A friend of mine once asked me my opinion on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, and I said I didn’t think there was much to them, and he said “What about WTC building 7? It collapsed at near free-fall speed into its own footprint, despite not being hit by a plane.” and I said “I’m sure you’re mistaken, but I’ll look into it.”
And so I looked into it, and… well, he wasn’t mistaken. A 47 story skyscraper collapsed at near free-fall speed into its own footprint, despite not being hit by a plane.
The FEMA report contains the following rube goldbergian explanation for the collapse:
Power to the Twin Towers was wired from the substation in WTC 7 through two separate systems. The first provided power throughout each building; the second provided power only to the emergency systems. In the event of fire, power would only be provided to the emergency systems. This was to prevent arcing electric lines igniting new fires and to reduce the risk of firefighters being electrocuted. There were also six 1,200 kW emergency power generators located in the sixth basement (B-6) level of the towers, which provided a backup power supply. These also had normal and emergency subsystems.
Previous to the collapse of the South Tower, the power to the towers was switched to the emergency subsystem to provide power for communications equipment, elevators, emergency lighting in corridors and stairwells, and fire pumps and safety for firefighters. At this time power was still provided by the WTC 7 substation.
Con Ed reported that “the feeders supplying power to WTC 7 were de-energized at 9:59 a.m.”. This was due to the South Tower collapse which occurred at the same time.
Unfortunately, even though the main power system for the towers was switched off and WTC 7 had been evacuated, a design flaw allowed generators (designed to supply backup power for the WTC complex) to start up and resume an unnecessary and unwanted power supply.
Unfortunately, debris from the collapse of the north tower (the closest tower) fell across the building known as World Trade Center Six, and then across Vesey Street, and then impacted WTC 7 which is (at closest) 355 feet away from the north tower.
Unfortunately, some of this debris penetrated the outer wall of WTC 7, smashed half way through the building, demolishing a concrete masonry wall (in the north half of the building) and then breached a fuel oil pipe that ran across the building just to the north of the masonry wall.
Unfortunately, though most of the falling debris was cold, it manages to start numerous fires in WTC 7.
Unfortunately, even with the outbreak of numerous fires in the building, no decision was made to turn off the generators now supplying electricity to WTC 7. Fortunately, for the firefighters, someone did make the decision not to fight and contain the fires while they were still small, but to wait until the fires were large and out of control. Otherwise, many firefighters may have been electrocuted while fighting the fires.
Unfortunately, the safety mechanism that should have shut down the fuel oil pumps (which were powered by electricity) upon the breaching of the fuel line, failed to work and fuel oil (diesel) was pumped from the Salomon Smith Barney tanks on the ground floor onto the 5th floor where it ignited. The pumps eventually emptied the tanks, pumping some 12,000 gallons in all.
Unfortunately, the sprinkler system of WTC 7 malfunctioned and did not extinguish the fires.
Unfortunately, the burning diesel heated trusses one and two to the point that they lost their structural integrity.
Unfortunately, this then (somehow) caused the whole building to collapse, even though before September 11, no steel framed skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire.
The NIST report says that the failure of a single column near ground level led, first to a vertical progression of failures, causing the collapse of the East Penthouse, followed by a horizontal progression of failures leading to the near-simultainious collapse of all of the building’s 27 core columns.
The official 9/11 commission report, in its 568 pages, does not mention building 7 at all.
That explanation seems a lot less Rube Goldbergian than a sinister conspiracy rigging a side building that wasn’t hit by a plane with explosives. What on Earth would have been the point? Which of the conspiracy’s goals will fail to be achieved if building 7 does not fall down? All you’re doing here is learning a valuable lesson about the ability of conspiracy theorists to present evidence that looks around that convincing in favor of anything. Recalibrate your sensors for how much evidence something which looks “around that convincing” is.
In addition, building 7 housed documents relating to numerous SEC investigations. The files for approximately three to four thousand cases were destroyed, according to the Los Angeles Times.
So some shadowing group kills two thousand people, arranges planes to get flown into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the middle of Pennsylvania and does hundreds of billions in damage to the economy to pick up an insurance check… when the building was on some of the most expensive real estate in the world? Or to destroy evidence the SEC had? Is that how you would do it? Really?
Those events are a priori unlikely but given that WTC 7 did in fact fall down the above seems as likely a sequence as any. Certainly more likely that a conspiracy.
Unfortunately, even though the main power system for the towers was switched off and WTC 7 had been evacuated, a design flaw allowed generators (designed to supply backup power for the WTC complex) to start up and resume an unnecessary and unwanted power supply.
Did someone explain the sequence of events that led to the building falling by positing a design flaw or has the existence of the design flaw been confirmed independently? It doesn’t really matter but it would be interesting to know. I have the same question re: other mechanical failures and design issues.
