Lets talk about WTC 7 which seems to be biggest smoking gun in the CT arsenal.
Why did the professionals say it collapsed? Was it only due to fire?
The WTC 7 structure had 47 floors and was 570 feet tall. It suffered damage on multiple floors and especially on floors towards the bottom. It had massive fires raging within reported by several firefighters who were actually at the site and weren't making assumptions based only from pictures.
Witness accounts of WTC 7 fires.
Witness accounts of WTC 7 damage.
Here is a photo of building 7 amid the collapse of WTC 1.
Here is a report authored by Brent Blanchard, senior editor of implosionworld.com and Director of field operations at PROTEC Documentation Services Inc.
Protec is one of the world’s most knowledgeable, independent authorities on explosive demolition, having performed engineering studies, structure analysis, vibration/air overpressure monitoring and photographic services on well over 1,000 structure blasting events in more than 30 countries. These include the current world record-holders for largest, tallest and most buildings demolished with explosives. Protec regularly documents the work of more than 20 explosives contractors who perform structure blasting as a primary source of revenue (including extensive experience with every American company) as well as dozens more who blast structures in a part-time capacity.
--- "Several demolition teams had reached Ground Zero by 3:00 pm on 9/11, and these individuals witnessed the collapse of WTC 7 from within a few hundred feet of the event.
We have spoken with several who possess extensive experience in explosive demolition, and all reported seeing or hearing nothing to indicate an explosive detonation precipitating the collapse.
As one eyewitness told us, "We were all standing around helpless...we knew full well it was going to collapse. Everyone there knew. You gotta remember there was a lot of confusion and we didn't know if another plane was coming...but I never heard explosions like demo charges. We knew with the damage to the building and how hot the fire was, that building was gonna go, so we just waited, and a little later it went."
"Any detonation of explosives within WTC 7 would have been detected by multiple seismographs monitoring ground vibration in the general area. No such telltale 'spike' or vibratory anomaly was recorded by any monitoring instrument." --Blanchard
As far as the fires are concerned, conspiracy theorists again love to pick out quotes that aren't from anyone who was actually there on scene and directly involved in the action.
Here is a photo of fires raging in WTC 7.
Now lets look at some of the quotes from the firefighters on scene ---
FDNY Assistant Chief Harry Myers:
"When the building came down it was completely involved in fire, all forty-seven stories."
FDNY Deputy Chief Nick Visconti:
"the fire was going virtually on every floor."
FDNY Lieutenant Robert LaRocca:
"We walked over by number Seven World Trade Center as it was burning and saw this 40-plus story building with fire on nearly all floors."
FDNY Lieutenant James McGlynn:
"Just when you thought it was over, you're walking by this building and you're hearing this building creak and fully involved in flames. It's like, is it coming down next? Sure enough, about a half an hour later it came down."
FDNY Chief of Operations Daniel Nigro:
"The most important operational decision to be made that afternoon was [that] the collapse [Of the WTC towers] had damaged 7 World Trade Center, which is about a 50 story building, at Vesey between West Broadway and Washington Street. It had very heavy fire on many floors and I ordered the evacuation of an area sufficient around to protect our members, so we had to give up some rescue operations that were going on at the time and back the people away far enough so that if 7 World Trade did collapse, we [wouldn't] lose any more people. We continued to operate on what we could from that distance and approximately an hour and a half after that order was [given], at 5:30 in the afternoon, 7 World Trade Center collapsed completely."
Remember. WTC 7 was more than twice as tall as any of the other buildings 3, 4, 5, and 6. It sustained severe damage mostly on the lower floors. They were attempting to fight fires in the building until an operational decision was made to pull back and not risk the lives of any more people that day. The building then burned for approximately another hour and a half before finally collapsing.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
Lets take a look at what would have to happen in order to bring down WTC 7 with a controlled demolition ---- A demolition project would have required the tower walls to be opened on dozens of floors, followed by the insertion of thousands of pounds of explosives, fuses and ignition mechanisms, all sneaked past the security stations, inside hundreds of feet of walls on all four faces of the buildings. Then the massive charges would have had to been initiated with precision to bring down the building they way it fell.
There is simply no evidence (seen or heard) of the amount of explosions it would take to bring that building down.
Take a look at a real building implosion ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx8mjwXshpU&mode=related&search=
A very informative page with hundreds of links to accurate information about the Collapse of building 7 was created by Mark Roberts - probably the most well known 9/11 researcher.
http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/introduction
