By Brian J. Pape, AIA
The University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) recently released an independent report on
the destruction of 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7), which collapsed into its own ‘footprint’, falling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity (‘free-fall’= no obstruction to the pull of gravity) for a third of its seven-second collapse. The principal conclusion of the University study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7, based upon a number of findings from different analyses.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the official cause for the collapse was normal office fires. Officials from (NIST), after claiming that they found no evidence for explosives, admitted that they did not even look for such evidence, and have since refused to consider the evidence when confronted with it.
Then on the 18th anniversary of one of America’s greatest tragedies, CNBC senior analyst Ron Insana went on New York’s 77 WABC Radio to share his haunting experience of that horrible day, and the fate of WTC 7. Mr. Insana stated “I was standing with some military and police officers….. there were still fears that if that building had fallen sideways, you were going to wipe out a good part of Lower Manhattan. So they did manage for one to take that down in a controlled implosion later on.” (Insana received an Emmy nomination for his reporting of 9/11.)
(In another reported instance, FDNY Lieutenant David Restuccio told MSNBC’s Brian Williams just minutes after the collapse: “We had heard reports that the building was unstable and that eventually it would either come down on its own or it would be taken down.”)
Many independent researchers have studied the collapse of WTC 7 and assembled a body of evidence that raises questions about the validity of NIST’s conclusions.
Fire alone has never brought down a skyscraper before 9/11, nor has one done a “free-fall” from fire alone. The UAF’s 4-year computer modeling study of WTC 7’s collapse was conducted by researchers in the university’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering and Mines (CEM), Institute of Northern Engineering (INE), with J. Leroy Hulsey, Ph.D., P.E., S.E., as lead author. They show that fires could not have caused weakening or displacement of structural members capable of initiating any of the hypothetical local failures alleged to have triggered the total collapse of the building. The collapse of WTC 7 was comprehensive, involving failure of all columns in the building nearly simultaneously, and not a progressive collapse of columns throughout the building in a sequential failure. This conclusion is apparent and obvious to any architect or engineer with even rudimentary knowledge of steel structures.
In the June 2018 issue of West View News, an editorial stated that the Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry (LC) had presented their 52-page report to the US Attorney General in NYC, demanding the re-opening of an investigation into 9/11 by presenting the explosive evidence to a grand jury. This September 2019, the Lawyers Committee filed a Federal Complaint against United States Attorney Geoffrey Berman for the Southern District of New York, William P. Barr, Attorney General of the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice, for Mandamus Relief and Disclosure of Grand Jury Records.
According to the AE911Truth.org website, more than 3,150 Architects & Engineers and 22,787 members of the general public have already signed a petition to urge Congress to re-open the investigation.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks has published the draft report online at university of fairbanks alaska released study on building 7, and this release begins a two-month period during which the public is invited to submit comments. The final report will be published later this year.
For further information, contact the Lawyers’ Committee directly at https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/contact/,
or www.lcfor911.org or https://www.ae911truth.org
Building fell at free-fall – as fast as a bowling ball falling from the sky. Credit: AE911truth.org
Caption: This FEMA plan shows the WTC site and building labels. Credit: FEMA
