The quote is far too vague. I am much more intrested into how the building fell so quickly.

Note how they mangle Silevrstein's actual comment... twice in two different ways! Again, the incredible thing about all of this is that Silverstein himself has never been asked to clarify his meaning in person (i.e. not through a spokeshill)

The Collapse of World Trade Center 7

Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished. The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds. Mr. Silverstein said:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, you know, “We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it.” And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.

9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein’s suggestion to “pull it” is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.

Facts: On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:

Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings. The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of WTC Tower 1.

In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.

Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, “I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it.” Mr. McQuillan has stated that by “it,” Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated unequivocally, “NIST has seen so evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition,” in its Collapse of WTC 7 report (p. 6). NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that it was caused by the collapse of a critical column due to “fire and/or debris induced structural damage.” There was substantial damage to WTC 7 when the nearby WTC 1 tower collapsed and fires began shortly afterwards. Also, WTC 7 was a very unusual building because it was built over an existing Con-Edison power generation substation, which contained two large 6,000 gallon fuel tanks for the emergency generation of power. The fuel from these tanks could have contributed to the intense heat that apparently weakened the supporting columns in WTC 7.

http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2005/Sep/16-241966.html

____

♠

Real Truther a.k.a. Verdadero Verdadero

WTCdemolition.com - Harvard Task Force

____

♠

Real Truther a.k.a. Verdadero Verdadero

WTCdemolition.com - Harvard Task Force

'...this hardly strikes me as outside the realms of possibility, and even probabilistically arguable.'

Yet still grasping, for all that.

Don't get me wrong--I'm trying to read each of these attempts at finding plausibility in the 'built-with-detonation-in-mind' contention, but I always wind up thinking:

Not bloody likely!!!

the stability or instability of any explosives pre-planted?

No one in their right mind. That's why it's preposterous.

Knowing where to place them is another story. Still, there is a heightened level of risk that the information could get into the wrong hands.

My little fire department does pre-planning in our response area. We note where all identifiable hazards are located on any given property. For us, this includes propane tanks, power lines, fuel storage, and sometimes ammunition. :-) This is for our own safety. If we git kilt, we caint help no one.

Find a firefighter who has been briefed on pre-planted demolition explosives in ANY building in the private sector anywhere. I've never heard of it. And as a firefighter, I know that I wouldn't want to go into a seriously burning structure that had them either.

Recall the firefighters in the film "9/11" discussing the explosions that they heard, "boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it was like they had detonators or something." To me, that sounds more like firefighters who were surprised at what they heard, rather than dismissive because it was something to be expected? What would the limits on liability be if a building owner failed to inform the fire department that a burning building contained pre-planted demolition explosives?

I would like to see the pre-planning that FDNY had for WTC 7. I'm particularly
interested in seeing a discussion therein of a possible BLEVE, Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion, involving the two 6,000 gallon diesel tanks that, according to NIST, were a part of a pressurized delivery system.

--
"But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7."
~~ Dr. Shyam Sunder - Acting Director Building and Fire Research Laboratory (NIST)

Thermate built in to the framework of the building thirty years ago? Stephen Jones research would indicate that such a cutter technology was not available until the 90's:

BYU's Jones describes a discovered patented device specifically designed for Thermite cuts of large objects, during a June 7, 2006 interview on the Alex Jones radio program:

"A patent back to the 1990's, which shows a cylinder ... you pack the cylinder with thermate or thermite ... specifically stated to be used as a cutting device based on thermite ... the molten iron shoots out of this groove in a line ... the patent specifically says this is designed to cut through thick materials"
http://www.pissedoffcombatveterans.com/id670.html