WHERE DID THE TOWERS GO? by Dr. Judy Wood, Ph.D

[James Lewis]

Mr. Orling, I have to say that I am deeply bothered by your spurious use of "science" to discredit Dr. Woods' theory of what happened to the Twin Towers. You seem you want to use your position as an architect as a pulpit to make statements that cannot be reconciled through science, or plain common sense. One question...if the buildings did "collapse" in the way that you suggested, why is it that no other building in history has been observed to collapse in the same way after burning? As an example, the fire at One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, on February 23, 1991, burned for 19 hours, far longer than the Twin Towers did, and not only did the building NOT collapse (the fire gutted eight floors of the building), but even the glass didn't melt - and the melting point of glass is far lower than the melting point for carbon steel. So how can a fire that burned for a much shorter time, and gutted far fewer floors, cause a structure as large as 1 and 2 World Trade Center to simply "collapse"? That simply doesn't make any kind of sense - common or otherwise. As for the theory about how the explosives, if any, could have been placed in the buildings, there is a simple answer for that. In the months preceding 9/11, the WTC was evacuated several times, different floors each time, for fire drills. That would have given any conspirators, or their mechanics, ample time to place explosive charges at strategic places inside of the building, as the evacuations lasted for around an hour to an hour and a half. My point is, the official version, and yours, do not make one whit of common sense. And yes, I understand that "scientists" like yourself have differing points of opinion on certain things. And I assume that we've all heard the old saying "walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be a duck", right? Well, if you accept the premise of what that says, which is basically the Principle of Identity in logic (an item or thing is what it is, and cannot be anything else), the the inverse must also be true. That means this: If it doesn't walk like a duck, quack like a duck, or do anything else remotely duck-like then we must be dealing with an animal that is something other than a duck. And I realize that this isn't the most "scientific" way of explaining things, but what it IS...is pure logic and common sense, pure and simple. And on a side note, full disclosure: I do not subscribe to Dr. Woods' theories of the WTC destruction. But I DO subscribe to common sense and logic, which both your's and Dr. Woods' theories seem to steadfastly ignore. I'm not a scientist...I'm just an old country boy from East Texas with a good bit of book sense and a hell of a lot of common sense. And neither your theory, nor Dr. Woods, holds water when the light of logic is shined upon them. As Sherlock Holmes said: "Detective work is about eliminating the impossible. Once you have eliminated the impossible, what you have left, however improbable, has to be the truth". Meaning, it has to be true because that's all that's left to see. Thank you very much :-)

Kyle,

I believe it pretty clear from the basic engineering and from the design of those towers that they could rather easily be taken down with some mechanism to fail as few as three of four tenant floors or the heavy floors and equipment on mech floors 108 and 109. If these floors alone were compromised and the equipment they contained as well as the heavy steel which framed them were released from their moorings so to speak... this would come crashing though any typical tenant floor. No doubt in my mind about this.

There were no explosives needed to fail the floors below the crush zone.. as the "ROOSD" driver would be far more efficient and reliable and was basically unstoppable. ROOSD is a chain reaction of sorts like pushing over a single domino and all the others will then fall in sequence.

If this was an engineered destruction as many claim it it seems more than likely it could have been, those who planned it understood the structure of those towers and that the floors were truly vulnerable to a runaway collapse once overloaded.

Tower 2 raises interesting questions as to what actually was the kick off mechanism because if it was an engineered take down the kick off mass was generated as a result of the top section tilting and the floors crashing down and generating the kick off mass. Perhaps the approach was to somehow get the columns to buckle or displace...then the floors would be unsupported and the whole top would drop and collide generating the threshold mass/energy for a ROOSD. Tower 2 may have been a botched job which didn't matter much in the end because once ROOSD conditions presented in that structure collapse was all but inevitable. Perhaps the asymmetry of the plane strike was the cause of the tilt... but the actual failure still required additional core column buckling to kick off the ROOSD.

The core columns at those elevations were quite a bit thinner sections and not that difficult to attack. There were no massive thick wall box columns up there above the plane strikes. And further the safety factor for the steel was likely less then 2 meaning that if less than half the key columns were compromised the remaining one would fold like a cheap tent. Claims of safety factors of 4, 5 or 20 are pure nonsense. I am doing a detailed columns study to determine the actual safety factor and the preliminary results put it at 1.5... which is slightly above the typical safety factor for steel in high rise frames.

The Wood thesis is complete nonsense because it simply does not fit to the observations of the event. She tries to make the claim that the steel disappeared when virtually all of it fell down and can be seen in the many photos of the debris pile.

One needs to ask if planners studied the towers (as I have) and identified the vulnerabilities (as I have)... why would they resort to complex scenarios and exotic weapons when this was clearly not necessary. Perhaps even the planes themselves delivered the "devices" ... not the fire... which would "attack" the structure enough to undermine enough of the floor supports to kick off a collapse. Or perhaps there were a few devices places and the inevitable fires caused by the flames would "ignite or detonate" the pre planted devices and over time... the key structure supports would be taken out and then a progressive re distribution of the stresses would take place which would also buckle columns and then enough would fail and the mass above would drop, collide and the ROOSD threshold would be created.

One needs to look at this as to how would THEY engineer this take down to be reliable and conceal the fact that there were devices planted.

Leaving the discussion of the actual gravitational collapse untouched has simply set the doubters off the reservation into exotic explosive scenarios... fighting amongst themselves for the proper explanation about the collapse. The collapse was not a mystery.... to those who study the structure which I doubt Bazant bothered to and fiddled around with mass, KE and crush up crush down nonsense... really navel gazing. Had he studied the plans, the specs and he videos he would not bother with is nonsense theories of crush up crush down. It's hard to figure out his motive in all this. He certainly didn't study the event in order produce his paper.

And then we have people who present as experts and haven't studied nor could they even understand the technical issues... witness Fetzer, Boldwyn who are in love with cold steel columns and have no idea what a building weight 500,000 tons standing 1360 feet tall would actually look like if it were breaking apart. Let's be honest here... who DOES know what a building of that size collapsing WOULD look like. How do they know with such certainty that what we see in those images is not a collapse... 500,000 tons collapsing is supposed to be a neat affair and show now debris ejected?... or enormous dust?

Where did all these experts come from?