3.5.2 Official Collapse Theories

One of the most convincing arguments for the controlled demolition hypothesis is the way the collapses are presented in the official reports – first the FEMA Report (2002) then the NIST Report (2005). Both reports used the same techniques to avoid the evidence of a controlled demolition hypothesis; for the Two Towers, the collapse was only studied until ‘global collapse was inevitable, and the NIST Report into Building 7 is to ignore all floors below the 8th floor and also the top floor. This is not at all the scientific method – plausible theories fit all the evidence and relevant evidence is not ignored. Analysis of the evidence dismissed by the official reports is left to scientific journals and ‘debunking’ websites.

But even the local collapse failure scenarios presented in the official reports are beyond belief, when one considers the techniques used in the reports and how they distort, omit and falsify data and even fundamental parts of the buildings design. The FEMA Report diagrams of the building omit the core columns which held up the structures. The core is incredibly presented as a series of horizontal steel floors, making the progressive collapse seem more likely. In the NIST Report, the ‘worst case’ was the one that was analyzed – that is, a scenario in which the plane hit faster, more centrally, carrying more fuel and causing more extensive structural damage than the evidence shows.

The “Truss-Failure” Theory that FEMA proposed was that fires caused the steel floor trusses at the impact site to bend, pulling the perimeter columns inward until the floors detached from the columns. Somehow, on at least one floor, the connections between the steel-and-concrete floor and all core and perimeter columns broke instantaneously. Thus the floor fell onto the one below it, which in turn broke free from the core columns, and so on down to the ground, even though most floors were undamaged by fires. Also, immediately after the floor(s) at the impact site has fallen, the core columns lost lateral support and so buckled, and the weight of the intact portion of building above sliced the columns as it fell directly downwards, through the path of maximum resistance, rather than toppling. This theory is beyond belief for many reasons, and does not match the observed initiation events nor explain the traits common to controlled demolitions.

While the NIST Report abandoned the Truss-Failure scenario of collapse initiation in favour of ‘Column-Failure Theory,’ the same mechanism of ‘progressive collapse’ (‘pancake theory’) is implied for the point from collapse initiation onwards. The NIST theory asserts that the impact site columns, both core and perimeter, were heated by the fires to extremely high temperatures – then enough of them lost enough strength that they buckled. Since the building fell straight down symmetrically, the failures due to the heat must have been virtually equal in all the columns on one floor. This is not supported by the observations, nor would fires be expected to spread evenly throughout the building (NIST (nor anyone else) has not released a computer model simulating this phenomenon). Though it is barely mentioned in the huge report, a similar collapse mechanism following ‘initiation’ is implied by the NIST Report, except that in the NIST theory, unlike in the FEMA theory, the top portion of the buildings crushed both the columns and the floors as they fell, acting as a kind of battering ram onto the undamaged building below.

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