Issue 12 - Summer 2007     Final Word
	9/11 - The Twin Towers and Common Sense

By Frank Legge, Ph.D.

Before the roof of the North tower of the World Trade Centre became hidden in dust it was falling at a rate which would have brought it to the ground in 10.5 seconds. The US administration expects us to believe that this fall rate is reasonable for a fire and plane damaged building. For comparison the roof on the right in this drawing, freely falling in a vacuum, would take 9.2 seconds.
Thanks to Joe Plummer of Stop the Lie for this thought-provoking drawing. http://stopthelie.com/fire_initiated_collapse.html	Data published by NIST shows that the steel was not hot enough for the collapse to begin. There are also engineers who have worked out that, even if collapse did begin at the damaged level, it would not continue, but would quickly come to a halt. That may be hard to validate, unless you can deal with complex calculations, but what about this time difference, just 1.3 seconds? Does not ordinary common sense tell you that the block on the left will be slowed down if it has to crush its way through over 90 storeys of cold steel and concrete? Would it not take more than 1.3 seconds longer than the one on the right, freely falling? Does this not imply that the undamaged, unheated lower part of the building suddenly lost structural strength in some way? Is there any explanation other than explosives that could account for this sudden loss of strength? No steel framed building has ever collapsed due to fire except on that day, when three tall buildings came down, and they came down impossibly fast. One of these three buildings, WTC 7, was not hit by a plane and showed little evidence of fire. It took no more than half a second longer than free fall to collapse. This building was occupied by the FBI, the CIA and the DoD. Is it feasible that al-Qaeda could have got past all these sensitive organizations to lay explosives without inside help? It is instructive to note that there were four other buildings at the WTC which were badly damaged by fire and falling debris but behaved in the usual way: they did not collapse.
To locate peer reviewed papers which substantiate these claims see: http://journalof911studies.com/ Frank Legge flegge@iinet.net.au Copyright © 2007, Frank Legge. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. ■

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