Official Reports Misrepresented the Towers' Construction

In light of the release of blueprints to the World Trade Centers by a whistleblower to Dr. Steven Jones, Jim Hoffman has updated his essay on the Tower Blueprints. Please read the original article to get the links and diagrams.

Tower Blueprints
Surviving Evidence of the World Trade Center Attack

The blueprints to the Twin Towers and Building 7 remained off-limits to the public for more than five years after the attack, despite the fact that the buildings were built with public money and that the engineering drawings of public buildings are supposed to be public information. 1 Incredibly, the team of engineers from the ASCE that conducted the only investigation of the building "collapses" before Ground Zero had been cleaned up lacked access to the buildings' blueprints -- at least until they signed waivers that they would not use the evidence in a lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. 2
Whistleblower Releases Blueprints

In March of 2007, an extensive set of detailed architectural drawings of the World Trade Center became public through the actions of a whistleblower. The 261 drawings included detailed plans for the North Tower (WTC 1), the World Trade Center foundation and basement, and the TV mast atop the North Tower. The set of drawings does not include plans for the other six buildings in the World Trade Center complex. However, since the Twin Towers were of almost identical construction, it is safe to assume that the the structural details that the drawings shown for the North Tower are largely applicable to the South Tower.

The drawings contain a wealth of detail about the buildings, including the dimensions of structural members such as the core columns.

Most of the drawings can be viewed in this multiresolution browser.
This 66th floor core plan included in the detailed architectural drawings shows that most of the core columns retained their full outside dimensions well above the midpoints of the Towers. Of the sixteen columns bounding the long faces of the core, thirteen have outside dimensions of approximately 54 by 22 inches in this 66th floor section.
Official Reports Misrepresented the Towers' Construction
Portion of photograph in the collection of the Skyscraper Museum

The detailed architectural drawings make clear what official reports have apparently attempted to hide: that the Twin Towers had massive core columns, and those columns ran most of the height of each Tower before transitioning to columns with smaller cross-sections.

Based on construction photographs exhibited in the Skyscraper Museum and illustrations from the Engineering News Record , 9-11 Research had established by mid-2005 that, low in the Towers, the sixteen core columns that bounded the long faces of the buildings' cores had dimensions of 54 by 22 inches. The detailed drawings show that these columns maintained these dimensions through about the 66th floor.

Both of the government-sponsored engineering studies of the Twin Towers' "collapses" -- FEMA's and NIST's -- are highly misleading about the core structures. Neither Report discloses dimensions for core columns -- dimensions that are clearly evident in the architectural drawings. Both Reports use a variety of techniques seemingly designed to minimize the strength of the cores or to conceal their structural role entirely.

So effective was FEMA at concealing the nature of the cores that the 9/11 Commission Report , citing the FEMA Report, denied the very existence of the core columns.
FEMA's Building Performance Study
Figure 2-2 of of FEMA's Building Performance Study, labeled "Representative structural framing plan, upper floors", is one of five illustrations in the report that depict core columns. Each of these illustrations depicts the core columns at their minimum dimensions, and none depict them at their typical dimensions.

In May of 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) released its Building Performance Study, of which Chapter 2, "WTC 1 and WTC 2", was devoted to explaining the "collapse" of the Twin Towers. It advances the "truss theory" or "pancake theory", in which the supposed failure of floor-truss-to-column connections is the initiating event in a series of chain reactions ending in total collapse. Added commentary in our archived copy expose many deceptive techniques employed in the article. 3

Key elements of FEMA's theory depend on misrepresentations of the Towers' construction made possible by their vague descriptions. For example, to explain other collapse of the core their Study states:
As the floors collapsed, this left tall freestanding portions of the exterior wall and possibly central core columns. As the unsupported height of these freestanding exterior wall elements increased, they buckled at the bolted column splice connections, and also collapsed.

Contrary to the FEMA's hedged assertion that the core columns were freestanding, construction photographs clearly show that large horizontal beams cross-connected the core columns in a three-dimensional matrix of steel.

FEMA's report seems crafted to hide the structural significance of the core columns, if not their very existence. Examples of features of the Report that minimize or conceal the core structures include:
Figure D-13 from FEMA's Study -- the only photograph in the Study that shows a core column

* The absence of any illustrations showing core columns of typical dimensions
* The repeated use of the term "service core" to describe the cores, and avoidance of terminology describing their structural role
* The use of illustrations that imply the cores didn't exist, such as Figure 2-20
* The only photograph of a core column in the Report (Figure D-13) being an atypical column of very small dimensions
* The inclusion of only floor plans that show core columns of very small dimensions with no clarification that the core columns that ran most of the Towers' heights were of much larger dimensions

NIST's Final Report on the Twin Towers

In 2005 NIST published its 'Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers' -- a 280-page report that was extremely vague in a number of respects, including any description of the structural systems of the Towers. It contains very little information about the core columns, the following being one of the only passages describing them:
Figure 3-3 From NIST's Final Report drastically misrepresents the dimensions of the core columns on the 78th through the 83rd floors.
The 47 columns in this rectangular space were fabricated using primarily 36 ksi and 42 ksi steels and also decreased in size in the higher stories. The four massive corner columns bore nearly one-fifth of the total gravity load on the core columns.

