The 50 Questions NIST Should Have Asked 20 Years Ago
WTC Building 7
Free-fall
1. How is it possible that 47-story Building 7 fell suddenly, symmetrically in free-fall acceleration, without any resistance from any of its 81 columns?
2. Why did NIST deny its free-fall for 7 years, only to be proven wrong and be forced to officially admit that it did collapse in free-fall?
Symmetry
3. How, if Building 7 was damaged asymmetrically in the north-east corner on floor twelve, as per the NIST report, could it fall symmetrically downward?
- Shouldn’t the building have tilted toward its damaged side – and not fall straight down through the path of what was the greatest resistance?
Fires
4. How could a few, small, and scattered ordinary office fires have brought this Type-1 fire-protected steel-frame skyscraper down, when several dozen examples of much hotter, much larger, and longer-lasting fires have never in history brought down such a building?
5. How could normal office fires take out all the columns in the building sequentially floor by floor, in 7 seconds?
6. Why did NIST claim that the fires were still burning, up until the time of the collapse, when the photos show that they were burnt out more than an hour before the collapse?
7. Why aren’t all the firefighters concerned, in the wake of the NIST report during the last 24 years, that such ordinary fightable fires can now bring skyscrapers down on top of them, and on top of the public who are told to “defend in place” in the building (and not obstruct access by firefighters)?
8. Why are many of these same firefighters calling for a new investigation of the NIST report itself?
Controlled Demolition
9. Since the collapse of Building 7 looks exactly like a controlled demolition, why did NIST avoid any serious consideration of this hypothesis?
10. How could a 40,000-ton moment-resisting and X-braced structural steel frame collapse like a house of cards in 7 seconds, with most of its columns and beams severed – one from another?
11. Why does WTC 7 have all of the key features of typical controlled demolition, and none of the features of collapse by fire?
Explosions
12. Why didn’t NIST include in its report on WTC 7 the half-dozen witnesses of explosions prior to its collapse, and even claim that there were no witnesses?
13. What could have caused an elevator cab to be “blown 30 feet out of its hoistway,” as Deputy Director of NY-Office of Emergency Management, Richard Rotanz, reported at Noon, when the building didn’t collapse for another 5 hours.
14. What caused Barry Jennings and Michael Hess to be injured by explosions and subsequently trapped in the building before either Twin Tower collapsed?
Foreknowledge
15. Why did Fire Chief Nick Visconti declare, “We’re moving the command post over this way, that building’s coming down!”?
16. How could Fire Chief Hayden’s engineer declare, upon being asked, “how long until the building comes down?” – then accurately state, “In its current state you have about 5 hours,” when no steel-frame fire-protected high-rise had ever come down due to fire alone?
17. Why did construction workers, while walking away from Building 7 and upon hearing an explosion from the building, look straight into the CNN camera saying, “You hear that? Keep your eye on that building. That thing’s coming down. The building is about to blow up, flame and debris coming down”?
18. Why did former Air Force medic Kevin McPadden hear a “3-2-1” countdown on the radio, and subsequently hear explosions before Building 7 collapsed?
19. How could the BBC have announced, live on TV, the collapse of WTC 7 20 minutes before it collapsed?
20. Why did CNN announce, 7 hours early, the 10:45 AM collapse of a 50-story building (obviously referring to Building 7)?
Expert Statements
21. Why have more than 3,600 Architects & Engineers signed onto the petition at AE911Truth.org demanding a new 9/11 WTC investigation?
22. Why are dozens of structural engineers making statements such as:
- “A localized failure in a steel-framed building like WTC 7 cannot cause a catastrophic collapse like a house of cards, without a simultaneous and patterned loss of several of its columns at key locations within the building”?
23. Why did the top European controlled demolition expert declare:
- “That is controlled demolition. It’s been imploded. It’s a hired job. A team of experts did this?
