Fire didn’t cause buildings’ collapse

By Crockett Grabbe

The March 26 Gazette reported that an agreement between government agencies controlling the World Trade Center site was finally reached for starting to rebuild at ground zero, locked from the public for more than eight years since the 9/11 attacks murdered nearly 3,000 people.

This followed news revealing a $637 million deal, to cover the medical costs for roughly 10,000 workers involved in the rescue and cleanup after the 9/11 disaster. The workers' illnesses for these years, typically respiratory in nature, resulted from the toxic brew of contaminants at ground zero.

Both of these news reports directly challenge the government reports that ordinary fires produced this disaster.

The facts and the scientific evidence are in direct contrast to the conclusions of the early 9/11 reports and the 45 reports that the National Institute for Standards and Technology Committee has generated. The WTC buildings did not collapse because of fires started by the airline crashes, but from explosions. The reports that fires did it are scientific swindles by elements of our federal government.

Who am I to make this claim? I am a physicist (doctorate in applied physics, Caltech, 1978) with more than 30 years experience in research, having published more than 100 papers and eight books. Further, I would point out the NIST Committee, while having a few engineers (mostly fire engineers), had no physicists. Their reports blatantly ignore simple principles of physics to reach their conclusions.

For example, the last NIST report released about a year ago claimed rapidly erupting fires caused Building 7 to fall rapidly and symmetrically in a 6.5-second virtual free-fall state. Because of the very asymmetrical nature of fires, this contradicts known principles of thermodynamics. The scientific facts slice through these documents much deeper.

From more than 100 reports by survivors hearing loud blasting noises just before the collapses, and with observed blast effects in the photographs of the North and South Tower collapses, they clearly did not collapse from fires. With significant damage going out over one-fourth mile from the buildings themselves, with multiple measurements of exceedingly high temperatures and massive melting of metal in the rubble, and with the “smoking gun” microscopic remnants of thermitic explosives in the rubble, the evidence is overwhelming that the government reports are wrong. Those remnants and their interaction with massive amounts of dust from pulverized building materials formed the toxins breathed by the rescue crews, causing nearly $1 billion in medical expenses.

The nature of the collapses, along with the principles of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, show the collapse was not caused by the fires. Ready calculations show gravity did not provide the energy for breaking up the towers because more than 10 times as much energy was expended in breaking them apart. Newton's laws of motion formulated 500 years ago show powerful horizontal forces blew out the multiple multistory large pieces of the wall in the North Tower, ripped apart the South Tower and produced their rapidly expanding, pulverized dust clouds.

We as a nation should never forget those mass murders and injuries on 9/11, or the poor responses to them by the federal government. A national action is sorely needed to correct the wholesale errors published on those collapses, and to investigate and fully expose all the murderers.

Crockett Grabbe of Iowa City worked as a research scientist for 28 years with the University of Iowa and recently moved his new business, SeaLane Research & Consulting, to Austin, Texas, where he will reside beginning in May. Comments: cgrabbe@austin.rr.com