The remaining sequence of events seems basically plausible given unique circumstances and an uncoordinated response (which was justifiably focused on the towers). And the rest is just noise- in the exact same way the weird facts about glass on clothing, washing machines and mops are noise in the Knox case.
Actually, what we have here is considerably worse than the case against Knox. At least the Knox prosecutors are able to tell a story consistent with the facts in which Knox is guilty. Here we are expected to believe there was a conspiracy without having any idea how such a conspiracy could have happened. There is no plausible motive given the kind of coordination that would have been necessary. No explanation for how so many people were kept quiet. There isn’t even a suspect! Just something seemingly improbable and a lot of hand waving. Knox and Sallecito’s prosecutors were privileging the hypothesis, here we don’t even have a hypothesis.
As to the design flaw, yes, it’s hypothetical, as is the debris falling across the street and through the concrete wall in the middle of the building, as is the fuel system even having any fuel in it, etc.
I certainly sympathize with your complaint about noise as it applies to conspiracy theories in general, this is indeed problem #1. Massive, massive amounts of red herrings. I think this summary is fairly clean of it, but if you have specific complaints I’d be happy to hear them.
I agree that the chain seems convoluted, but do we really have a baseline for what is plausible when airplanes start flying into buildings in a dense urban area?
well, it’s not like WTC was hit by any of those airplanes, but I suppose one might argue for a certain “the world has gone topsy-turvy” latitude in explanation. How this additional uncertainty results in “no explosives” being a “slam dunk”, I’m not sure.
(Apologies if this is the same question that gets asked in every thread of this kind; I freely admit to not having researched this.)
What motive would the conspirators have for demolishing WTC7 with explosives? If they wanted to start a war or increase wiretapping or get Bush re-elected, or whatever the motive was, flying planes into the towers was enough. Blowing up WTC7, and especially blowing up WTC7 without arranging a plausible explanation (like “a plane flew into it”, as they did with the towers) seems careless and unnecessary—out of character for a group of people careful and competent enough to arrange 9/11 and get away with it.
What irks me about this is that you probably don’t know what an uncontrolled demolition brought on by massive pieces of falling building, thousands of gallons of rushing diesel fuel, and apparently unstable electric conditions ought to look like. I certainly don’t.
I expect it would look like the building FALLING OVER, among other things. Making a building fall straight down into its own footprint is actually quite tricky. Buildings are designed to stay in one piece.
Off the top of my head, pulverizing the buildings into small pieces allows for a much more complete destruction of evidence than simply tipping them over would have. After building seven “fell down”, the rubble was quickly shipped off to blast furnaces, ironically under the supervision of a company called “Controlled Demolition Inc.”
Evidence of how the alleged demolition was accomplished is best eliminated by demolishing the building?
Ironically, what you find to be an ironic coincidence sends the signal that you’re inappropriately excited by cute but totally non-causal coincidences.
They’re designed to stay in one piece under normal conditions, and predictable disaster conditions. Clearly this wasn’t one of those, but you expect the same thing to happen?
Wait, what? Neither of those tipped like you said you would expect.
I meant that they stayed in one piece, as per your objection. No, they did not fall over, but then these have had their lower floors taken out symmetrically. Presumably a natural disaster would not be as forgiving.
Such material should come with a link to an official source. Right now, I lack the motivation to research on my own, but until I see a confirmation, I can’t exclude a hypothesis that the above text was concocted by a conspiracy theorist.
I’m not sure how to source something not mentioning something, but this is the official 9/11 commission report, if you’d like to not read about building 7 at all.
This link is to a conspiracy theory site, with inline comments by conspiracy theorists! The link to the original document at the end of the page doesn’t work.
And this is the NIST report
This is a news piece about the report, not the report itself. It contains a link to the report. In the report, page 33 begins the executive summary. As opposed to the summary you posted, it’s isn’t optimized for sounding ridiculous, while acknowledging the fact that similar fires never collapsed similar buildings before, etc.
Factors contributing to the building failure were: thermal expansion occurring at temperatures hundreds of degrees below those typically considered in design practice for establishing structural fire resistance ratings; significant magnification of thermal expansion effects due to the long-span floors, which are common in office buildings in widespread use; connections that were designed to resist gravity loads, but not thermally induced lateral loads; and a structural system that was not designed to prevent fire-induced progressive collapse.
Within the building were emergency electric power generators, whose fuel supply tanks lay in and under the building. However, fuel oil fires did not play a role in the collapse of WTC 7.
A friend of mine once asked me my opinion on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, and I said I didn’t think there was much to them, and he said “What about WTC building 7? It collapsed at near free-fall speed into its own footprint, despite not being hit by a plane.” and I said “I’m sure you’re mistaken, but I’ll look into it.”
And so I looked into it, and… well, he wasn’t mistaken. A 47 story skyscraper collapsed at near free-fall speed into its own footprint, despite not being hit by a plane.
