Scientist and Son-in-law identify "cutting charges" in WTC demolition

http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/911/magazine/gz/wall.html

Debris was still falling. You couldn’t see the sky. Maybe you could see like 30 or 40 feet up. And the weirdest thing, you could hear these booms above you. It sounded like bombs going off above you, but it was actually the military jets flying overhead. It was like an eerie feeling. You couldn’t see anything, but you could hear these things going back and forth. It was like a real heavy fog.

The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

...

Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures.

"It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that," Romero said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.

...

If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could have been caused by a small amount of explosive, he said.

http://emperors-clothes.com/news/albu.htm

NY Times 3/2/2002
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC LIPTON
Burning Diesel Is Cited in Fall of 3rd Tower
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00613FC35550C718CDDAA0894DA404482

<snip>"Massive structural beams that functioned as a sort of bridge to hold up the 47-story skyscraper known as 7 World Trade Center were compromised in a disastrous blaze fed by diesel fuel, leading to the building's collapse on Sept. 11, investigators have concluded in a preliminary report...As much as 42,000 gallons of diesel fuel was stored near ground level in the tower and ran in pipes up to smaller tanks and emergency generators for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's command center, the Secret Service's office and other tenants...Investigators have determined that the burning fuel apparently undermined what is known as a transfer truss. The trusses, a series of steel beams that allowed the skyscraper to be built atop multistory electricity transformers, were critical to the structural integrity of the building and ran near the smaller diesel tanks. A failure of the same type of structural bridge contributed to the collapse of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City when it was bombed in 1995. Federal guidelines for public buildings, created in 1996, warned of the dangers of such trusses in terrorist attacks...Fire officials did at one point question the storage of large amounts of fuel well above the ground level, saying that one large tank for the mayor's command center, if ever compromised, might fuel a fire that would threaten the building...Dr. John D. Osteraas, director of civil engineering practice, Exponent Failure Analysis Associates, in Menlo Park, Calif., reviewed videos of the collapse, discussed it with other engineers and came to a similar conclusion; the fuel, the trusses and the fire brought 7 World Trade down. "The pieces have come together,"he said. "Without the fuel, I think the building would have done fine."

NY TIMES
December 20, 2001
City Had Been Warned of
Fuel Tank at 7 World Trade Center
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3081FFC3B5A0C738EDDAB0994D9404482

<snip>"Fire Department officials warned the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1998 and 1999 that a giant diesel fuel tank for the mayor's $13 million command bunker in 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story high-rise that burned and collapsed on Sept. 11, posed a hazard and was not consistent with city fire codes. The 6,000-gallon tank was positioned about 15 feet above the ground floor and near several lobby elevators and was meant to fuel generators that would supply electricity to the 23rd-floor bunker in the event of a power failure. Although the city made some design changes to address the concerns - moving a fuel pipe that would have run from the tank up an elevator shaft, for example - it left the tank in place. But the Fire Department repeatedly warned that a tank in that position could spread fumes throughout the building if it leaked, or, if it caught fire, could produce what one Fire Department memorandum called "disaster."