WTC Collapse Inquiries

According to the official account of the attack as told by media and government, the Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed totally because of structural failures. Since no steel-framed building, bridge, or other large structure has ever totally collapsed with fires as the primary cause either before or after 9/11/01, these events would be the largest and most mysterious failures of engineered steel structures in the history of the world. Shouldn't they have prompted an investigation of commensurate scope and resources?

Incredibly, no investigation was funded as the site was cleaned up. A group of volunteers from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), many of whom had also participated in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, started an investigation with limited resources. FEMA eventually took over the ASCE's investigation, and named it the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT). Months after the attack, frustrations with failures of the investigation were expressed in a congressional hearing.

The hearing transcript goes on to list four reasons for the failure of the investigation, excerpted here.

It was not until long after the Ground Zero clean-up was completed that an investigation with a multi-million dollar budget began: NIST's 'Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation' was funded with an initial budget of $16 million. If the problems with FEMA's investigation enumerated in the Learning from 9/11: Understanding the Collapse of the World Trade Center earn it the description of a farce, then the conduct of NIST's investigation earn it the description of a cover-up. NIST's Final Report on the Twin Towers shows that:

• NIST avoids describing, let alone explaining, the "collapse" of each Tower after they were "poised for collapse." Thus, NIST avoids answering the question its investigation was tasked with answering: how did the Towers collapse?
• NIST describes the Twin Towers without reference to the engineering history of steel-framed buildings, and separates its analysis of WTC Building 7 into a separate report. By treating them in isolation, NIST hides just how anomalous the alleged collapses of the buildings are.
• NIST avoids disclosing the evidence sulfidation documented in Appendix C of the FEMA's Building Performance Study ¹   This unexplained phenomenon was described by the New York Times as "perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation."
• NIST has refused to publish the computer models that its report imply show how the fires in the Towers led to "collapse initiation".

Underwriters Laboratories executive-turned-whistleblower Kevin Ryan enumerates the official "investigations" completed by mid-2006 in his presentation A New Standard For Deception .

Ryan reports that the the leaders of the ASCE team who volunteered to explain the WTC collapses are almost identical to the authors of the OKC Murrah Building report.

Later in his presentation, Ryan notes the overlapping authorship of the FEMA and NIST reports.