The FEMA report contains the following rube goldbergian explanation for the collapse:
Power to the Twin Towers was wired from the substation in WTC 7 through two separate systems. The first provided power throughout each building; the second provided power only to the emergency systems. In the event of fire, power would only be provided to the emergency systems. This was to prevent arcing electric lines igniting new fires and to reduce the risk of firefighters being electrocuted. There were also six 1,200 kW emergency power generators located in the sixth basement (B-6) level of the towers, which provided a backup power supply. These also had normal and emergency subsystems.
Previous to the collapse of the South Tower, the power to the towers was switched to the emergency subsystem to provide power for communications equipment, elevators, emergency lighting in corridors and stairwells, and fire pumps and safety for firefighters. At this time power was still provided by the WTC 7 substation.
Con Ed reported that “the feeders supplying power to WTC 7 were de-energized at 9:59 a.m.”. This was due to the South Tower collapse which occurred at the same time.
Unfortunately, even though the main power system for the towers was switched off and WTC 7 had been evacuated, a design flaw allowed generators (designed to supply backup power for the WTC complex) to start up and resume an unnecessary and unwanted power supply.
Unfortunately, debris from the collapse of the north tower (the closest tower) fell across the building known as World Trade Center Six, and then across Vesey Street, and then impacted WTC 7 which is (at closest) 355 feet away from the north tower.
Unfortunately, some of this debris penetrated the outer wall of WTC 7, smashed half way through the building, demolishing a concrete masonry wall (in the north half of the building) and then breached a fuel oil pipe that ran across the building just to the north of the masonry wall.
Unfortunately, though most of the falling debris was cold, it manages to start numerous fires in WTC 7.
Unfortunately, even with the outbreak of numerous fires in the building, no decision was made to turn off the generators now supplying electricity to WTC 7. Fortunately, for the firefighters, someone did make the decision not to fight and contain the fires while they were still small, but to wait until the fires were large and out of control. Otherwise, many firefighters may have been electrocuted while fighting the fires.
Unfortunately, the safety mechanism that should have shut down the fuel oil pumps (which were powered by electricity) upon the breaching of the fuel line, failed to work and fuel oil (diesel) was pumped from the Salomon Smith Barney tanks on the ground floor onto the 5th floor where it ignited. The pumps eventually emptied the tanks, pumping some 12,000 gallons in all.
Unfortunately, the sprinkler system of WTC 7 malfunctioned and did not extinguish the fires.
Unfortunately, the burning diesel heated trusses one and two to the point that they lost their structural integrity.
Unfortunately, this then (somehow) caused the whole building to collapse, even though before September 11, no steel framed skyscraper had ever collapsed due to fire.
The NIST report says that the failure of a single column near ground level led, first to a vertical progression of failures, causing the collapse of the East Penthouse, followed by a horizontal progression of failures leading to the near-simultainious collapse of all of the building’s 27 core columns.
The official 9/11 commission report, in its 568 pages, does not mention building 7 at all.
That explanation seems a lot less Rube Goldbergian than a sinister conspiracy rigging a side building that wasn’t hit by a plane with explosives. What on Earth would have been the point? Which of the conspiracy’s goals will fail to be achieved if building 7 does not fall down? All you’re doing here is learning a valuable lesson about the ability of conspiracy theorists to present evidence that looks around that convincing in favor of anything. Recalibrate your sensors for how much evidence something which looks “around that convincing” is.
Well, building 7 was insured for hundreds of millions of dollars.
In addition, building 7 housed documents relating to numerous SEC investigations. The files for approximately three to four thousand cases were destroyed, according to the Los Angeles Times.
So some shadowing group kills two thousand people, arranges planes to get flown into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the middle of Pennsylvania and does hundreds of billions in damage to the economy to pick up an insurance check… when the building was on some of the most expensive real estate in the world? Or to destroy evidence the SEC had? Is that how you would do it? Really?
Eliezer Yudkowsky has requested that further discussion on this subject be moved to the new 9/11 conspiracy topic he made, over here.
And it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, too. In a word, pffft.
Those events are a priori unlikely but given that WTC 7 did in fact fall down the above seems as likely a sequence as any. Certainly more likely that a conspiracy.
Did someone explain the sequence of events that led to the building falling by positing a design flaw or has the existence of the design flaw been confirmed independently? It doesn’t really matter but it would be interesting to know. I have the same question re: other mechanical failures and design issues.
The remaining sequence of events seems basically plausible given unique circumstances and an uncoordinated response (which was justifiably focused on the towers). And the rest is just noise- in the exact same way the weird facts about glass on clothing, washing machines and mops are noise in the Knox case.
