PDF Scan Of Original: OurTown - Englewood FL - Dec 29th 2010

Engineer questioning 9/11

Official explanation defies basic laws of physics

By STEVE REILLY
STAFF WRITER

ENGLEWOOD — Like most Americans, Jonathan Cole was shocked by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
And like most Americans, Cole, an engineer and president of Giffels Webster Engineering, initially accepted official explanations for the towers’ destruction, but no longer.
The science doesn’t work, according to Cole, who has produced a series of simple experiments and videos that call into question the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s and other official findings on the disaster.
In late 2007, Cole began questioning all he heard when he was a sent a video of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. The video shows the building collapsing down on itself, much like the twin towers; however, WTC 7 wasn’t struck by an aircraft.
“I looked at it, I looked at it, and I thought that’s strange,” Cole said, describing his interest in 9/11 as an intellectual “hobby.” What hit him is that the official explanations defied or ignored Newton’s Law, thermodynamic and other basic laws of physics.
“WTC 7 is the Achilles’ heel,” he said. “That (building) did come down at free-fall acceleration.”
Why is that important? Cole said the speed at which the building fell is basically at the same speed as dropping a rock from a height. To achieve that speed, he concluded, “that some force removed all supports at the same time before (WTC 7) fell.”
“It falls parallel to the horizon,” he said. “There is only one possibility —that I know of — that would remove all supports, allowing it to accelerate uniformly and allowing it fall straight down, and that’s a controlled demolition.” By the end of 2007, Cole said he started questioning the events of 9/11 when he realized that what was said defied basic scientific principles.
“When you realize something is wrong, you have to learn more and more,” he said. “You do tend to go off on tangents, and I always had to focus on the buildings themselves. I studied hard on them.”
Cole was among the first 400 of the more than 10,000 architects, professional engineers and others who signed a petition on www.ae911truth.org   calling for Congress to enact a new and independent investigation of destruction of the twin towers and Building 7.
Cole’s videos, which can be found on YouTube and http://911speakout.org, show him evaluating conclusions of 9/11 reports. Some of the experiments appear like “Mr. Wizard” science, but they do bring to light the fundamental physics that raise questions.
A NIST fact sheet at http://wtc.nist.gov  , states:
“Some 200 technical experts — including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia — reviewed tens of thousands documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse.”
The conclusion of the NIST investigation was:
• The impact of the aircraft into the towers severed and damaged support beams, dislodged fireproofed installation and widely dispersed jet fuel over several floors.
• The jet fuel ignited, reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Celsius, and weakened floors and columns to the point where floors sagged and pulled perimeter columns inward.
• The bowing inward of the perimeter columns led to the failure of the two towers.
According to NIST investigators, the towers experienced no “pancaking” or other evidence of demolition.
And according to NIST, “WTC 7’s collapse, viewed from the exterior (most videos were taken from the north), did appear to fall almost uniformly as a single unit. This occurred because the interior failures that took place did not cause the exterior framing to fail until the final stages of the building collapse.”
But according to Cole, NIST and other existing reports fall short of investigating and detailing what he said were the “three of the largest structural failures” of buildings.
“All I am asking is for people to look at the evidence,” Cole said. “Think about it and judge it. I am looking for someone to prove me wrong. I would love for someone to prove me wrong.”
Cole has scheduled presentations with local chapters of engineering associations, but he also would like to share with other groups what his research on 9/11 suggests.
E-mail: reilly@sun-herald.com  

SUN PHOTO BY STEVE REILLY, reilly@sun-herald.com  
Jonathan Cole, a local engineer, has researched and now questions assumptions about what led to the collapse of three World Trade Center buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.