The Explosive Evidence at the World Trade Center on 9/11
By Richard Gage, AIA, Architect
1. FEMA Report, Appendix C
Before the NIST investigation, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a preliminary cursory investigation and produced a Building Performance Assessment Report.
In Appendix C of that report, the agency described steel samples from Building 7 that had undergone a “high-temperature corrosion attack” that had turned a heavy steel beam flange “into Swiss cheese.”
FEMA found “evidence of a severe high-temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including rapid oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting….”
FEMA’s metallographic analysis showed that the steel had not only melted but that some of it had even “evaporated”. This takes a temperature of 4,000ºF!
But according to ME Petroleum (the manufacturer of the JET A-1 fuel in in the WTC attack planes) the jet fuel burns at only 600ºF in open air – about 3,400 degrees F. cooler than what evaporated the WTC steel:
Per FEMA’s Appendix C analysis, “A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel.”
It added: “No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified”, which The New York Times called “perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.”
NIST excluded most of the contents of the Metallurgical Examination from its report when it took over the investigation from FEMA in 2002!
Neither jet fuel nor office fires can reach anywhere close to steel’s melting point of 2,800ºF, much less, its evaporation temperature of 4,000ºF.
So what could have caused this “high-temperature corrosion attack” on the WTC steel?
Thermite is an incendiary used by the military to destroy steel. It is a mixture of powdered iron oxide and elemental aluminum which, when ignited, reacts violently producing temperatures of 4000 to 4500°F – well above iron’s melting point – producing molten iron and aluminum oxide ash in a highly dangerous eruption:
This incendiary, thermite, if it were used, would answer some important questions. It explains the extreme heat and resultant damage to the steel – because it burns at 4,000 degrees F. It explains the abundant evidence of molten iron spheres in the WTC dust that we will uncover shortly. And, it explains the presence of sulfur which is added to thermite to create “thermate”, which is even more effective at cutting through steel “like a knife through butter”.
Even if these critical temperatures had been reduced somewhat by the presence of free sulfur, which was also documented in Appendix C, where did the sulfur come from?
Contrary to what NIST and others have claimed, the sulfur, also, could not have come from “gypsum wallboard” in which it is an inert chemically “locked” ingredient. Besides, gypsum board has never in the last hundred years turned on and attacked the very steel that it has been designed to protect.
2. Molten Iron and/or Steel Pouring Out
Photos and numerous credible witnesses, including first responders and structural engineers, confirmed the existence of several tons of molten metal in the WTC debris pile – described by some firefighters as “flowing like lava.” Photos clearly show glowing molten metal dripping from the jaws of “crab claw” excavators:
Again, office fires and jet fuel are not anywhere hot enough to produce the molten metal seen in photos and reported dozens of witnesses.
Video of the South Tower taken shortly before it came down shows a spout of molten metal spewing from near the plane impact opening. It is glowing bright orange-yellow in daylight, unlike molten aluminum (the primary component of the planes which NIST claimed was the source of the molten metal). Molten aluminum appears silvery under daylight conditions. This pouring metal could only be molten iron or steel:
3. Fused Molten Steel “Meteorites
9/11 artifacts architect Bart Voorsanger discovered numerous massive multi-ton previously-molten objects which he referred to as “meteorites” in the WTC rubble, describing them as “fused… molten steel and melted concrete… fused by the heat”.
Jet fuel and office fires cannot produce molten iron. Nothing in the official narrative accounts for these “meteorites”.
Concrete also melted during the WTC destruction, and concrete melts only above 3200°F. The Police Museum near the World Trade Center is home to this artifact of melted concrete. The museum curators have no idea how significant this evidence is to answering the mystery of what brought down The Towers. Concrete can also be converted to its original dry elements, turning to a “whitish powder”, at even lower temperatures of 1,500°C, per ASTM C856 – which may explain the missing 110 concrete floors that should have been stacked up at the bottom in the pile.
