Destruction of WTC.
New Seismic Data Refutes
Official WTC Explanation
By Christopher Bollyn
Exclusive to American Free Press
9-5-2
Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from Sept. 11 indicate huge
bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin
towers immediately prior to the collapse.
American Free Press has learned of pools of "molten steel" found at the base
of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy
source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York
seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained
seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse.
These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally
knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.
In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support
columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel"
were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and
intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved
environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.
Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told AFP
that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center.
Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to remove the debris from
the site.
Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI)
of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls
itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and
implosion of structures."
Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up
plan for the entire operation.
AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.
"Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements."
These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts
of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said.
The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the
rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also
found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800
degrees Fahrenheit.
Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the
jet fuel."
Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were fueled by "paper, carpet
and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors
as they 'pancaked' into the basement."
However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying
kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in
the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in
an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC collapse, Painful Questions,*
told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed
down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be "a smoky smoldering
pile."
Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be
reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F.
Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke,
it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit.
The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was
available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.
Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging
Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots.
Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the
South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F was recorded.
This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep.
At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the
entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box
columns were four inches thick.
Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling
first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the
very beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP, "Everything went
simultaneously."
"At 1029 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from
the base and began falling down," Hufschmid writes. "If the first event was
the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of
columns?"
Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections
between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer
with the FEMA assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."
Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives
in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the
structure."
SEISMIC 'SPIKES'
Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in
Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic
activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained.
While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant
earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.
The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the
10-second collapse of the South Tower at 95904 and a 2.3 quake during the
8-second collapse of the North Tower at 102831.
However, the Palisades seismic record shows that-as the collapses began-a
huge seismic "spike" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the
ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the
collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.
These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the theory
that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.
A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of
University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear
explosion appears on a seismograph.
The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other
seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West
seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.
Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers
actually hit the ground.
Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of
Columbia University's Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, "This
is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being
investigated."
Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a
100-fold increase in energy released. These "short-period surface waves,"
reflect "the interaction between the ground and the building foundation,"
according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.
"The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a
gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology
Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades
seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles
away.
These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local
earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the
WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was "not coupled" to the
ground.
"Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was
converted into ground motion," Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that
resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small."
Last November, Lerner-Lam said "During the collapse, most of the energy of
the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring
structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage-but
not causing significant ground shaking."
Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was
many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the
falling mass of the towers. The question is What was that energy source?
While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous
eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in
the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests.
Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the
fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing,
headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.
Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of
steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if
an explosion had affected the steel.
"I am not a metallurgist," Corley said.
Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of
Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu
Schnitzer East.
Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chi ca go-based company, sold
the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000
tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per
ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the steel.
Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports.
Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading
firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.
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