The passage implies that only the corner columns were "massive" when, in fact, the sixteen columns on the long faces of the cores shared the same dimensions for most of each Tower's height.

Illustrations in the Report depict the core columns at the North and South Tower crash zones as being the same size, when in fact the core columns were much broader around the 80th floor than around the 95th. NIST's failure to highlight this difference is especially interesting in light of its estimates of core column damage in the Towers. Those esimates show 10 of the South Tower's core columns severed, compared to only 6 of the North Tower's. How could the South Tower's core have had more damage when its impact-level columns were twice as large as the North Tower's and it sustained only a glancing rather than a head-on impact? Was NIST struggling to explain how the South Tower succumbed to "global collapse" almost twice as quickly as the North Tower despite having much smaller fires?
World Trade Center Master Plan
This illustration from 'Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel' shows a structural system that matches the drawings in the MASTER PLAN. Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel

Prior to the release of the detailed architectural drawings, 9-11 Research published the MASTER PLAN, dated December 16, 1963. The MASTER PLAN does not show structural details such as column dimensions, and shows an arrangement of core columns that was later changed. The obsolete core column arrangement indicated in the MASTER PLAN has been reproduced in other publications such as the book 'Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel'. 4

I wish

these plans had been available a year ago when I started building my 3d models of the WTC complex... I used the 'master plan' version from 911 Research, since nothing better existed.

Fortunately, NIST did actually release an image of one of the final core blueprints in one of their reports, and I was able to use this to build an accurate core model... critical for correlating flashes and squibs captured on video with interior structural members. Maybe now I'll start from scratch again and do a model that better represents column dimensions on each floor...

Wow:

I would love to see your 3-D model.

haha

just gimmie a couple more weeks... we're getting close.

Hey Captain, will you please

Hey Captain, will you please contact me:
ignoranceisntbliss@hotmail.com

WTC-7 Built With Public Money?

Got any details on that?

Some WTC Facts

Client:
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Architect:
Minoru Yamasaki Associates

Location:
New York, NY

Gross Floor Area:
13 million sf / 1.2 million sm

Height:
North Tower: 1,378 ft (417 m) South Tower: 1,361 ft (415 m)

Awards:
Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement, 1971
American Society of Civil Engineers

Honor Award for Engineering Excellence
Consulting Engineers Council of the United States

Grand Award for Engineering Excellence
New York Association of Consulting Engineers

First occupied in 1970, in magnitude and complexity and in pioneering advances in the technology of high-rise buildings, this pair of 110-story buildings was unlike anything constructed before. With almost one full acre on each floor, the project had a gross area of 13 million sf (1.2 million sm) or about 19 times the overall site area of 16 acres. Over 200,000 U.S. tons (182,000 metric tons) of structural steel were required.

The twin towers altered the world of high-rise buildings in many ways not associated directly with structural design. Some of the many facets of the structural system included:
• The use of prefabricated multiple column and spandrel wall panels.
• The use of large, prefabricated floor panels, complete with steel deck and in-floor electrification.
• The World Trade Center provided the first comprehensive environmental and wind tunnel study completed in a boundary layer wind tunnel. The first evaluation of the dynamics of a building in the turbulent wind... the very cornerstone of contemporary design for high-rise buildings.
• The first testing of humans to determine their sensitivity to the lateral oscillation of buildings... thus the first development of rational criteria for the dynamic performance of a high-rise building.
• The development of the concept for "Shaftwall", a lightweight fire-rated wall system that now dominates the construction industry.
• The invention, development and the incorporation of visco-elastic damping units to reduce the swaying motion of a tall building.

http://www.lera.com/projects/hir/wtc.htm

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Physics/Science/Mathematics do not lie, only people do.
9/11 was an INSIDE JOB

WTC Facts in Proportion

More statistics:

Mass of structural steel per tower = 100,000 tons (from above by CattleRustler)

Estimated total mass of each tower = 500,000 tons (1/5 mass is steel)

 

Boeing 767 maximum fuel load = 24,000 gallons

Boeing 767 fuel load Boston to LA = 10,000 gallons (estimated by pilots flying this milk-run)

 

FEMA & NIST maintain 10,000 gallons of Jet A1 collapsed a 500,000 ton tower

 

Divide both figures by 1,000 to maintain the same ratio:

10 gallon jerry can of kerosene will destroy 500 tons of concrete & steel - OR -

10 gallon jerry can of kerosene will soften 100 tons of steel.

