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September 2021: For the past 20 years, conspiracy theories well-nigh the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States have swept the nation. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City, for example, was an within job, according to "truthers" who have propagated the claim for two decades.
It was in this climate that Popular Mechanics first took on the chore of debunking 9/xi myths. Our first written report appeared every bit the comprehend story for the March 2005 issue. The reporting grew into a 2006 book with a frontward by Sen. John McCain, which was updated in 2011. Below, yous'll find a lightly-edited version of the section on the Globe Trade Heart.
20 years later, 9/eleven conspiracy theories linger on. In the years following the study of this publication, truthers would launch of variety of attacks on Popular Mechanics, accusing the mag of being a tool of the federal government and drawing tinfoil-hat diagrams to tie Popular Mechanics to the Bush Administration and the supposed big conspiracy. If all this nonsense accomplished anything, it was to presage our current era of "alternative facts" and attacking the messenger whenever the message clashes with one'due south predetermined behavior.
The plummet of both World Trade Center (WTC) towers—and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours afterwards—initially surprised fifty-fifty some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC's structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire equally well as the astringent harm inflicted past the planes.
Yet, that caption hasn't swayed conspiracy theorists, who fence that all three buildings were wired with explosives in accelerate and razed in a serial of controlled demolitions.
Widespread Damage
Claim: The first hijacked plane crashed through the 94th to the 98th floors of the World Trade Center's 110-story N Tower; the 2d jet slammed into the 78th to the 84th floors of the 110-story South Tower. The affect and ensuing fires disrupted elevator service in both buildings. Plus, the lobbies of both buildings were visibly damaged before the towers collapsed. "There is NO Fashion the impact of the jet caused such widespread damage fourscore stories beneath," claims a posting on the San Diego Contained Media Center website (sandiego.indymedia.org). "It is OBVIOUS and irrefutable that OTHER EXPLOSIVES (... such as concussion bombs) HAD ALREADY BEEN DETONATED in the lower levels of tower one at the same time as the plane crash."
FACT: Following up on a May 2002 preliminary study by the Federal Emergency Direction Agency (FEMA), the National Institute of Standards and Applied science (NIST)—a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce—released another report in jump 2005. NIST shared its initial findings with Popular Mechanics at the time, and made its lead researcher available to our team of reporters.
The NIST investigation revealed that plane debris sliced through the utility shafts at the Northward Tower's core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel—and peppery devastation throughout the building. "It'southward very hard to document where the fuel went," says Forman Williams, a NIST adviser and a combustion practiced, "but if it'south atomized and combustible and gets to an ignition source, it'll go off."
Burning fuel traveling down the elevator shafts would have disrupted the elevator systems and caused extensive damage to the lobbies. NIST heard first-person testimony that "some elevators slammed right downwards" to the basis flooring. "The doors cracked open on the anteroom floor and flames came out and people died," says James Quintiere, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland and a NIST adviser. A similar ascertainment was made in the French documentary ix/eleven by Jules and Gedeon Naudet. As Jules Naudet entered the N Tower lobby, minutes afterward the starting time shipping struck, he saw victims on fire, a scene he institute too horrific to picture show.
"Melted" Steel
Claim: "Nosotros have been lied to," announces the website AttackOnAmerica.cyberspace. "The showtime lie was that the load of fuel from the shipping was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot plenty to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Sabotage At The WTC."
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, non hot plenty to melt steel (2750 degrees Fahrenheit). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to cook, they just had to lose some of their structural strength—and that required exposure to much less heat. "I accept never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Plummet Of Called-for Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to aggrandize at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses well-nigh 50 per centum of its strength at 1100 [degrees Fahrenheit]," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800 [degrees] it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a keen deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the estrus.
But jet fuel wasn't the but affair burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering science at the Academy of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and burn down experts that Popular Mechanics consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material within the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells Pop Mechanics. "It burned for mayhap 10 minutes, and [the towers] were nonetheless continuing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff called-for afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
Puffs of Dust
CLAIM: As each tower collapsed, clearly visible puffs of dust and debris were ejected from the sides of the buildings. An advertisement in The New York Times for the book Painful Questions: An Analysis Of The September 11th Assail made this claim: "The concrete clouds shooting out of the buildings are not possible from a mere collapse. They do occur from explosions." Numerous conspiracy theorists cite Van Romero, an explosives expert and vice president of the New Mexico Establish of Mining and Technology, who was quoted on ix/eleven by the Albuquerque Journal every bit maxim "there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse." The commodity continues, "Romero said the plummet of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures."
