What Was In Building 7?
Building 7 was one of New York City's larger buildings. A sleek bronze-colored skyscraper with a trapezoidal footprint, it occupied an entire city block and rose over 600 feet above street level.
Built in 1985, it was formerly the headquarters of the junk-bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, which contributed to the Savings and Loans collapse, prompting the $500-billion taxpayer-underwritten bailout of the latter 1980s. At the time of its destruction, it exclusively housed government agencies and financial institutions. It contained offices of the IRS, Secret Service, and SEC.
One of the most interesting tenants was then-Mayor Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management, and its emergency command center on the 23rd floor. This floor received 15 million dollars worth of renovations, including independent and secure air and water supplies, and bullet and bomb resistant windows designed to withstand 200 MPH winds. The 1993 bombing must have been part of the rationale for the command center, which overlooked the Twin Towers, a prime terrorist target.
How curious that on the day of the attack, Guiliani and his Entourage set up shop in a different headquarters, abandoning the special bunker designed precisely for such an event. Hmmmmm.
Building 7 had a number of fires of limited extent and unknown duration before its precipitous sudden collapse at 5:20 PM. Official reports assume that debris from the fall of the North Tower ignited fires at 10:29 AM.
Photographs of the building's north face show only small, barely visible fires. Photographs of the building's east face, apparently from the mid-aternoon, show flames emerging from an isolated section of the 11th floor. Photographs of the building's west face, apparently from the late afternoon, so several areas with smoke stains, but don't show any flames. There appear to be no photographs of Building 7 from a time shortly before its collapse that show large active fires. The photograph below, taken in the afternoon, shows the upper half of Building 7 from the south. There are no signs of fire.
FEMA's report blamed the collapse of Building 7 primarily on fires, though it was inconclusive. NIST's investigation placed much more weight on claims of severe structural damage to the building. Nonetheless, all theories of the collapse that exclude demolition are necessarily primarily fire theories, since the building collapsed almost seven hours after incurring any structural damage from North Tower fallout. It is thus striking that other skyscraper fires exhibited fires that were far more extensive and long lasting that Building 7's, but none of these other buildings collapsed.
Despite the fact that the fires in Building 7 were relatively small and short-lasting compared to other office fires, a decision was made not to fight them. The government has never explained that decision.
The Silence Surrounding Building 7
The American Public was treated to wall-to-wall television coverage of the September 11th attack throughout the day and for nearly the entire following week. Yet most Americans remember only two skyscrapers collapsing in Lower Manhattan on the day of the attack: the Twin Towers. The total collapse of the third huge skyscraper late in the afternoon of September 11th was reported as if it were an insignificant footnote. The television networks played video of the jets impacting the Twin Towers hundreds of times. But most people never saw video of Building 7's collapse.
Building 7 was neither hit by an airplane nor, apparently, by heavy fallout from the collapse of either of the Twin Towers. If you believe the official story that it collapsed from fires, it would be the first case in history in which fires leveled a steel frame building. Shouldn't that have been newsworthy, given its implications for building safety and rescue and firefighting operations? Incredibly, it is very difficult to find any mention of building 7 in newspapers, magazines, or broadcast media reports about the September 11th attack.
Controlled Demolition
Buildings do fall vertically like Building 7, when destroyed by controlled demolition.
The controlled demolition of large structures is a well developed art and science. Removing a tall building from an urban landscape without damaging adjacent structures -- a considerable engineering feat -- is a task that a handful of controlled demolitions companies specialize in. One such company is Controlled Demolition Inc., which, incidentally, was subcontracted by Tully Construction to coordinate the removal of rubble from Ground Zero and the disposal of the structural steel in the months following the attack.
The steel skeletons of buildings like WTC 7 are extremely robust. They are designed to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes, and are over-engineered to handle several times the maximum loads anticipated during their lifetimes. Such steel skeletons have local structural integrity. An event that destroyed one portion of the structure would not case distant portions to shatter. If some force obliterated the load-bearing columns well below the top of a 600-foot tall skyscraper, the top of the building would topple like a tree, not smash its way down through intact floors and into its foundation.
Controlled demolition destroys vertical steel structures while overcoming their tendency to topple onto adjacent real-estate. It does so by shattering the steel skeleton through the precisely timed detonation of explosive charges.
Demolitions are large undertakings with high stakes. The number of charges required is at least the number of columns times some fraction of the number of floors. An error in timing of the detonations could cause expensive collateral damage.
Most demolitions seek to implode the building, causing the mass to move toward the center, resulting in a tidy rubble pile. In tall buildings this is typically done by shattering the interior structures of the building first or ahead of the exterior structures. That causes the interior mass to fall first, pulling outer structures toward the center. Pieces of the outer walls end up on top of the rubble pile. 1 Â
Building 7's documented vertical plunge and tidy rubble pile with exterior wall fragments on top are exactly the kinds of results that controlled demolitions achieve through careful engineering.
In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. So: This building's collapse resulted in a profit of about $500 million!
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