 

D9 Caterpillar bulldozers are common in construction and weigh 50 tons. A D11N Caterpillar is not commonly seen as it weighs about 100 tons. It is 2 sizes bigger than the D9 cat.

Cat D11N

Here's a picture of the 100 ton D11N cat.

Bring your 10 gallon jerry can of kerosene ... lets go melt it !

If I was a professional engineer for a living, I sure wouldn't want my name showing anywhere on the documents supporting the "official" (conspiracy) theory.

5+ years?

This is one of my problems: if the buildings came down like ‘the official account’ said they did then why keep the public from the blueprints for more than 5 years?
I would think this would raise a lot of suspicion.
I mean, if this was a murder case this fact would be one of the first things brought up in the trial.

The Trial

isn't over yet.

Charges were brought against a tall, skinny guy form a place where mostly short people live. A warrant for his arrest was issued. The trial went on with the defendant absent. The prosecution called a single witness. In cross examination, the witness was found to have given false testimony and have serious conflicts of interest. Strangely, the judge has failed to direct the jury to disregard the witness' testimony in it's entirety and have it stricken from the record. So for now, it has become the record. All attempts to call other witnesses to testify have been denied by the judge. The defendant is still being sought, we are told. But, all leads have ended up cold.

If we can get some more people into the courtroom, the judge will have no choice but to allow additional testimony. I hear that could implicate some of the judges golfing buddies, though. Hence, his reluctance to cooperate.

--
The true threat to liberty comes not from terrorists but from our political leaders whose natural inclination is to seize upon any excuse to diminish them.
~~ Walter Williams, Nightly Business Report, September 2001

Fire destroy steel my ass!

If a kerosene fire (aviation fuel) can melt steel and even vaporise it, as the official story tells us, then why does my barbeque gas grill not melt, or my pots on the gas stove, or the engine of my car or the jet engines of planes for that matter? Its the same carbon fuel and reaches the same temperature? To tell us that the jet fuel fire caused 200'000 tons of steel and those massive columns to just disintegrate is bull shit science and a complete lie. Even a 3rd grader realises that.
.

3rd Grader

Could realize this..... if he wanted to
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Together in Truth!

Scale Model 9/11 Re-enactment anyone?

Now that we have the blueprints of the North Tower and the bathtub sub levels...Why don't we find somebody to build a scale model to recreate the jetliner impact and subsequent fires?
It'd be expensive, but maybe some rich truther like Jimmy Walters or others could finance this. Or how about a collection/donation drive to make it happen?

Problem

You can not scale down the temperatures of the fire.

While I do not feel like a scaled down column would fail in a fire.... They would still be far more suseptable to the temperatures.

I say build a full scale model of the upper 30 to 40 floors..... recreate the supposed damage and then light that puppy up.

Could charge admission and sell the DVD footage.

Hell have a huge concert before the show.... make it worth while.

You could burn it over and over and it wouldn't fail.... even if you affect alll columns equally which didn't happen on 911.

Put as much kerosene as you want in the building.... have it pumped in if you want.

Do not put any fireproofing or have any sprinkler systems.

The construction would cost much less than a functional building because you would not need to do all the finish work. You could filll it with used office furniture and recycled paper.

Would cost far less than Clinton investigations.... and eliminate all future spending in Iraq....errrrrr....Iran
___________________
Together in Truth!

Love your idea!

Why not do both?!
=)
I remember there was an 8-story model built in the UK a few years back using the same truss floor panels as in the WTC, and they (whoever did it) couldn't bring the structure down with any type of fires....Can't remember what the organization was that did it.

Do you mean

the Cardington Fire Tests ?

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interns < internets

Yep, cardington...

That's it...

I'm actually talking to a structural engineer friend of mine

He says that anything can be scaled down. So I'm thinking of building a replica of WTC 1 or 2 (or both).

My idea is to just try to reproduce the controlled demolition event (with fireworks?) using a very small scale model to see if the dust clouds/squibs, etc., etc. are formed (using a very sensitive camera would be good to capture every detail). If one could recreate the effect of the original event, then I think that would speak volumes about actual cause of the collapse.

Alternatively, one could simultaneously blow out several of the key floors to see if the top half of the tower falls straight through the path of most resistance (or if it topples over instead -- like it's supposed to). Of course, you'd have to weaken the structure in the manner described by NIST in order for the recreation to be accurate.

OR, instead you could go overboard and excessively weaken key areas of the structure's lower levels to prove one very important point: that even with such additional weakening, the building would not collapse anywhere near or at freefall speed.

