Captain Chris Boyle, 18 years FDNY
A little north of Vesey I said, we’ll go down, let’s see what’s going on. A couple of the other officers and I were going to see what was going on. We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on. So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

But they had a hoseline operating. Like I said, it was hitting the sidewalk across the street, but eventually they pulled back too. Then we received an order from Fellini, we’re going to make a move on 7. That was the first time really my stomach tightened up because the building didn’t look good. I was figuring probably the standpipe systems were shot. There was no hydrant pressure. I wasn’t really keen on the idea. Then this other officer I’m standing next to said, that building doesn’t look straight. So I’m standing there. I’m looking at the building. It didn’t look right, but, well, we’ll go in, we’ll see.

So we gathered up rollups and most of us had masks at that time. We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned.

Deputy Chief Peter Hayden, 33 years FDNY
We tried to get searches in those areas. By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

It sure looks like it's controled to me, And what I have read of the FEMA reports

Did the collapse of the WTC 7 benefit corporations who were being sued by the SEC?

Aimed at the world's financial heart, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were designed to throw capitalism into chaos. In one respect they succeeded: Millions of crucial documents were vaporized in the tragedy, and the process of sorting the losses out has been difficult and has included charges of opportunism.

A Citigroup lawyer, for instance, recently told a congressional committee looking into the bank's role in the WorldCom mess that she couldn't provide them with all the information they sought because some of it was destroyed in the attack on the World Trade Center.

"Some further email records the committee has requested cannot be retrieved," wrote Citigroup Deputy General Counsel Jane Sherburne in an Aug. 7 letter to House Committee on Financial Services.

"The backup tapes for external emails from September 1998 through December 2000, and for a short time period in September 2001, were lost when the building in which they were stored (7 World Trade Center) was destroyed in the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001."
Maybe no financial institution lost more critical documents than the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had its New York regional office at 7 World Trade Center. While the regulatory agency was fortunate in that it lost no employees in the terror attacks, it suffered setbacks in a number of long-running securities investigations.

In August, defense lawyers for several former executives of Rite Aid, who've been charged by the SEC with fraud and obstruction of justice, filed a motion seeking a delay in the trial, claiming some of the documents gathered by the SEC had been lost in the attack. SEC attorneys contend many of the original copies of those documents still exist at other locations but acknowledge it will take time to reconstruct all the evidence in the case.

The SEC says the main problem it encountered was that an index for the documents in the Rite Aid case was destroyed in the attack -- not necessarily the documents themselves.

A similar reconstruction of evidence had to take place in a decade-old insider trading case against several former executives of Motel 6, a chain of low-cost motels. The SEC settled the case against the remaining defendants in June. But before that could occur, it had to obtain a court order directing the lawyers for some of the defendants to assist the SEC in reconstructing files "that were destroyed due to the events of Sept. 11, 2001."

In the Motel 6 case, the four remaining defendants, without admitting or denying the insider-trading charges, entered into a settlement with the SEC in which they agreed to pay fines and penalties totaling $798,000. In all, the 10-year case netted $6.36 million in fines, penalties and disgorged profits for the SEC.

SEC officials won't discuss how many cases may have been impacted by the terror attacks, but they claim the lost information was limited to two weeks' worth of data stored on the agency's computers that hadn't yet been backed up.

But it's clear from talking to securities lawyers who practice before the SEC that things haven't gone as smoothly as the agency would like the public to believe.

"Regardless of what the regulators say, they lost a ton of files," says Bill Singer, a New York securities lawyer, who says one case he had pending before the SEC quickly settled because so many of the original documents were destroyed. "In my opinion it was a wholesale loss of documents."

TheStreet.com (9/09/02) Link



"...it appears that the collapse initiated at the lower levels on the inside and progressed up..." -FEMA: WTC Study, Chp 5 (05/02)

Doesn't the fact that the WTC 7 did collapse on it's own footprint and caused relatively little damage to the surrounding buildings gives strong support to the theory that it was imploded by demolition?



Link