4. Witnesses to Molten Metal
Many first responders and structural engineers described the presence of molten metals while working in the pile:
1. FDNY first responder Captain Philip Ruvolo stated: “You get down below and you see “molten steel – molten steel! –running down the channel rails – like you’re in a foundry – like lava from a volcano.”
2. First responder Patrick Dillon describes: “The further down into that pile I got, the more I could make out what looked like, from a science fiction movie, and it was way down deeper inside this nightmare. It was bright orange and moving like you would see in a volcano eruption in a movie. And that’s where the heat was coming from.”
“And every time I went back in the lava thing, the molten metal got closer and got more intense – brighter. It was like moving and running like it was in a movie. At one point, on the second or third day, there was like a lake of it. And these molten areas stayed hot and stayed molten for days and days.”
3. Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer of the Twin Towers, was taken down into the basements and saw what he recounted as “a little river of steel, flowing”.
4. This video shows molten steel/iron pouring from the remains of the fallen WTC structure months after 9/11, in an “inferno of heat and smoke.” The (unknown) site cleanup engineer states, “…tremendous amount of steel that was heated up…. We uncover the steel and the air hits it, and it’s still hot…”:
5. Richard Riggs, Debris Removal Specialist, recounts his experience: “There were actually melted beams, where it was actually molten steel that was being dug up.”
6. Ken Holden, Director of the New York Dept of Design & Construction, stated in a Congressional hearing on 9/11: “Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall.”
7. Michael Casale, Project Superintendent for Mazzochi Wrecking at the WTC site, noted: “The clean-up was very difficult in the beginning. The steel was coming out red in certain areas in the first couple of weeks.”
10. The documentary “9/11: New Pearl Harbor” by Italian director Massimo Mazzucco also documents in greater detail the extreme heat at the World Trade Center site, including testimony such as, “Vichers’ crew picked up 40 foot-long pieces of steel impaled in the pile where the bottom 20’ would be glowing red hot.”
Despite all of the above evidence – and there is much more – of molten metal, NIST denied the existence of Molten metal:
John Gross, Co-Project Leader of the NIST WTC analysis, states: “…molten steel – I know of absolutely nobody; no eyewitnesses who have said so; nobody who has produced it.”
And yet here he is on the salvaged steel pile, proudly photographed with the end of a “partly evaporated” steel beam – requiring a temperature of 4,000ºF – from WTC 7 that was provided to WPI by FEMA author Jonathan Barnett for the analysis published in their Appendix C Metallurgical Examination:
Figure 12a: “Fire temperatures were so intense that concrete melted like lava around everything in its path,” including this handgun from WTC 6. It sits today in the NYPD museum.
5. Hot Spots in the Pile with Extreme Temperatures Measured by USGS and NASA
The U.S. Geological Survey used NASA’s data from thermal imaging of the WTC rubble pile surface to document extreme hot spots with temperatures of almost 1,400°F – hotter than most office fires can produce – though there were no fires on the surface of the WTC7 pile following its collapse.
The detected surface temperatures could only be the result of radiating heat emanating from far higher temperatures deep within the WTC pile, which persisted for several weeks despite the continuous spraying of millions of gallons of water onto it. Significantly, thermite contains its own source of oxygen, so it burns under water as well.
6. Previously Molten Iron-Rich Spheres/Droplets in the WTC Dust
Chemical and micrographic analysis of the dust that blanketed Lower Manhattan after the destruction of both of the Twin Towers revealed the presence of iron-rich “microspheres.”
These microspheres were found in separately-collected dust samples both near and far from the World Trade Center, some collected before clean-up operations had begun. Their tell-tale shape indicates that they were previously-molten fragments that were pulled by surface tension into spherical droplets that solidified before hitting the ground.
These microspheres are further direct evidence of temperatures exceeding the melting point of iron during the destruction of the skyscrapers. They could not have been produced by friction or any other known process during the collapse of the Towers.