In fact, I'm willing to be that if you made the top half twice as heavy as it's supposed to be, it would still not cause the collapse to be as fast as that of the WTC towers.

Sounds good!

Can't wait to see video of that!

you already have your proof

If the south tower impact area was melted (which it wasnt), and the top portion and the remaining lower portions of the building remained intact and structurally sound, then when the tilt occurred the laws of physics dictate that the top piece should have continued and fallen off the side. Instead we saw lateral momentum completely cease, and the lower portion of the building completely "dustify" and allow the upper portion to decend thru what should have been the path of most resistence.

Further, none of the government models (computer based or physical based) were able to make the collapse happen as we saw it. The fires cause truss sag of 3 inches, recreations could only make floors fail with 42 inches of sag.

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Physics/Science/Mathematics do not lie, only people do.
9/11 was an INSIDE JOB

You never have enough for the zombies

I agree, but there are still a lot of eggheads out there who need to see this in order to start getting a clue.

Don't waste your time...

For those who will accept your model as valid, it's not necessary, and for those that won't accept it, it's worthless.

Instead, invest the energy out on the streets.
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interns < internets

cutting steel

This is in reply to wainbee.

It would take at least a twenty pound tank of propane and a 250 pound tank of oxygen just to cut the blade of that bulldozer into pieces let alone melt and disintegrate it. Does anyone even understand the amount of temperature it takes to simply manipulate a metal let alone weaken it? I am SO TIRED of the people i talk to about this telling me that the fires weakened the the steel thus causing global collapse. This brings to mind me cutting steel in order to demolish. In order to breakdown the structural integrity of something you have to weaken it's connections. Light a car on fire, the gas tank blows up but is the car pulverized, no. Now take a torch and cut it up. END result the car will come apart in the way you fashioned.

PLEASE any American citizen with a brain understand that if a building had collapsed due to weakened metal it would have fallen over, as i have seen many times in objects i have cut up with torches. It would not have fallen straight down!

More on cutting and melting steel

Thanks sweetER.

 

Was hoping we would hear from the metal workers. Many of us 911 Truthers find it difficult to imagine a tractor blade that's 22 feet wide and 10 feet high (see above). A basketball player would find the upper drive axel for the tracks at eye level, 6 ft.off the ground! You can't see it in the picture, but the Cat D11 is enormous at 15 ft. high, 22 ft. wide and 35 ft. long (nearly the same size as a 1,000 sq.ft. bungalow). Just imagine melting this much steel with 10 gallons of kerosene!

I agree, its an insult to the public's intelligence for any engineering professional to claim that a relatively small amount of jet fuel could weaken a steel frame and cause a 110 storey building to fall straight down into its footprint - twice in the same day! Then to top it off, a steel building half the height of the towers falls down without burning jet fuel! We must be nearing the point of litigation for incompetence bordering on fraud for those creating these ridiculous reports.

Wait until the 911 Truth researchers finish analyzing the blueprints from GeorgeWashington's report above. I'm reading about structural steel box beam columns 3 to 4 inches thick measuring 54 by 22 inches weighing 3/4 ton per foot. I think this is what we see in the photo below. Funny how the jet fuel cut these massive pillars at 45 degrees, just the right way so that they would eject to the open exterior of the building.

Let's keep digging people. Its gonna be roundup time soon!

alright

I am so glad someone else noticed that picture. the first time i saw that i knew something was used to cut it. You can tell just be seeing the metal runoff. that is exactly what steel looks like after you cut it. Do you think anyone could look at that and not tell?

A fun PR stunt

would be to set up two short columns connected with a beam, all of similar dimensions to those of the core in the upper floors of the Towers, and set up a large open air propane-fueled burner to engulf the beam in flames.

Throw in a sample floor truss for good measure.

Light it up and put it on a web cam with a clock so people could watch it stand, day after day after day, like the hostage crisis during the Carter administration.

I think that would get the point across quite well.

I, too, get really irritated when I talk to "debunkers" and they push the jet fuel fire line on me. The government reports state that the jet fuel burned off after 15 or 20 minutes, at most, and the fires were clearly not burning that hot as evidenced by the black smoke and the radio calls by the firemen on the scene. Then, to cap it off, the fires only burned for 56 and 102 minutes. Give me a break, this is just laughable.

Bottom line, how many of you have talked to your local firefighters about this? We need to get out there and very carefully get them on our side. Firefighters for 9/11 Truth has a great ring to it, don't you agree?

I hope that you and yours are all well.

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

Great idea!

Can anyone make an informed estimate on the costs of such a project?

What also needs to be stressed more is that in 1975, the North Tower itself burned over 6 floors for 3 hours. Firefighters described the event as "like fighting a blowtorch", and yet no structural members had to be replaced afterwards. None whatsoever.

Only later was a sprinkler system installed.

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