Slide #39 - Official Investigations

Poisoning the Well

This slide lists four investigations into the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7. Gage is not happy with these investigations, and so he will be spending much time attacking them.

He gets creative with his quotations marks here, putting a question on the words "investigations," "volunteers," and "assessment." But by and large, he sticks to facts in what he says about them. Let's examine them all.

Structural Engineers Association of New York

Wait, this one isn't on Gage's list. How strange! They had several teams on the ground as early as September 17. Their first report was issued as a map on September 21, and they continued to do "detailed and rapid inspections in September and October 2001."

Their book on the inspections was published in 2003. I don't know how Gage could have missed it.

The American Society of Civil Engineers

At their website, the American Society of Civil Engineers explains who they are and what they do:

The American Society of Civil Engineers, a professional organization representing more than 123,000 civil engineers, celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2002. When the twelve Founders gathered at the Croton Aqueduct on November 5, 1852, and agreed to incorporate the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects, one can only wonder if they dreamed the profound significance and long-lasting impact ASCE would have on the overall development of society. They laid a foundation for what proves to be one of the most prominent engineering societies in the world.

Today ASCE is a worldwide leader for excellence in civil engineering. With a mission to advance professional knowledge and improve the practice of civil engineering, ASCE is a focal point for the development and transfer of research results, and technical policy and managerial information. Through strategic emphasis in key areas, including infrastructure renewal and development, policy leadership and professional development, ASCE delivers the highest quality publications, programs and services to its worldwide membership, demonstrating a daily commitment to sustaining the profession.

As civil engineering enters a new millennium, the American Society of Civil Engineers will take the opportunity of its 150th anniversary to reflect on the profession's rich heritage. Then, equipped with this knowledge, ASCE will develop flexible, forward-thinking plans for the future, and start its 151st year with a renewed foundation for progress, leadership and growth in quality.

The ASCE prepared this shockwave presentation that quickly summarizes their response to the attacks. It ends with the names of the five ASCE members that lost their lives that day.

You can also find Gene Corley's testimony before Congress from March 6, 2002, here (pdf). It contains an overview of just what ASCE had done, beginning on the afternoon of 9/11, to investigate these collapses. By May 2002, the World Trade Center team had produced a preliminary report on not only these three buildings, but all the WTC complex buildings and several others in the area. Corley notes that this was the fifth time in 2001 that such steps were taken to investigate building collapses, and that this was something the ASCE did regularly.

The Simple Analysis Paper by Bazant & Zhou

Wow, this didn't make Gage's list either. I wonder why not?

After all, these two structural engineers were able to show mathematically that the upper sections of the towers need only have fallen a single story (pdf) before possessing enough kinetic energy to tear the lower structure apart.

In fact, the upper section would have had more than enough energy by an order of magnitude.

This analysis was published in the Journal of Engineering Mechanics (Vol. 128, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 2-6, addendum, pp. 369-370). They submitted the paper on September 14, 2001, and after peer review, the paper was approved with an addendum on October 8, 2001.

Volume 128 means 128 years of continous publication. The JOEM is a very prestigious engineering journal, in other words. It's even published by the ASCE. Is that not official enough for Richard Gage?

The Federal Emergency Management Agency Reports

FEMA regularly performs building performance assessment (BPA) after major disasters in the United States, and 9/11 would be no different. On October 1, 2001, FEMA joined forces with the ongoing ASCE investigation, and together the two agencies produced the May 2002 Building Performance Assessment report. The ASCE team became the BPA Team (BPAT), in effect.

The Exponent Failure Analysis Associates Report

Oh, wait. This isn't on Gage's list, either. How strange! This report was commissioned by Larry Silverstein's insurers, and they were on the ground the afternoon of 9/11.

The insurers commissioned their own engineering study, written by Exponent Failure Analysis Associates Inc., Los Angeles. Also released, the report disagrees with the Weidlinger findings, but mostly on points relating to the insurance battle. Engineers from Wiss, Janney, Elstner and Associates Inc., Northbrook, Ill., also working for the insurers, would not comment on their work.

I don't understand why Gage wouldn't mention this report. Doesn't it count?

