WTC Building 7

I've been wanting to write something succinct about 9/11 for a very long time.

I had a brain-flash the other day, so I went and researched "building demolition companies" on the web, because lots of people said that the towers were the result of a controlled demolition - others have said that they fell because of the fierceness of the fires weakened the supports, and the buildings just pancaked to the ground.

Lets leave out the issue for the moment that they fell in near free-fall speed.

Another issue about researching building demolition companies has to do with the fact that Larry Silverstein, the owner of the World Trade Center complex, was interviewed sometime in 2002 (for a documentary by PBS called "America Rebuilds") about Building 7, and he said "they made that decision to pull"

"I remember getting a call from the...er...fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.' And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."

Watch him below:

Perhaps I should let Mr Silverstein recant that statement however:

"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."

So perhaps he meant "pull the firefighters out" - the trouble is:

NIST and FEMA and Frank Fellini, Assistant Chief at the time for WTC 7, said:

"...We were concerned that the fires on several floors and the missing steel would result in the building collapsing. So for the next five or six hours we kept firefighters from working anywhere near that building, which included the whole north side of the World Trade Center complex. Eventually around 5:00 or a little after, building number seven came down."

So, given that Building 7 was "pulled' (from Larry Silverstein's own mouth) just how long does it take to place all the explosives in a building in order for it to fall into its own footprint, and minimise damage to surrounding buildings?

Here's where my research comes in - according to http://www.controlled-demolition.com,

they demolished the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit in 1998. Here's what they had to say about how they went about it:

CDI’s 12 person loading crew took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI’s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation overpressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition.

Read that again. 24 days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations.

So how was Building 7 prepared for demolition, on the same day? If CDI's 12 people took 24 days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations, then to do it in one afternoon would have taken, what, 288 people? Yet, during the day, there was smoke and dust and debris all over the WTC complex. How could 288 people get so organised, research the design of the building, bring in all the explosives, get inside the building (and why didn't they put the fires out while they were in there?), place the charges, rig up the detonators...

It just seems implausible at best.

If you think that 9/11 was the result of terrorists, you're completely correct.

Thanks to http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2210 for details.