Slides #30/31 - New York Times Article

This slide and this slide are actually the same slide, revealed part by part during Gage's presentation. At his website, Gage shows this effect by reproducing it twice or three times with new information revealed on subsequent slides. However, I'm going to treat this slide and others like it on a single page.

Gage's Problems with Quotation Marks

A funny thing happened while I was looking up this article at the New York Times website. I plugged in the given title: "Engineers Are Baffled Over The Collapse of WTC 7." That doesn't bring up anything at all from a NYTimes archives search. No combination of the title as keywords, no direct quote, nothing!

Strange. Yet Gage has that headline in quotes, as if it came straight from the page.

So I grabbed a sentence from the story on the slide and did yet another search. Bingo! The article was right there!

And what do you know? That wasn't the actual title at all. Guess what it was?

A NATION CHALLENGED
THE SITE
Engineers Have a Culprit in the Strange Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: Diesel Fuel

By JAMES GLANZ
Published: November 29, 2001

Well, at least Gage got the date right.

You know, when it gets to this level of cherrypicking, you just have to wonder. When you have red-hot, smoking quotes from a New York Times article, but you can't use the actual title in your slide because it will undercut the presentation, it takes a certian level of something or other to just make up a title. I mean, the word "baffled" isn't even used in the article.

Understand: I'm not questioning the description at all. The article itself says that the engineers were stunned by WTC 7 even after getting a handle on the collapse of the towers. It says that they were struggling to explain it when they started looking at the diesel fuel in the building. And the delay of the final report of NIST on this building is now legendary.

But why make up a title at all? Why put it into quotes like it was actually from the newspaper? Especially when there are suitable quotes for your purpose in the article?

Honestly, why not just use the quotes you want to use and simply cite "New York Times, 29 Nov 2001"?

It isn't because Gage wouldn't want you to go looking up that article, is it?

Some Quotes Gage Wouldn't Want You To See

Here are some other interesting quotes to read from Gage's proof text, some that failed to make the cherrypick:

With the collapse of both towers by 10:30 a.m., larger pieces of the twin towers had smashed parts of 7 World Trade and set whole clusters of floors ablaze. An hour later, the Fire Department was forced to abandon its last efforts to save the building as it burned like a giant torch. It fell in the late afternoon, hampering rescue efforts and hurling its beams into the ground like red-hot spears.

...Falling debris also caused major structural damage to the building, which soon began burning on multiple floors, said Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the Fire Department. By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away from it for safety reasons.

A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Barnett said.

"Any structure anywhere in the world, if you put it in these conditions, it will not stand," Mr. Marcus said. "The buildings are not designed to be a torch."

My goodness. No wonder Gage doesn't want you reading that article. If you did, you just might get the impression that heavily damaged buildings that become giant torches fall down. That would spoil the cherry truth pie Gage is cooking in your mind.

The "Stunned" Engineers

It's worth noting at this point that WTC 7 has indeed been a thorny problem for engineers. As the New York Times shows, the building collapse is important to structural engineers for a lot of reasons. The towers had their fireproofing blasted away in the impact zone by the aircraft, but 7 didn't have this kind of damage. It did stand for much longer than the towers, probably as a result of not losing its fireproofing. But finding out the various weaknesses that allows the total collapse of 7 World Trade would help engineers build stronger and safer buildings in the future.

Indeed, the new 7 World Trade has many different innovations to guard against the kind of collapse that took its predecessor. The two most relevant to our discussion at this point is that there is no simple steel frame in the core (it's been reinforced with concrete), and the fireproofing is four times thicker than it needs to be.

The long-delayed NIST Final Report on 7 World Trade is due to be released in draft form July of this year.

"Had Ever Collapsed Because Of A Fire"

No other building has ever had the kind of structural damage that 7 World Trade suffered (except for the Twin Towers). No other building has had the fires left unfought for hours (except for the Twin Towers).

Gage seems perilously close to making the argument that steel-frame buildings cannot fall down under any circumstances. He does not, because this would be a foolish thing to say. But the way that controlled demolition advocates bandy this statement around, you begin to wonder if that's what they really think. And that would be a great question to ask anyone who quotes this section of the Times article, by the way.

Are there any circumstances that could lead to the collapse of a steel-framed building?

The answers from CD advocates might surprise you.

On the next slide, Gage will show examples of buildings on fire that did not collapse the way 7 World Trade did. I'll deal with them there.

The Diesel Fuel and the Evaporated Steel

The "culprit" in the 2001 article quoted by Gage appears to not be so important after all. NIST released an update on the status of their 7 World Trade report in December of 2007 (pdf), and they had this to say about the fires in the building:

The working hypothesis is based on an initial local failure caused by normal building fires, not fires from leaking pressurized fuel lines or fuel from day tanks.

Apparently the fires in the building were sufficient to cause the initiating event (whatever it was that led to the failure of column 79) without the additional fuel from the reserve tanks in the building.

The evaporated steel was taken from the debris pile, as noted by the Times article. There is no proof I'm aware of that the evaporation happened before or during the collapse. Indeed, since the steel was taken from the debris pile, it's far more likely that the intense fires under the pile damaged the steel in this way.

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