“NIST simulations omitted basic structural supports that would have made this girder failure impossible.”
They admit they ignored evidence, and they don’t care.
According to one of three new points released this week by the 9/11 Consensus Panel, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has dismissed the importance of architectural drawings for World Trade Center Building 7, accessed through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which prove that the claim that the building was brought down by office fires cannot be correct.
If NIST doesn’t correct its faulty technical analysis, it could find itself being sued by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (more on that below).
According to a press release from the Consensus Panel (co-founded by David Ray Griffin and Elizabeth Woodworth), their first new point deals with the computer simulations offered by NIST, “which purported to show that fire-induced thermal expansion caused a girder to be pushed off its seat at Column 79, thereby initiating a global collapse of the entire 47-story building at 5:21 in the afternoon.”
But the release goes on to state that the drawings show “that the NIST simulations omitted basic structural supports that would have made this girder failure impossible.”
From the Consensus point itself:
“Review of the released WTC 7 drawings showed that there were two serious structural feature omissions from the NIST analyses relevant to the NIST “collapse initiation” theory. They were:
1. Steel plate stiffeners that provided critical support for girder A2001.
2. Floor beams S3007, G3007, and K3007, which provided lateral support for beam G3005.
Analyses performed by independent engineers show that when the stiffeners and lateral support beams are included, NIST’s probable collapse sequence is impossible, because:
1. The girder flange for column 79 could not bend or fail with the stiffeners present.
2. Beam G3005 – which NIST claimed buckled from thermal expansion and led to the collapse of WTC 7 – could not have buckled if G3005’s omitted lateral support floor beams S3007, G3007, and K3007 were present.”
The conclusion of the point reads as follows:
“NIST’s claim that the collapse of WTC 7 was initiated when Girder A2001 was pushed off its seat at Column 79 is untenable.
With the alleged initiating event ruled out, all of NIST’s claims about subsequent structural failures must be considered baseless and invalid.”
Human rights attorney William F. Pepper, representing Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General in December 2013 reporting the omissions from the NIST report and calling for an independent engineering study. He followed this up in March 2014 by phone and received acknowledgment from NIST that it had omitted the stiffeners, but that they did not need to be considered.
Pepper is best known for having represented the family of Martin Luther King in a 1999 wrongful death suit against Lloyd Jowers and other unknown conspirators in the MLK assassination. The jury found Jowers responsible along with “governmental agencies.” Pepper also represents Sirhan Sirhan who was convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
An article on the AE911Truth web site by Dennis McMahon and James McDowell goes into the details of efforts by Pepper and AE members Tony Szamboti and David Cole to press NIST to “produce a corrected analysis and report on the collapse of Building 7.”
Szamboti, a mechanical engineer who has just joined the 9/11 Consensus Panel, was told by NIST that its engineers did not agree with Pepper’s letter. This has led Szamboti to start work on a technical analysis of the “relevant structural elements” to show that NIST calculations are in error. Once this work is completed, the findings will likely be passed on to NIST in another letter from Pepper. If nothing is done at the point (as we can expect nothing will be), AE911Truth is already on record as saying that a lawsuit against NIST may follow.
WTC 7 steel was available
The second new Consensus point refutes the repeated claim by NIST that no steel was recovered from Building 7. NIST has used this claim to shut down all questions about what the steel might prove about what really caused the destruction of the building.
The Panel makes the point that if NIST’s explanation of a collapse due to “thermal expansion” were true, then examining the steel would have been extremely important in preventing future occurrences.
The Panel reports that the “best evidence” includes that fact that three scientists from the Worchester Polytechnic Institute wrote a letter entitled “An Initial Microstructural Analysis of A36 Steel WTC Building 7”to a technical journal in 2001. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) published a report by the same three scientists in 2002 that examined the corrosion and thinning of WTC steel using as an example a beam that “appeared to be from WTC 7.” That it did come from Building 7 was confirmed by the lead author of the FEMA study in a 2008 BBC documentary.
A FOIA request yielded photographs of WTC 7 steel being examined by John Gross, the co-project leader on NIST’s Structural Fire Response and Collapse Analysis. And all this evidence is supported by media reports in the New York Times and the official publication of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
This 9/11 Consensus Panel point concludes:
“More than ample evidence shows that NIST’s claim – that no steel from WTC 7 was found – is false. By denying this evidence (which was even cited in one of NIST’s own reports), it could claim that there was no evidence that the building had been brought down by explosives.
By denying the availability of WTC 7 steel, moreover, NIST positioned itself to explain the collapse by resorting to a computer simulation into which variables could be inserted at will – given the fact that there was to be no peer review – and which has been shown to be false.”
Foreknowledge of ‘collapse’
The final new Consensus point addresses the considerable evidence that there was foreknowledge of the “collapse” of Building 7 both by authorities and the media.
It starts by pointing out that there have been two official stories about the WTC 7 destruction. One stated that the building was critically damaged by flying debris and that fires were fueled diesel fuel stored in the building. The second, in the form of the 2008 NIST report, stated that it was strictly office fires that led to the collapse and that this had resulted from an effect called “thermal expansion” that played a significant part in initiating a global collapse.
As the Consensus Panel points out, neither scenario fits the evidence. And certainly neither would explain the certainty that seemed to exist that the building would be coming down. Examples of this knowledge included officials on the scene (the fire chief, assistant chief, firefighters, and paramedics) and media (CNN and the BBC reported the collapse before it happened, while MSNBC reported that “several different officers” had said that Building 7 would be the next to come down).
So the Panel’s concludes:
“Neither Account 1 nor Account 2 of the collapse of WTC 7 can account for the certainty of many people on the scene that the building was going to collapse, the fact that some of them had this foreknowledge long in advance, and that two of the TV networks were able to announce the collapse prematurely. This foreknowledge, it would seem, must have come from people who intended to bring the building down.
This foreknowledge corroborates, therefore, the evidence and conclusions presented in previous Points (see Consensus Points WTC7-1, 2, 3, 5, and 6) that WTC 7 was brought down through a process of controlled demolition.”
This brings to 40 the number of points approved by the 24-member 9/11 Consensus Panel so far.