24. Why did top forensic structural engineer, Prof. Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska, following a 4-year study of WTC 7, declare:
- “The collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a progressive collapse, as claimed by NIST.“
Extreme Heat
Molten Metal
25. What does it mean that FEMA, in its 2002 Report, including a metallurgical examination of the WTC 7 steel, revealed “a phenomenon never before observed in building fires….a liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel…”
- Why did NIST eliminate this metallurgical report from their final report?
26. Did Fire Protection Engineer Jonathan Barnett know, when he said, “steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated,” that it takes 4,000°F to evaporate steel? And that jet fuel and office fires don’t even rise to a third of that temperature?
27. Why is there bright yellow molten steel or iron pouring out of the crab claw excavators in the WTC pit? And out of the South Tower just minutes before its collapse.
28. Why did the first responders in the pit report, “you get down in the pile, and you see molten steel – flowing down the channel rails, like lava from a volcano”?
- Did they know that it takes 3,000°F to melt steel, and that office fires and jet fuel can only achieve half of this temperature?
29. What can explain the well-documented 3,000°F temperatures that are well-documented in the WTC Twin Towers collapse aftermath?
- Why is there evidence of ignited thermite found by so many first responders in the WTC pile?
Previously Molten Iron Microspheres
30. What does it mean that the US Geological Survey and RJ Lee Group independently documented billions of previously molten iron-rich microspheres in ALL of the WTC dust samples?
Where would the required 3,000°F come from?
- Could the ignited thermite have created those molten iron microspheres?
31. Why is bright yellow molten steel or iron pouring out of the South Tower just minutes prior to its collapse?
32. What explains the 2009 peer-reviewed findings from the Niels Harrit research team of dual-layered red-gray chips of nano-thermite in all the independently-collected dust samples they analyzed?
- Why do they ignite at the same temperature as military grade “super-thermite”?
- Why do they produce molten iron-rich microspheres when ignited?
33. What does it mean that Harrit’s international research team found that the “red layer of the red/gray chips in all of their WTC dust samples is active unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material”?
The Twin Towers
Official Explanation
34. How can the official explanation of the Twin Towers’ collapse be true (that an intact top section drove down the rest of the building after weakening of some of the structural steel in the impact zone) when this top section had already been destroyed in the first 3 seconds of the collapse (telescoping in on itself) and so was not even available to drive anything down to the ground?
- NIST claims that the top part of the building drove the rest of the building down to the ground. Why then do none of the photos or videos show such a top part driving anything down?
- And why didn’t that top “pile driver” drive down the 800-foot-tall group of columns standing for 6 seconds after the overall collapse?
35. Why did Zdenek Bazant, in his calculations for his controversial paper submitted to the Journal of Engineering Mechanics on 9/13/01( only two days after 9/11) use twice the actual mass of the upper section of the North Tower above the impact floors and only one third of the actual column strength of the larger building section beneath it in his support for NIST collapse theory?
- a. Why is this paper still today the key theoretical basis of NIST’s column failure theory?
36. Why does the destruction of the towers look more like a volcanic eruption (than a straight-down gravitational collapse) with upward and outward arching streamers, a geometry of fireworks, freely flying solid molten objects trailing thick white smoke clouds?
Witnesses of Explosions
37. Why are there 156 First Responder witnesses of explosions – seeing, hearing, and feeling explosions – many of them BEFORE the towers ever came down?
38. Why did NIST claim that there were “no witnesses of explosions” when there were as many as 200 publicly recorded testimonies – many before the collapse?
- What could explain Fire Chief Frank Cruthers’ testimony that, “… an explosion… appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay, before you could see the beginning of the collapse”?
39. Why did 36 reporters on the day of 9/11 report the WTC destruction as an explosion-based event, most of them actual witnesses of explosions?
- a. Why did the mainstream national media change the story the next day from explosion-based collapses to “fire-induced collapses”?
40. Why did the FBI, NYPD, and FDNY on the day of 9/11 all state that they suspected that explosives were used to bring down the towers, but change their story in the following week to fire-induced collapse?
