a result of his actions, he lost his life on 9/11. In summary, the World Trade Center designers not only contemplated jet fuel fires—they considered the plane crashes that would have caused them. They anticipated impact speeds of 600 mph as well as aircraft similar in size to the planes used on 9/11. The towers were designed to survive substantial column loss along with 100 mph winds. They were intended to survive bombings, earthquakes, and hurricanes. If the designers were sufficiently competent in the planning and realization of their award-winning WTC Towers as intended, they should have remained standing. Tragically, they did not. From this irreconcilable fact there can only be two conclusions; either the designers were inadequate in their designs, or there is an alternate explanation for their destruction on 9/11. However, these are not all of the facts. After 9/11, WTC building designer Leslie Robertson has made statements which directly contradict previous comments by other building designers—including himself. According to Paul Thomspon, it was reported on Sept 3-7, 2001 “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.”[28] Surprisingly, Robertson claimed that the WTC Towers were designed to survive plane crashes at speeds of on 180 mph.[29] He also repeated this claim in an interview with Steven Jones in October 2006.[30] However, these statements are contradicted by Skilling, who indicated 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.”[31] Robertson is also somewhat contradicted by his own statement in 1984-5 that there was “little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building was attacked.”[32] Immediately after 9/11 it was reported that “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.’”[33] Later, in 2002, Robertson said: “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.”[34] In 2005, NIST also claimed that they had 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.”[35] These statements ignore the fact that Skilling claimed in 1993 that “Our analysis [in 1964] 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.”[36] As well, Robertson said the following in an interview with Steven Jones in October 2006: “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.”[37] Three of these claims are demonstrably problematic. The claim about “slow flying” aircraft has already been discussed.[38] The statement about molten metal is also contradicted by many eyewitness statements.[39] In fact, it is possible that Robertson himself saw this molten steel, but this fact is not confirmed at the present time.[40] Not only had many witnesses claimed to have seen this molten metal, FEMA had performed an analysis of it. Their observations were recorded in Appendix C of their WTC Building Performance Study.[41] Ironically, Robertson stated that he was not aware if anyone had performed an analysis on the molten steel in an interview with Jones—who had also performed an analysis of previously molten metal samples from Ground zero.[42] Jones’ findings appear to be corroborated by the FEMA report which described “a phenomenon never before observed in building fires: eutectic reactions, which caused ‘intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese.’”[43] The New York Times described this as “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”[44] NIST did not even mention the presence of molten steel and called it “irrelevant to the investigation.”[45] Amazingly, NIST’s 10 000 page, $20 million report couldn’t find the space to mention the earlier findings about the molten steel analyzed in the FEMA report. There have even been reports of evaporated steel.[46] The presence of molten steel would be very surprising because jet fuel fires are incapable of melting steel.[47] In fact, NIST reported that the highest recorded temperatures of the jet fuel fires from the WTC were not even enough to weaken the steel.[48] Conclusions It is demonstrable that the WTC building designers claimed that the Twin Towers would survive an event similar to 9/11. Either the WTC building designers were tragically wrong in their calculations and designs, or there is another explanation for the destruction of the WTC Towers. After 9/11, WTC building designer Leslie Robertson has made claims that are contradicted by statements and documents from as many as 40 years ago. These contradictions must be resolved through the release of all of the pertinent WTC documents that have been withheld since 9/11. [2] Arabesque, Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice Member and 9/11 Researcher: http://www.911blogger.com/blog/877. [3] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, The Height of Ambition, New York Times, September 8, 2002. [4] James Glanz and Eric Lipton, City in the Sky: The rise and fall of the World Trade Center, Times Books, Henry Hold and Company, LLC, 2003, pages 134-136. [5] Angus K. Gillespie, Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1999), 117 [6] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, page 133. [7] How Columns Will Be Designed for 110-Story Buildings, Engineering News-Record, April 2, 1964: 48-49. [8] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, Page 227. See also Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. [9] Ibid. pages 131-132. [10] Jim Hoffman, Towers' Design Parameters: Twin Towers' Designers Anticipated Jet Impacts Like September 11th's, http://911research.wtc7.net. [11] World Trade Center Building Performance Study: Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Recommendations, FEMA Report 403, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, Washington, DC, 2002. Page 