WTC Blueprints Leaked by Whistleblower |
Unseen documents show official investigations used flawed construction details
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 A whistleblower that was on a team working for Silverstein Group in 2002 has made public an extensive set of detailed architectural drawings of the World Trade Center, that prove beyond any doubt that the official reports into the collapse of the towers misrepresented their construction.
The documents were passed to physics Professor Steven Jones, formerly of Brigham Young University, who has done extensive research into the collapse of the buildings and contends that explosives were used to bring them down.
Little is known about the identity of the whistleblower at this point, however the blueprints provided consist of 261 drawings included detailed plans for the North Tower (WTC 1), the World Trade Center foundation and basement, and the TV mast on top of the North Tower.
Most of the drawings can be viewed here.
The blueprints, unlike those of any other publicly funded building, have been withheld from public view since the 9/11 attacks without explanation and were even unavailable for viewing by the team of engineers from the American Society of Civil Engineers, who were assembled to investigate the collapses by FEMA, until they had signed legal documents which bound them to secrecy and demanded that they never use the information against the buildings' owners as part of a lawsuit.
The website 911research.wtc7.net, one of the sites at the forefront of independent investigation into 9/11 for years now, states:
The detailed architectural drawings make clear what official reports have apparently attempted to hide: that the Twin Towers had massive core columns, and those columns ran most of the height of each Tower before transitioning to columns with smaller cross-sections.
Both of the government-sponsored engineering studies of the Twin Towers' "collapses" -- FEMA's and NIST's -- are highly misleading about the core structures. Neither Report discloses dimensions for core columns -- dimensions that are clearly evident in the architectural drawings. Both Reports use a variety of techniques seemingly designed to minimize the strength of the cores or to conceal their structural role entirely.
FEMA, in its explanation of the collapses, stated:
As the floors collapsed, this left tall freestanding portions of the exterior wall and possibly central core columns. As the unsupported height of these freestanding exterior wall elements increased, they buckled at the bolted column splice connections, and also collapsed.
The blueprints show that FEMA's report was inaccurate in stating that core columns were "freestanding" when in fact large horizontal beams cross-connected the core columns in a three-dimensional matrix of steel.
The NIST report into the collapses has also been proven inaccurate by the blueprints as it has implied that the only the corner columns were "massive" and that the core columns decreased in size in the higher stories when, in fact, the sixteen columns on the long faces of the cores shared the same dimensions for most of each Tower's height.
These omitted and distorted facts serve to render the official reports extremely questionable. It seems that facts were being tweaked in order to get closer to an explanation for the collapses. Even then the reports both failed to provide adequate explanations of why the buildings fell.
The buildings more or less fell into their own footprints, which is something that normally takes weeks of expert planning when a building is intentionally demolished and there are only a few companies on the planet that can do it.
Within each trade tower there were 47 steel columns at the core and 240 perimeter steel beams. 287 steel-columns in total. According to the official story, random spread out fires on different floors caused all these columns to totally collapse at the same time and at a free fall speed, with no resistance from undamaged parts of the structure.
Professor Steven Jones points out that the total annihilation of the building, core columns and all, defies the laws of physics unless it was artificially exploded:
"Where is the delay that must be expected due to conservation of momentum – one of the foundational Laws of Physics? That is, as upper-falling floors strike lower floors – and intact steel support columns – the fall must be significantly impeded by the impacted mass. If the central support columns remained standing, then the effective resistive mass would be less, but this is not the case – somehow the enormous support columns failed/disintegrated along with the falling floor pans."
Below is an examination of the official reports in more detail.
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The Official Explanation of the collapses of the Trade Towers and Building 7
The official explanation says that the towers collapsed because of the combined effect of the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires. The report put out by FEMA said: “The structural damage sustained by each tower from the impact, combined with the ensuing fires, resulted in the total collapse of each building".
And building 7's collapse according to FEMA was also due to fire, however FEMA could not give specific details:
"The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse [“official theory”] remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis [fire/damage-caused collapse] has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue."
FEMA is not an investigative agency, but it was entrusted with the sole responsibility for investigating the collapses. It began to coordinate the destruction of the evidence almost immediately. The structural steel was quickly removed and loaded on ships for transport to blast furnaces in India and China. Meanwhile, FEMA's investigation of the collapses consisted of assembling a group of volunteer investigators from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), dubbed the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT). The group was headed by W. Gene Corley, a structural engineer from Chicago who led the investigation of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
FEMA's investigation of one of the worst and most pivotal events in history was farcical:
No independent investigation was funded: FEMA allocated $600,000 for the BPAT's study, which included the cost of printing their report.