7. Evidence of UN-Ignited Thermite in the WTC Dust: Dual-layered Red-Gray Nano-Thermite Chips
An even more definitive discovery arose during a scientific examination of the WTC dust – small red-gray chips. An international team of chemists, physicists, and others led by Niels Harrit, PhD, Professor of Chemistry, confirmed that the chemical make-up of the red layer of these chips, their granular structure, and their thermal behavior, were all consistent with those of “advanced thermitic pyrotechnics or explosives”.
Particle sizes of less than a tenth of a micron inside the red layer of the chips identify this material as nano-thermite. The importance of the extremely small particle sizes is that – the surface area is significantly increased for a given volume of the components, so chemical reactions are greatly accelerated.
Harrit’s team published their findings in The Open Chemical Physics Journal in April 2009:
Members of the team had earlier asked NIST to test the dust for evidence of explosives but NIST repeatedly refused to do so, even though such testing is called for by NFPA 921, the National Fire Protection Association guidelines for fire and explosion investigations throughout the United States. NIST did not even discuss the issue of thermite or explosives in its reports. Furthermore, their charter restricts their investigation to fire-only as a cause of the WTC collapses.
Only in its FAQ referring narrowly to tests for ordinary thermite and thermate – not part of its formal reports – did NIST explain that “such tests would not necessarily have been conclusive” because, they claimed, “The metal compounds also would have been present in the construction materials making up the WTC towers…”
However, NFPA 921 does not provide any justification for not performing the tests, especially when there is compelling evidence of “high-temperature accelerants (HTAs),” such as “melted steel” (22.4.1). The guidelines also refer to thermite specifically: “Thermite mixtures also produce exceedingly hot fires. Such accelerants generally leave residues that may be visually or chemically identifiable.”
Moreover, Harrit’s team of scientists, who did examine the dust, found an exotic, highly-engineered form of thermite, known as nano-thermite or super-thermite. These materials ignite with much lower sound levels than conventional explosives.
The Nano-thermite (or Super-thermite) in the WTC dust contains ultra-fine-grain particles of aluminum and iron oxide, 1000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, “intimately intermixed” and embedded in a matrix of organic material. When heated slowly to about 800ºF (430°C) it ignites, producing molten iron spheres – with the same chemical signature as the molten iron spheres found in all the dust samples by the USGS and RJ Lee Group!
This chemical reaction, triggered only at 430° C, releases enough energy to raise the temperature beyond the melting point of iron (2800°F/1538°C), proving it to be a thermitic reaction and proving it to be the source of the molten iron microspheres found in all the WTC dust samples.
8. A Conclusion Damning to the Official Narrative
So what does the evidence reveal? Was it a combination of plane impact damage and resultant fires that brought down the Twin Towers as claimed by the government’s NIST report? OR was it extreme heat generated by active super-thermitic materials – and explosives, as covered in Part 2 of this report, Twin Towers’ Explosive Destruction?
As we have compellingly seen, the ten signature features of controlled demolition evident in the Twin Towers’ destruction comprise direct evidence of the use of pre-placed high-energy explosives and incendiaries.
Fires – the official government explanation – don’t cause ANY of these features – let alone ALL of them.
Along with the compelling corroboration of additional circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony detailed in Part 2 of this report, we believe that we have definitively proven controlled demolition at the WTC on September 11, 2001.
All of the above evidence of extreme heat is completely unaccounted for in the official narrative of the destruction of the three WTC Towers. Plane impacts and jet fuel fires have no ability to produce this phenomenon.
Each and every component of this evidence must be explained by any coherent theory of the tower collapses. But none of it was included or explained by NIST, or by any other government agency.
ONLY controlled demolition by thermite and nano-thermite is supported by the evidence, in combination with high-energy explosives, can explain the forensic and photographic evidence and witnessed phenomenon.
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