31. [12] Hoffman, Towers' Design Parameters. [13] Ibid. [14] Ibid. [15] Eric Nalder, Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision, Seattle Times, February 27, 1993. [16] James Glanz, and Eric Lipton, Towers Withstood Impact, but Fell to Fire, Report Says, Fri March 29, 2002, New York Times. “Experts said no building like it [WTC7], a modern, steel-reinforced high-rise, had ever collapsed because of an uncontrolled fire.” Norman Glover, Fire Engineering, Fire Engineering journal, October 2002. “Almost all large buildings will be the location for a major fire in their useful life. No major high-rise building has ever collapsed from fire…” [17] Thompson, Complete 9/11 Timeline. February 27, 1993: WTC Engineer Says Building Would Survive Jumbo Jet Hitting It [18] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, pages 131-2. [19] Thompson, Complete 9/11 Timeline. February 27, 1993: WTC Engineer Says Building Would Survive Jumbo Jet Hitting It [20] Hearing before the Committee on Science, House of Representatives, One Hundred Seventh Congress, Second Session, March 6, 2002, Serial No. 107–46. [21] Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice, Independent Investigators Release Suppressed Blueprints of Destroyed World Trade Center Tower, March 27, 2007. http://www.stj911.org. [22] Christopher Bollyn, Some Survivors Say ‘Bombs Exploded Inside WTC’, American Free Press, October 22, 2001. [23] Nalder, Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision [24] Towers Built to Withstand Jet Impact, The Chicago Tribune, September 12, 2001. [25] Leslie E. Robertson, Reflections on the World Trade Center. National Academy of Engineering, Volume 32, Number 1 - Spring 2002. [26] http://Prisonplanet.com, WTC Construction Manager: Towers Were Designed to Take Numerous Plane Crashes, http://www.prisonplanet.com, November 14, 2004. [27] “DeMartini will be in his office on the 88th floor of the north tower when it is hit on 9/11. He will die when the tower collapses, after helping more than 50 people escape.” [Associated Press, 8/29/2003; New York Times, 8/29/2003] [28] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, pages 138-9, 366. [29] Nalder, Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision [29] Towers Built to Withstand Jet Impact. See also: Thompson, Complete 9/11 Timeline, Between September 3, 2001 and September 7, 2001: WTC Structural Engineer Says Trade Center Designed for 707 Crashing Into It. These articles from 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.” [30] See a partial transcript of this interview included below. [31] Thompson, Complete 9/11 Timeline, February 27, 1993: WTC Engineer Says Building Would Survive Jumbo Jet Hitting It [32] Glanz and Lipton, City in the Sky, Page 227. See also Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline. [33] James Glanz, Believed to Be Safe, the Towers Proved Vulnerable to Jet Fuel Fire, The New York Times, September 12, 2001 [34] Robertson, Reflections on the World Trade Center [35] National Institute of Standards and Technology, 9/2005, page. 13 [36] Nalder, Twin Towers Engineered To Withstand Jet Collision [37] Steven Jones in discussion With Leslie Robertson, by KGNU Radio, Denver, CO, Oct 26, 2006. http://www.911podcasts.com/files/audio/StevenJones_LeslieRobertson_20061026.mp3 [38] See another statement by Robertson here: “The buildings survived the impact of the Boeing 767 aircraft, an impact very much greater than had been contemplated in our design (a slow-flying Boeing 707 lost in the fog and seeking a landing field).” Taken from: Robertson, Reflections on the World Trade Center [39] ‘George Washington,’ Why was there Molten Metal Under Ground Zero for Months after 9/11? December 06, 2005. http://georgewashington.blogspot.com/ [40] Someone, quite possibly Leslie Robertson “describes fires still burning and molten steel still running 21 days after the attacks.”[40] [41] See here for pictures and comments in FEMA’s report mentioning the melted steel: http://www.911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/metallurgy/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.” “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.” WPI provides a graphic summary of the phenomenon.” [42] Paul Watson, Scientific Analysis Proves Towers Brought Down By Incendiaries, June 20, 2006. http://www.prisonplanet.com “using advanced techniques we're finding out what's in these samples [of iron taken from Ground Zero]—we're finding iron, sulphur, potassium and manganese—these are characteristic of a variation of thermite which is used to cut through steel very rapidly, it's called thermate.” See also: Griffin, The Destruction of the World Trade Center and Jones, Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse? [43] Joan Killough-Miller, The ‘Deep Mystery’ of Melted Steel, WPI Transformations, Spring 2002. [44] Ibid. [45] Jim Hoffman, NIST's World Trade Center FAQ A Reply to the National Institute for Standards and Technology's ‘Answers to Frequently Asked Questions’. August 30, 2006. [46] “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: James Glanz, Engineers are baffled over the collapse of 7 WTC; Steel members have been partly evaporated, New York Times, November 29. 2001. [47] “The maximum flame temperature increase for burning hydrocarbons (jet fuel) in air is, thus, about 1000 °C -- hardly sufficient to melt steel at 1500 °C.” Taken from: Eagar, T. W. and Musso, C. (2001). “Why Did the World Trade Center Collapse?” Science, Engineering, and Speculation”, Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, 53/12:8-11 (2001). [48] Kevin Ryan, A New Standard for Deception, June 4, 2006. See also: NIST and the World Trade Center. Posted by Arabesque at 1:23 PM Labels: Building Designers, John Skilling, Leslie Robertson, World Trade Center Newer Post Older Post Home
