A Note About 9/11 “Debunkers”

It could be hoped that the comments from the structural engineers quoted in this article would silence the “debunkers” who dismissed our arguments first because, allegedly, no engineers agreed with us. That was never
true to begin with. After AE911Truth was formed and scores of engineers signed the petition, these debunkers predictably moved the goalposts, saying we didn't have any engineers who know anything about heavy steel
structures such as tall buildings.

Since the 28 engineers interviewed for this article do in fact possess that knowledge, the goalposts will no doubt just be moved again. This kind of behavior should make clear the nature of the game that is being played. One word for it is sophistry.

"Something is wrong with this picture," thought Nathan Lomba, as he watched replays of the Twin Tower collapses on television on September 11, 2001. A licensed structural engineer trained in buildings' responses to stress, Lomba saw more on the screen than you or I. He puzzled, "How did the structures collapse in near-symmetrical fashion when the damage was clearly not symmetrical?"...

The engineers find it difficult to believe the government’s claim scattered fires brought about such an orderly collapse. Failure of heatweakened steel would show
“large deflection, asymmetric and local failure, and slow progress,” David Scott told colleagues at the Institution of Structural Engineers in the UK. It’s “a gradual process,” agrees Anders Björkman, and “cannot be simultaneous everywhere.”

A Swedish naval architect working in France, Björkman maintains that failures “will always be local and topple the mass above in the direction of the local collapse.”

Charles Pegelow: “How could all 47 core columns fail at the same instant?” Pegelow has performed design work on offshore oil rigs and tall buildings. His opinion: “Fires could not do that.”

Impossible Collapse Acceleration

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) characterized the Twin Towers’ collapse as “essentially in free fall” (Section 6.14.4 of NIST NCSTAR 1).
Brookman wrote asking NIST investigators why debris fell “with little or no resistance from the intact structure below.” Rice questions how each tower “inexplicably collapsed upon itself, crushing all 287 massive columns on each
floor [while maintaining near-freefall speed] as if the 80,000 tons of supporting structural steel framework underneath didn’t exist.”

Falling objects should take “the path of least resistance,” notes Pasternack, while official explanations claim that Tower debris took the path of greatest resistance – through the strong, crossbraced core structure all the way to the ground.

The rapid breakup of this robust structure appears to defy the laws of physics, engineers say. Forty-five years of structural design experience inform the view of Claude Briscoe, P.E., that the government’s collapse theories “seem to defy the laws
of mechanics, conservation of energy, and known structural failure behavior.” In the official story, the kinetic energy of the falling debris would have been largely absorbed by the energy required to dismember the structure, bending and twisting steel components, and pulverizing 220 acres of concrete floors. To accomplish all this while achieving a nearly free-fallspeed collapse is “simply not physically possible,” says Mason. “There is not sufficient energy available.... For this massively strong structure to just crumble away at near-free-fall speed would have required immense amounts of explosive energy.”

1. Easily deceived or duped; naïve, easily cheated or fooled.