Embarrassing NIST: They Left Out Critical Structural Features of WTC7

Embarrassing NIST: They Left Out Critical Structural Features of WTC7

by Andrew Mills         

On December 12, 2013, well known attorney, Dr. William Pepper, sent a letter to the U. S . Department of Commerce Inspector General on behalf of Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth. The letter concerned certain structural feature omissions found in early 2012 in the drawings on which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) based their conclusions in their 2008 report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC7) on 9/11. (NIST is one of the agencies under the Department of Commerce.) Dr. Pepper's letter asked that that the Inspector General investigate and have NIST correct the Report.     

As most Americans know, a third building (WTC7) of the WorldTradeCenter complex of buildings collapsed on the same day as the twin towers.  WTC 7 was a 47-story skyscraper that housed offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, as well as the NYC Office of Emergency Management's OperationsCenter. It collapsed at around 5 pm on 9/11. No airplane crashed into it and it experienced only minor fires before it collapsed. It fell straight down, right into its own footprint, and the speed of fall was very close to gravitational free fall.  Many people at the time remarked that its collapse closely resembled the collapse of buildings due to intentional demolition.      

Of those Americans who know that Building 7 collapsed on 9/11, very few are aware that the government through NIST actually investigated the causes of the building's collapse. The report by NIST was released to the public in August 2008, nearly seven years after the attacks. The drawings upon which the report was based were released only in 2011 in response to a FOIA request.   At the time of the release of the report, many professional engineers and architects had serious misgivings about the report as it basically contended that for the first time in history, the symmetrical, complete collapse of a large, fire protected, steel framed building was said to be fire induced.     

As noted in Dr. Pepper's letter, since the release of the drawings, structural engineers have spent considerable time comparing these drawings to the descriptions of the collapse model provided in the report. Their findings revealed that critical structural features in Building 7 were inexplicably missing from consideration in the Report. These critical features included stiffeners, that provided critical girder support, as well as lateral support beams which supported a beam which allegedly buckled. Only through the omission of any discussion about the stiffeners and the lateral support beams is NIST's probable collapse sequence possible. It is the unanimous opinion of these structural engineers that with the inclusion of these critical features, NIST's probable collapse sequence must be ruled out.      

As Dr. Pepper's letter notes, the group of architects and engineers unanimously believe that the NIST Report's conclusion of collapse due to fire could not have been justified if the stiffeners and the lateral support beams were not omitted. The credibility of NIST and the Department of Commerce requires that they open an investigation into the potential negligence and/or misconduct by the lead investigators of NIST's Building 7 investigation and that NIST be directed to produce a corrected analysis and report on the collapse of Building 7, this time, by fully taking into account the presence of the stiffeners and the lateral support beams.        

After the discovery of these omissions, the group of architects and engineers who discovered them pressed NIST for over a year to get an answer to the question as to why these critical features were omitted from the Report's discussion and analysis. But they were greeted with silence until October 25, 2013 when a NIST public relations official finally acknowledged that the stiffeners had been omitted, but incredibly, from an engineering standpoint, said they were not necessary to consider.          

With the submittal of Dr. Pepper's letter, which was accompanied by a detailed engineering analysis, NIST has never before been challenged this way, with their own data and information that they themselves have released. They appear to be caught between a rock and a hard place. At the very least they should be forced to release their WTC 7 collapse modeling data. They have not responded to the letter as of yet.       

But this is court-room level evidence of impropriety involving the preparation of the WTC 7 report, and will clearly be an embarrassment to NIST. It shows that the demand for a new WTC 7 investigation by those skeptical of the Report's conclusions was in order all along. Even if nothing else is re-investigated about 9/11, the collapse of Building 7 richly deserves a thorough investigation .      

Here is a link to Dr. Pepper's letter to the Department of Commerce Inspector General:

http://www.journalof911studies.com/resources/2014JanLetterPepper.pdf