[1] Research based on Paul Thompson’s Complete 9/11 Timeline and other sources. http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=leslie_robertson
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#1. To: Kamala (#0)
MIHOP bump
Note ... slow-moving. Or perhaps it indicates that Skilling was exaggerating in order to appease public concern at the time about the towers' safety. Or he just misunderstood what had been done. Why assume a plane of that type would hit the buildings at full speed at all? The ONLY circumstance where that would be remotely likely is a hijacking and deliberate crash. But at that time, engineers were not worrying about hijackers crashing planes into skyscrapers. What they were worrying about is a plane being lost in fog and traveling at a speed well below it's maximum hitting a tower. As actually had happened in the past. There is NOTHING to prove this other than a single paragraph in a public relations document put out by Skilling. There is NO indication in any of 1200 pages of calculations that this is the case. And the engineer that nearly all organizations say was the project engineer and lead structural engineer ... Leslie Robertson ... said this is not the case. And no one from the original design team has come forward to contradict him. This is false. Skilling did not say the towers would survive the fires. He said there would be a horrendous fire (in contrast to what the *truth* crowd alleges). The fact is that engineers in that time period lacked the tools (computers, software and understanding of the physics of fires) to even make such a conclusion with ANY degree of confidence. What he clearly meant is that he thought the structure would survive the impact ... and it did. That is all. Those reading this thread should read this history of what went on back then: 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." This is misleading and false. Misleading because steel framed "building structures" have collapsed due to fire in the past. It's one reason we have very stringent fire codes in steel-framed buildings. It's misleading because no steel-framed skyscraper has ever been hit by a large commercial jet containing large amounts of jet fuel at nearly maximum velocity. Misleading because no steel-framed skyscraper has ever burned without some form of fire suppression effort taking place to resist the spread of the fire. Misleading because the WTC tower construction was very different from other skyscrapers that caught fire. And false because all portions of the Windsor Tower in Madrid that depended on a steel frame did in fact collapse due to fire. The ONLY reason the Windsor Tower didn't collapse is that the rest of the tower depended on a reinforced concrete frame. This is misleading. This leaves the reader with the notion that the White Paper was only on this analysis, contained further details about the analysis, and that this was it's overall conclusion. Wrong. Here is the white paper: What was quoted is just a single paragraph (item number 3) in a white paper covering ELEVEN topics. In fact, this was the ONLY paragraph in the paper concerning this analysis. There were no other details. Furthermore, a reading of the White Paper shows it was written as a public relations piece where nothing that might negatively influence the public's perception of the towers would be mentioned. Skilling and company were worried about losing potential occupants of the towers. Hence, there would be a tendency on his part to overstate the towers' safety. This is misleading. They make it sound like some devious government plot. The truth is that public access to the design documents was prevented due to rulings by a judge in the legal actions related to 9/11 insurance claims and due to concerns by those involved in the lawsuits. Blame lawyers and our legal system ... don't blame "the government". Don't be excessively paranoid. And note the following article ... http://undicisettembre.blogspot.com/2007/04/whistleblower-wtc-blueprints.html . It takes the claims about the significance of those drawings and what the conspiracy community claims about them apart. I quote a few excepts from it just to get your interest: "These blueprints, however, are not the first to surface. I had already received copies of the Twin Towers' construction blueprints from a senior Italian architect who had been involved with the WTC project at the time, and research I conducted in 2003 and 2004 pointed out that private rescuers had retained microfilms of the design and construction drawings. ... snip ... On page 47 of the Italian edition, Langenwiesche discusses LERA (an engineering firm run by Leslie E. Robertson, the designer of the World Trade Center) and states that LERA used its own copy of the original drawings (the only surviving copy, since the remainder of the documents were stored by PANYNJ in its offices in the North Tower and was thus lost in the collapse) with great care and sparingly, carefully controlling dissemination in order to ensure that LERA would be involved in the clearing and rebuilding process and to protect itself in view of the impending victim compensation lawsuits. ... snip ... the provided TIFF drawings are architectural blueprints, not the construction blueprints. ... snip ... I checked this illustration against the corresponding blueprint, which is identified as A-A-143 and shows the core structure for floors 84 to 86. The match is perfect. I also checked many of the indications of the floors