Actually, what we have here is considerably worse than the case against Knox. At least the Knox prosecutors are able to tell a story consistent with the facts in which Knox is guilty. Here we are expected to believe there was a conspiracy without having any idea how such a conspiracy could have happened. There is no plausible motive given the kind of coordination that would have been necessary. No explanation for how so many people were kept quiet. There isn’t even a suspect! Just something seemingly improbable and a lot of hand waving. Knox and Sallecito’s prosecutors were privileging the hypothesis, here we don’t even have a hypothesis.
I’ve addressed the motive in another subthread.
As to the design flaw, yes, it’s hypothetical, as is the debris falling across the street and through the concrete wall in the middle of the building, as is the fuel system even having any fuel in it, etc.
I certainly sympathize with your complaint about noise as it applies to conspiracy theories in general, this is indeed problem #1. Massive, massive amounts of red herrings. I think this summary is fairly clean of it, but if you have specific complaints I’d be happy to hear them.
I agree that the chain seems convoluted, but do we really have a baseline for what is plausible when airplanes start flying into buildings in a dense urban area?
well, it’s not like WTC was hit by any of those airplanes, but I suppose one might argue for a certain “the world has gone topsy-turvy” latitude in explanation. How this additional uncertainty results in “no explosives” being a “slam dunk”, I’m not sure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atbrn4k55lA
It certainly LOOKS like a controlled demolition.
(Apologies if this is the same question that gets asked in every thread of this kind; I freely admit to not having researched this.)
What motive would the conspirators have for demolishing WTC7 with explosives? If they wanted to start a war or increase wiretapping or get Bush re-elected, or whatever the motive was, flying planes into the towers was enough. Blowing up WTC7, and especially blowing up WTC7 without arranging a plausible explanation (like “a plane flew into it”, as they did with the towers) seems careless and unnecessary—out of character for a group of people careful and competent enough to arrange 9/11 and get away with it.
This is a good question, I’ve replied to yudkowsky’s rather more inflammatory version of it above.
For the record, it’s simply not true that fires never cause steel buildings to collapse.
The only total collapse due to fire in that PDF that I see is a 19 story concrete Russian apartment block. That and the buildings from 9/11.
What irks me about this is that you probably don’t know what an uncontrolled demolition brought on by massive pieces of falling building, thousands of gallons of rushing diesel fuel, and apparently unstable electric conditions ought to look like. I certainly don’t.
I expect it would look like the building FALLING OVER, among other things. Making a building fall straight down into its own footprint is actually quite tricky. Buildings are designed to stay in one piece.
Well then why wouldn’t they plant explosives in such a way as to make the building FALL OVER?
Seriously, spend like 5 seconds figuring out what we’re likely to reply before you post.
Off the top of my head, pulverizing the buildings into small pieces allows for a much more complete destruction of evidence than simply tipping them over would have. After building seven “fell down”, the rubble was quickly shipped off to blast furnaces, ironically under the supervision of a company called “Controlled Demolition Inc.”
Evidence of how the alleged demolition was accomplished is best eliminated by demolishing the building?
Ironically, what you find to be an ironic coincidence sends the signal that you’re inappropriately excited by cute but totally non-causal coincidences.
EDIT: Whoops, forgot we were supposed to be discussing this on the other page.
Reply is now here.
They’re designed to stay in one piece under normal conditions, and predictable disaster conditions. Clearly this wasn’t one of those, but you expect the same thing to happen?
Given that that’s what happens in failed controlled demolitions, yeah, I do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGE92upfQM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsePUn5-88c
Wait, what? Neither of those tipped like you said you would expect.
And failed controlled demolitions are not unprecedented disaster conditions, but I suspect this discussion is not worth having.
I meant that they stayed in one piece, as per your objection. No, they did not fall over, but then these have had their lower floors taken out symmetrically. Presumably a natural disaster would not be as forgiving.
Such material should come with a link to an official source. Right now, I lack the motivation to research on my own, but until I see a confirmation, I can’t exclude a hypothesis that the above text was concocted by a conspiracy theorist.
The summaries certainly were written by conspiracy theorists.
Here’s the FEMA report
And this is the NIST report
I’m not sure how to source something not mentioning something, but this is the official 9/11 commission report, if you’d like to not read about building 7 at all.
This link is to a conspiracy theory site, with inline comments by conspiracy theorists! The link to the original document at the end of the page doesn’t work.
This is a news piece about the report, not the report itself. It contains a link to the report. In the report, page 33 begins the executive summary. As opposed to the summary you posted, it’s isn’t optimized for sounding ridiculous, while acknowledging the fact that similar fires never collapsed similar buildings before, etc.
I would like to reply to you, but Eliezer Yudkowsky has requested that further discussion on this subject be moved to the new 9/11 conspiracy topic he made in order to mock it in more detail, over here.
Please repost your comment there, I’m on thin ice and I don’t want to break the rules by replying to you in an unsuitable zone.
I’m not going to repost my comment, but you are welcome to reply on the other thread.