Except for an early "tourist trip", The BPAT volunteers were barred from Ground Zero.
They did not see a single piece of steel until almost a month after the disaster.
They had to guess the original locations of the few pieces of steel they saw.
They collected 150 pieces of steel for further study (out of millions of pieces).
Their report, which called for "further investigation and analysis", was published after Ground Zero had been scrubbed.
A key facet of the FEMA report on the towers' collapse was the pancaking floors theory, whereby each floor successively gave way due to buckled columns and the weight from above. This theory has since been roundly dismissed as it totally ignores the fact that the building's central core columns even existed and also ignores the toppling effect witnessed during the collapse of the South Tower and the explosive pulverizing of all materials into fine powder.
NIST's Investigation
It was not until long after the Ground Zero clean-up was completed that an investigation with a multi-million dollar budget began: NIST's 'Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation' was funded with an initial budget of $16 million.
Where as the FEMA investigation in understanding the Collapse of the World Trade Center could be chalked up as a farce, the NIST's investigation cannot. NIST's results strongly indicate a cover-up. NIST's Final Report on the Twin Towers shows that:
NIST avoids describing, let alone explaining, the "collapse" of each Tower after they were "poised for collapse." Thus, NIST avoids answering the question their investigation was tasked with answering: how did the Towers collapse?
NIST describes the Twin Towers without reference to the engineering history of steel-framed buildings, and separates its analysis of WTC Building 7 into a separate report. By treating them in isolation, NIST hides just how anomalous the alleged collapses of the buildings are.
NIST avoids disclosing the evidence sulfidation documented in Appendix C of the FEMA's Building Performance Study.This unexplained phenomenon was described by the New York Times as "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation."
NIST has refused to publish the computer models that its report imply show how the fires in the Towers led to "collapse initiation".
The report explains the collapse of both towers with the following sentence:
"The change in potential energy due to downward movement of building mass above the buckled columns exceeded the strain energy that could have been absorbed by the structure. Global collapse then ensued."
So NIST promulgates a theory of "progressive collapse" - ie once the top started coming down, the whole lot came down with it, even the undamaged sections of the building. NIST admits that it didn't even attempt to model the undamaged portions of the building and only modeled a portion of each tower in any detail -- its "global floor model" which consisted of "several stories below the impact area to the top of the structure." Thus the structurally intact floors 1-91 of WTC 1 and floors 1-77 of WTC 2 were excluded from the so called "global" models of the towers. NIST provides no evidence that its model even predicted "collapse initiation".
The excellent research website www.911review.com, which everyone should visit, succinctly sums up the cover up perpetrated by the NIST report:
In summary: The reports by NIST say nothing about how -- and if! -- the collapse was able to progress through dozens and dozens of structurally intact floors without being stopped. If no external energy was available e.g. in the form of explosives, this would have been the opportunity to show that no such energy was needed. On the other hand, if some unaccounted-for energy broke the supporting structures enabling the collapse to progress with the speed it did, there would have been many good reasons not to try to model the impossible, ie. a purely gravitation-driven collapse. Stopping the analysis early enough also saves NIST from trying to explain the symmetrically of the collapses (despite non-symmetrical impact damage and fires), the almost complete pulverization of non-metallic materials as well as the extremely hot spots in the rubble. These remain as inexplicable by the official story as they have ever been.
Despite calls from leading structural and fire engineers, and despite the fact that they published models of the plane impacts, NIST has refused to publish visual simulations from its computer models of the collapses.
In an even more startling admission in its own report, NIST reveals that it "adjusted the input" of variables in tests beyond the visual evidence of what actually happened in order to save its own hypothesis:
"The more severe case (which became Case B for WTC 1 and Case D for WTC 2) was used for the global analysis of each tower. Complete sets of simulations were then performed for Cases B and D. To the extent that the simulations deviated from the photographic evidence or eyewitness reports [e.g., complete collapse occurred], the investigators adjusted the input, but only within the range of physical reality. Thus, for instance,…the pulling forces on the perimeter columns by the sagging floors were adjusted..." (NIST, 2005, p. 142)
NIST simply "discarded" realistic tests based on the empirical data because they did not cause the buildings to collapse.
If this is not indicative of a cover up then what is? The investigation is the wrong way round, NIST has already decided what happened and is manufacturing data to prove it!