Seismic Evidence
41. Why did the Richter Scale recordings from Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory document significant seismic events for both towers, more than a dozen seconds before the planes hit either tower – corroborating the explosive testimony of William Rodriguez and others of massive explosions in the basement prior to the plane hitting the buildings?
42. Why did the seismic evidence from Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory document significant seismic events, in the North Tower, 5 seconds before the heaviest debris from each tower struck the ground? And in the South Tower, 7 seconds before any debris struck the ground?
- Wouldn’t this seismic evidence corroborate the testimony of the first responders that saw, heard, and/or felt explosions before the towers fell?
43. Why did at least 3 of the tripod-mounted cameras (two on the ground and one on the rooftop) “shake” 3 to 10 seconds before each of the towers fell?
- Would the camera evidence corroborate the seismic evidence and the first responder’s explosive testimony?
Explosive Evidence
44. Since the damage from the planes and fires was so asymmetrical, why was the destruction itself so precisely symmetrical – all the way down each face of each tower?
Why do the videos show precise rows of individual explosions progressing down the towers – floor by floor?
45. Why do we see in the videos isolated pin-point explosive ejections occurring 20, 40, and even 60 stories down below the downward-traveling zone of destruction in each tower?
Descent Profile and Speed
46. Why did the top sections of each tower descend suddenly, smoothly, down with no stoppage or “jolt” upon impact with the cold, hard, intact steel columns below the floors of the plane impacts?
47. How was it possible that the top section of each Tower descended without slowing at all, but instead accelerated, as if 80,000 tons of steel beneath wasn’t even there?
- What happened to the steel?
Lateral Ejection of Steel
48. Why do we see in the videos the lateral ejection out of both of the Towers of hundreds of freely flying structural steel sections each weighing 4 to 8 tons, at 80mph, landing up to 600 feet in every direction, impaling all of the surrounding skyscrapers?
- Why are they trailing thick white smoke clouds when steel is not flammable in office fires, or under jet fuel conditions?
- Could this be due to the other byproduct of thermite – aluminum oxide ash?
49. Since FEMA officially documented a 1200-foot diameter zone of flying, fallen, and impaled structural steel beyond the footprints of both Towers, how could that steel, which comprised 1/3 of the weight of the falling section of each building, have still been available to crush the lower part as NIST claimed?
Missing Floors
50. Since there were 110 concrete floors, each an acre in size, and since they were not stacked up in pile of “pancakes” at the bottom, and since a third of the WTC dust in the 3” thick blanket across Lower Manhattan from river to river is powdered concrete, then how could the concrete floors (also 1/3 of the weight of each Tower) be available to crush the building below?
51. What extreme-high temperature could have reduced 90,000 tons of concrete in each Tower back to its original aggregate, sand, and cement powder?
Demolition Access
52. How could the perpetrators have gained access to the Towers to plant high energy explosives and incendiaries?
- Could a massive fireproofing upgrade project in the months and years prior to 9/11 have provided access to the underside of the floor systems to apply sprayed-on nano-thermite?
- Is it a coincidence that the WTC fireproofing upgrades occurred mostly on the floors that were hit by the planes on 9/11?
- Could the largest elevator modernization in the world in the 9 months prior to 9/11 have provided access to the core columns and beams?
- Is it just a coincidence that Ace Elevator employees were pulled out of the Towers on 9/11 for a “union meeting”?
Destruction of Evidence
53. Why was 99% of the WTC structural steel crime scene evidence loaded onto barges starting just 2 weeks after 9/11 and shipped to China for recycling before structural engineers and metallurgists could get their hands on it to do a proper forensic investigation?
We encourage you to ask these questions of your elected representatives and the media. We address most of these questions in our presentations, podcasts,us and radio interviews. So get us in front of them! Who do you know that might interview RichardGage911 about the explosive destruction of the 3 World Trade Center Skyscrapers on 9/11?
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