Modern Steel High-Rises Don’t Collapse Like a House of Cards
Despite Catastrophic Damage

Those of us attempting to present the evidence of the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center skyscrapers to the “uninitiated” can meet with significant psychological resistance. Some respond to the scientific forensic evidence quite readily. But some do not.

WTC 3 severely damaged from the South Tower debris. No complete collapse. The North Tower is yet to come down on top of it.

Another way to open the minds of skeptics – without getting technical at all – is to compare the other WTC buildings that did not actually collapse to the three that collapsed completely. Show the following photos to your stubborn interlocutor. Ask him or her to notice how severely damaged these other buildings were by the debris from the Twin Towers, yet substantial portions remained upright. And ask “Why?”.

WTC 3 after the North Tower's debris rained down on it. Still some portions remain intact.

World Trade Center Building Three was also known as the World Trade Center Hotel, the New York Marriott Hotel, or the Vista Hotel.

Many have compared the severe damage that WTC 3 sustained to the minimal damage that WTC 7 sustained, and wondered how WTC 7 could have collapsed so completely – like a house of cards – uniformly, symmetrically, and at free-fall acceleration as fast as a bowling ball falling off the top of it.

FEMA documented the distribution of Twin Tower's perimeter wall column pieces

Consider the impact that WTC 3 must have sustained for it to have been damaged as it was. Material from the Twin Towers was coming down with enough force to penetrate as many as about sixteen floors of this building. Yet, the lower floors stopped the debris, and a total collapse, well before ground level, and most sections stopped the damage far higher than that. How could any “collapse” in Building 7 – which would have had nowhere near the momentum that the falling Twin Tower material did – have continued through the entire structure of WTC 7? How could any such destruction (regardless of what started it) possibly have kept accelerating, through scores of heavy, mostly undamaged columns and hundreds of structural interconnections? Shouldn’t Building 7’s collapse have decelerated and stopped even sooner than the free-falling heavy structural steel members that were stopped by the lower portions of WTC 3?

If the portions of WTC 3 that didn’t take a direct hit didn’t come down, then Building 7 should not have come down at all, and certainly not in the manner that it did: smoothly and symmetrically, at freefall acceleration for more than 2 seconds - and at near-freefall for the rest of its destruction. (Depending on your interlocutor’s reaction to this point, you might go on to remind him or her of the reports of sounds of explosions – including from a witness who was inside WTC 7 – and even a reported countdown overheard on a radio by a first responder just before the building came down.)

WTC 4 sustained massive damage - but did not collapse

WTC 4 is another important case in point. Though the vast majority of this building was leveled by the falling debris, the remainder was still standing. Yet no portion of Building 7 remained standing?

WTC 5 was ravaged by fire - like few other steel buildings in history. Like them, however, it suffered no collapse.

World Trade Center Building 5 was fully engulfed in flames - burning far more extensively than the few small isolated pockets of fire in WTC 7. If any WTC building was going to collapse by “normal office fires” (the official cause of WTC 7’s destruction) it would be this one. Yet, it did not collapse.

WTC 6 suffered perhaps the most extensive damage in the complex from the debris of the Twin Towers. Why didn't the remaining portions of this building fail?

World Trade Center 6 is also an important benchmark for the robust, redundant structural design of steel-framed structures.

Given that WTC 7 failed so completely with such minor debris damage and such minor fires, anyone would find it strange that WTC 6, with a massive hole crushed into it which accounts for almost half its volume, should remain standing.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The WTC 6 building had to be torn down at great effort and expense, while at WTC 7 they needed only to pick up the structural members, already dismembered from one another.

WTC 6's failure to collapse betrays the real nature of WTC 7's destruction

No formal education, slide rule, calculator, or computer model is required to know that something is very wrong with the story we’ve been given by the government engineers in their WTC building reports.

Be sure to ask your now-convinced skeptical thinker to sign our petition calling for a truly independent investigation, with subpoena power, of the destruction of all three World Trade Center skyscrapers. Anyone can sign, and every signature counts.

WTC 7's fine-grained remains lay almost completely within the building's footprint - before the cleanup crew ever got there