deeper into wtc7

Building 7 was the third skyscraper to be reduced to rubble on September 11, 2001. According to the government, fires, primarily, leveled this building, but fires have never before or since destroyed a steel skyscraper.

The team that investigated the collapse were kept away from the crime scene. By the time they published their inconclusive report in May, 2002, the evidence had been destroyed.

Why did the government rapidly recycle the steel from the largest and most mysterious engineering failure in world history, and why has the media remained silent?

Building 7 was one of New York City's larger buildings. A sleek bronze-colored skyscraper with a trapezoidal footprint, it occupied an entire city block and rose over 600 feet above street level.

Built in 1985, it was formerly the headquarters of the junk-bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, which contributed to the Savings and Loans collapse, prompting the $500-billion taxpayer-underwritten bailout of the latter 1980s. At the time of its destruction, it exclusively housed government agencies and financial institutions. It contained offices of the IRS, Secret Service, and SEC.

Tenant Square Feet Floor Industry
Salomon Smith Barney 1,202,900 GRND,1-6,13,18-46 Financial Institution
IRS Regional Council 90,430 24, 25 Government
U.S. Secret Service 85,343 9,10 Government
C.I.A. N/A N/A Government
American Express Bank International 106,117 7,8,13 Financial Institution
Standard Chartered Bank 111,398 10,13,26,27 Financial Institution
Provident Financial Management 9,000 7,13 Financial Institution
ITT Hartford Insurance Group 122,590 19-21 [Insurance]
First State Management Group, Inc 4,000 21 Insurance
Federal Home Loan Bank 47,490 22 Financial Institution
NAIC Securities 22,500 19 Insurance
Securities & Exchange Commission 106,117 11,12,13 Government
Mayor's Office of Emergency Mgmt 45,815 23 Government
This list is based on a table published by CNN.com, which did not include CIA, whose tenancy was disclosed after the attack in the New York Times article. 1
One of the most interesting tenants was then-Mayor Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management, and its emergency command center on the 23rd floor. This floor received 15 million dollars worth of renovations, including independent and secure air and water supplies, and bullet and bomb resistant windows designed to withstand 200 MPH winds. 2 The 1993 bombing must have been part of the rationale for the command center, which overlooked the Twin Towers, a prime terrorist target.

How curious that on the day of the attack, Guiliani and his entourage set up shop in a different headquarters, abandoning the special bunker designed precisely for such an event.

The Investigation of Building 7's Collapse
What did the government do to investigate the unprecedented collapse of a steel-framed building from fires? It gave FEMA the sole discretion to investigate the collapse, even though FEMA is not an investigative agency.



A BPAT volunteer diligently measures a piece of steel that that FEMA allowed to pass to the Fresh Kills landfill rather than directly to the blast furnaces.
FEMA assembled a team of volunteer engineers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), dubbed the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT), to write the World Trade Center Building Performance Study . The engineers were not granted access to the site of the catastrophe. Rather, they were allowed to pick through some pieces of metal that arrived at the Fresh Kills landfill. Most of the steel was never seen by the part-time investigators. It had been sold to scrap metal vendors, and was being shipped out to overseas ports as quickly as the newly constructed infrastructure could handle.

The FEMA/ASCE investigation was not funded by an act of Congress, and given a paltry $600,000 by FEMA. 1 A March 2002 hearing transcript revealed that, just two month before publishing its final report the BPAT still had not been able to see blueprints for WTC 7 or the Twin Towers since they lacked subpoena power. 2

FEMA's BPAT, the only official organization that reported on Building 7's collapse within two years of the attack, published their Final Report in May of 2002, just after the last building remains had been scrubbed from Ground Zero. The Report was completely indecisive about the cause of Building 7's collapse.

NIST's Investigation
Later, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) was charged with investigating the collapses of the World Trade Center skyscrapers by the National Construction Safety Team Act (HR 4687), enacted on Oct. 1, 2002. 3 Unlike FEMA, NIST chose to separate their analysis of the Twin Towers and Building 7 into two separate reports. Although they initially promised to release their final report on Building 7 in mid-2005, they delayed the publication date multiple times. As of this writing the report is promised sometime in 2007.

The American public was treated to wall-to-wall television coverage of the September 11th attack throughout the day and for nearly the entire following week. Yet most Americans remember only two skyscrapers collapsing in Lower Manhattan on the day of the attack: the Twin Towers. The total collapse of the third huge skyscraper late in the afternoon of September 11th was reported as if it were an insignificant footnote. The television networks played video of the jets impacting the Twin Towers hundreds of times. But most people never saw video of Building 7's collapse.

Building 7 was neither hit by an airplane nor, apparently, by heavy fallout from the collapse of either of the Twin Towers. If you believe the official story that it collapsed from fires, it would be the first case in history in which fires induced the total collapse of a steel-framed building. Shouldn't that have been newsworthy, given its implications for building safety and rescue and firefighting operations? Incredibly, it is difficult to find any mention of Building 7 in newspapers, magazines, or broadcast media reports about the September 11th attack.

The collapse of Building 7 was reported on 9/11/2001, apparently by all or most of the television networks. These reports were so obscure that it was not until 2007 that researchers discovered that the BBC and CNN had announced the collapse before it occurred.

Despite the enormity of this event, there is no mention of it in a timetable of press flashes, alerts, and bulletins from the day of and after the attack compiled by the Associated Press.