New Study: WTC 7 Didn’t Collapse from Fire

At the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 crimes, a newly released study from the University of Alaska Fairbanks reveals that—as many “conspiracy theorists” have long maintained—fire did not cause the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, the last of the three buildings in NYC to collapse onto its own footprint on 9/11.

By Mark Anderson

The vastly improbable official story of what happened in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001 didn’t fall as fast as some may have hoped, but it has nevertheless collapsed, with apparent finality, in the light of a four-year University of Alaska Fairbanks study which found that uncontrolled fires did not bring down the World Trade Center’s Building 7, contrary to the U.S. government’s contention that fires alone brought down the structure.

Using blueprints of the construction of the Salomon Brothers Building, as Building 7 was formally named, university engineers, according to their report, developed sophisticated computer models of the 47-story building, the collapse of which happened about seven hours after the WTC’s twin towers collapsed on the morning of that grim Tuesday.

“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse,” a draft report on the findings notes.

NIST is the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. The agency has tried to maintain in the face of growing skepticism that burning materials from the neighboring twin towers, within the 16-acre WTC complex, hit WTC Building 7 and set it ablaze, and that the building eventually succumbed to intense internal fires and crumbled to the ground.

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), which funded the University of Alaska Fairbanks research, said in a statement in the immediate wake of the study’s findings that it’s calling for “a sustained effort by AE911Truth and our supporters to get Congress to acknowledge the University of Alaska Fairbanks WTC 7 Report and determine that [NIST] failed in its congressional mandate to explain the likely technical cause of WTC 7’s free-fall collapse on 9/11.”

The study, which examined how the building’s design would have responded to fires at the 13th floor, where most of the fires reportedly occurred, also took into account the official NIST collapse scenario, and then ran multiple computer simulations destroying various structural points in order to identify which failures would have had to occur for the destruction of the building to happen as it did.

“The models … show that the only way to replicate the observed collapse is to simulate the failure of every column at nearly the same time,” an informational video on the study by AE911Truth noted.

The study summarizes: “It is our conclusion that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the building.”

Many 9/11 researchers are well aware of the university’s study and its conclusions and it has bolstered their resolve to continue pushing for a new investigation into the events of Sept. 11, 2001. They want to know what did cause the mysterious collapse of Building 7 if it was not fire, and what could have caused the failure of every column at nearly the exact same time—a scenario reminiscent of a controlled demolition using explosives.

Mark Anderson is AFP’s roving editor. Email him at [email protected].