FACT: Once each tower began to plummet, the weight of all the floors in a higher place the collapsed zone bore down with pulverizing forcefulness on the highest intact flooring. Unable to absorb the massive energy, that floor would fail, transmitting the forces to the floor beneath, allowing the collapse to progress downward through the building in a chain reaction. Engineers call the procedure "pancaking," and it does not require an explosion to begin, according to David Biggs, a structural engineer at Ryan-Biggs Associates and a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers squad that worked on the FEMA study.
Like all part buildings, the WTC towers contained a huge volume of air. As they pancaked, all that air—along with the physical and other debris pulverized past the strength of the collapse—was ejected with enormous free energy. "When you accept a pregnant portion of a floor collapsing, it'due south going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window," NIST pb investigator Shyam Sunder tells Popular Mechanics. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of a controlled sabotage, Sunder adds, "but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception."
✅ Go the Facts: ix/11 Conspiracy Theories
Demolition skilful Romero regrets that his comments to the Albuquerque Journal became provender for conspiracy theorists. "I was misquoted in proverb that I thought it was explosives that brought down the edifice," he tells Popular Mechanics. "I only said that that'south what it looked like."
Romero, who agrees with the scientific conclusion that fire triggered the collapses, demanded a retraction from the Journal. It was printed Sept. 22, 2001. "I felt like my scientific reputation was on the line." But emperors-clothes.com saw something else: "The paymaster of Romero's research institute is the Pentagon. Directly or indirectly, pressure was brought to carry, forcing Romero to retract his original statement." Romero responds: "Conspiracy theorists came out maxim that the government got to me. That is the farthest thing from the truth. This has been an albatross around my neck for three years."
Seismic Spikes
Merits: Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Globe Observatory in Palisades, New York, 21 miles due north of the WTC, recorded the events of nine/eleven. "The strongest jolts were all registered at the starting time of the collapses, well earlier falling debris struck the earth," reports the website WhatReallyHappened.com. A columnist on Prisonplanet.com, a website run by radio talk show host Alex Jones, claims the seismic spikes (boxed area on Graph 1) are "indisputable proof that massive explosions brought downwardly" the towers. The site says its findings are supported by two seismologists at the observatory, Won-Young Kim and Arthur Lerner-Lam. Each "sharp fasten of curt duration," says Prisonplanet.com, was consistent with a "sabotage-way implosion."
Revisionists say sharp spikes (graph 1, to a higher place) mean bombs toppled the WTC. Scientists disagree with the claim.
FACT: "In that location is no scientific footing for the determination that explosions brought downwardly the towers," Lerner-Lam tells Popular Mechanics. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later plummet of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only i graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time bridge.
On that graph, the viii- and 10-2nd collapses appear—misleadingly—as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same information gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves—blue for the South Tower, red for the North Belfry—start pocket-size and then escalate equally the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.
WTC 7 Collapse
CLAIM: Seven hours after the two towers roughshod, the 47-story WTC 7 collapsed. According to 911review.org: "The video conspicuously shows that it was not a collapse subsequent to a burn, but rather a controlled demolition: amongst the Cyberspace investigators, the jury is in on this i."
WTC 7 stands amid the rubble of the recently collapsed Twin Towers. Damaged by falling debris, the building then endures a fire that rages for hours. Experts say this combination, not a demolition-style implosion, led to the roofline "kink" that signals WTC 7'south progressive collapse.
FACT: Many conspiracy theorists signal to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively low-cal harm to WTC 7 prior to its plummet. With the benefit of more fourth dimension and resources, NIST researchers at present back up the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA study indicated. "The about important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical impairment to the due south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells Popular Mechanics. "On almost a third of the face to the center and to the bottom—approximately ten stories—about 25 percentage of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural harm contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more than research. But NIST's analysis suggests the autumn of WTC seven was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC seven show cracks, or "kinks," in the building'south facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, i after the other. The entire building savage in on itself, with the slumping east side of the construction pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
According to NIST, there was one main reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were conveying exceptionally big loads, roughly 2000 square anxiety of flooring area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out but one cavalcade on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could crusade a vertical progression of collapse so that the unabridged section comes down."
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: Get-go, trusses on the 5th and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from ane set of columns to another. With columns on the south face plain damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
Second, a 5th-floor fire burned for up to seven hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the 5th flooring was connected to a big tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of fourth dimension."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the burn down that burned for hours, just those combined factors—along with the building'south unusual construction—were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
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The Berenstain Bear Scouts and the Sci-fi Pizza Guided Reading Level
Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a6384/debunking-911-myths-world-trade-center/