at which the column cross-section changed, and again the match is perfect. Accordingly, it is false to claim that NIST provided misleading information regarding the cross-section of the columns. Anyone claiming this is in bad faith or has an inadequate grasp of the official reports. That's a polite way of saying that the people who make such claims haven't even bothered to read the reports they're trying to criticize. ... snip ... It is therefore absolutely evident that any use of these architectural drawings to investigate not only the dimensions of the columns but even merely their cross-sectional shape is a harebrained approach, worthy of those who posit the involvement of nukes or space rays in the collapse of the WTC. ... snip ... In view of these findings, I believe there is no way one can claim that NIST attempted to provide misleading information. Those who make such allegations are probably poorly informed or lack the technical skills needed to comprehend the wording of specialist reports. ... snip ... In summary: the release of the architectural blueprints is certainly important, because it allows us to increase our knowledge of the buildings (for example the layout of the elevators). But it would be absolutely wrong, and ethically unacceptable, to use these documents to mount a campaign against NIST's technical reports. I believe that these findings also clearly show how gratuitous and groundless the CT's allegations of manipulation are." This is misleading. DeMartini was NOT the construction manager during the construction of the World Trade Center. He was about 14 at the time. So he's in no position to know this. Second, he is NOT a structural engineer. His degree was in architecture. So he's not really qualified to make such a calculation. Indeed, in his statement, he completely overlooked the importance of velocity in the impact. The WTC towers were NOT "designed" for a impact. They were reportedly ANALYZED for an impact. And it was most likely a low-speed, not a high speed impact. And where in the world does he get the multiple impact claim? Out of thin air, perhaps? If so, he stayed out of ignorance. But God bless him, anyway. Why cut out the sentence "A lot of people would be killed." and the phrase "However, Skilling said," before the last sentence? Skillings was not necessarily saying the structure would survive the fires. What he wrote can easily be interpreted to mean only that he thought the structure would survive the impact and be there when the fires began. And it was. This is misleading because these were not jet fuel fires. The jet fuel only started the fires. This is completely false. There were no "recorded" temperatures. What NIST did is determine what peak temperatures certain samples of steel taken from the towers experienced. All of these samples still had paint on them because the test required it. Thus they pre-selected out any steel that saw temperatures high enough to remove the paint. They did this because they couldn't find a robust test procedure for higher temperatures. The results of those tests validated the fire code results since the fire code results indicate temperatures consistent with the test results in each of the locations where the steel samples were obtained. BUT the fire code results indicate there were far higher temperatures in other locations. And those temperatures are by far high enough to significantly weaken unprotected steel. In conclusion ... Why is it the *truth* movement members, like Mark, must continue to rely on deceptive and lying articles like this one?
--------------------------------------------------------- Aren't you lucky. You get to receive one of the 15 posts I'm allowed each day.
#2. To: Kamala, ALL (#0)
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.’
John Skilling explained that they “looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side… 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.”[9]
This indicates that the building designers considered Boeing 707 airplane impact speeds of 600 mph.
It is likely that the designers considered this speed of impact for the reason that the cruse speed of a Boeing 707 is 607 mph.
Not only were these speeds anticipated by the building designers
In 1993, Skilling explained that they performed an analysis that concluded that the WTC towers would survive the impact and jet fuel fires from a Boeing 707:
In fact, no steel-framed building structures had ever collapsed due to fire before or since 9/11.
A three-page white paper, dated February 3, 1964.”[17] This ‘white paper’ concluded that: “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.”[18]
The lack of access to WTC building documents remains a problem to this day. Indeed, in March of 2007, Steven Jones and Scholars for 9/11 Truth and Justice finally obtained the WTC blueprints from a ‘whistle-blower’.
Not only were the towers designed to survive plane crashes, they were designed to potentially survive multiple plane crashes. This fact is supported by Frank A. Demartini, the on-site construction manager for the World Trade Center,
Demartini appeared to be so confident that the towers would not collapse that he stayed behind to help save at least 50 people.
These statements ignore the fact that Skilling claimed in 1993 that “Our analysis [in 1964] 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.”[36]
The presence of molten steel would be very surprising because jet fuel fires are incapable of melting steel.
In fact, NIST reported that the highest recorded temperatures of the jet fuel fires from the WTC were not even enough to weaken the steel.
Conclusions
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