The Silverstein/Weidlinger Associates Report

Released in October 2002, about the same time as the report above, the study commissioned by Larry Silverstein and led by Weidlinger Associates found that the floor trusses had not failed, as was widely suspected before then. Much of the report remains unreleased, but the major findings were divulged in this PDF file.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology Reports

In his testimony before Congress on the same day Corley spoke, the director of NIST, Arden Bement, explained the rationale behind a possible NIST study of the collapses in New York:

Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center, NIST's building and fire researchers began assisting federal and local agencies in many ways to investigate the spread of fire through the buildings and their subsequent collapse. Our researchers used previously developed models along with preliminary information from videos of the attack and other sources to simulate the spread of fire and smoke in the buildings. At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NIST conducted a comparison and analysis of the current building and fire codes of New York City with national codes, and we contributed to the Army Corps of Engineers' study of the structural and fire damage to the Pentagon. In addition, NIST experts participated in the initial assessment of the collapse conducted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Coalition that comprised a Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) funded by FEMA. The ASCE Coalition Team also included professional members of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY). NIST is lending its expertise in structural disasters to ASCE and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) to store WTC steel at its Gaithersburg, MD, headquarters for further scientific study.

However, more needs to be done. A growing number of technical experts, industry leaders, and families of victims are pressing for a broad-based Federal investigation to study the building construction, the integrity of the materials used, and all the technical conditions that combined to cause the building disaster at the World Trade Center ...NIST has begun working informally with a coalition of organizations - representing key industry, standards, codes, and professional groups - in an effort to launch a comprehensive public-private response program that includes such an investigation. NIST is also working very closely with FEMA, since an in-depth technical investigation would go well beyond the scope of the building performance assessments conducted by FEMA following major disasters. The implementation of the results of such an investigation would be critical to restore public confidence in the safety of tall buildings nationwide, enhance the safety of fire and emergency responders, and better protect people and property in the future. To cite one example, the February 4th issue of "Crain's New York Business" reports that an increasing number of tenants are leaving the Empire State Building, which is again the tallest building in New York City, because of fears of another terrorist attack. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that building vacancy rates have doubled in Manhattan, despite the 15 million square feet of space that was lost on September 11th.

The emphasis is mine.

So NIST was involved in the very beginning in a support function for various organizations investigating the performance of buildings that fell on 9/11. There remained a need for a more in-depth study than FEMA could do, and indeed the FEMA reports called for these deeper investigations, particularly into the Towers and Building 7.

Building 7 was attractive to NIST because of the possibility of examining a progressive collapse. The towers, as per the Bazant-Zhou paper, were only interesting to NIST up to the point of collapse. There is no way to build a building that can resist the kind of forces unleashed after the upper sections gained momentum. Structurally, the towers could yield information about resisting that collapse initiation as long as possible.

But 7 was different. Much could be gained by establishing as strongly as possible the collapse sequence all the way down. The report on 7 is legendarily tardy, as I've said before. Yet the most recent update from NIST has revealed some of the reasons for this. The biggest is an actual computer model of the entire building in which various scenarios will be fully propagated throughout the collapse sequence.

The final report on Building 7 is due to be released in draft form in July of 2008. However, in June 2004, NIST did release an interim report on Building 7 as part of a progress report of all their work to that date.

The Same Group of Engineers?

I'm compiling a list of the contributors to the various reports right now. Needless to say, Gage is hopelessly wrong. The ASCE teams turned out to be the authors of the FEMA reports. The two agencies worked together to produce those reports! It was on October 1st that the investigation became a "joint effort" according to Corley's March testimony, so of course the same engineers worked on those "two" projects -- it was the same thing!

Gene Corley contributed to the Weidlinger study, but he's not listed as an author or even a contributor to the NIST study on the towers. Bud Nelson, Therese McAllister, and John L. Gross are on the NIST list, but they had nothing to do with the Weidlinger study. Another engineer, Long Phan, came to the NIST WTC team from the Pentagon BPAT, and three reviewers of the FEMA WTC report show up at either Weidlinger or NIST, but not both.

I have five more pages of contributors to the NIST Final Report on the WTC Towers to add to the Excel document, and I have 297 names. Out of 297 people of all occupations, exactly eight show up more than once, and that's proof that "basically" the same group of engineers produced all these reports?

And that doesn't include the other studies that Gage somehow neglected to put on this slide. Well, it is packed rather full.

Mark Roberts has a comprehensive list of the various studies and papers written about the collapses. Please check it out.

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