A “normal office fire” cannot cause a fireproofed steel frame to “vanish” in an instant. Incendiaries and explosives can. Symmetrically razing a steel-framed skyscraper in mere seconds, though, requires such extraordinary demolition skills that only a handful companies in the world will even attempt it.
NIST’s fairy tales about these two contributing factors to the collapse — the trusses and a diesel fire — were clearly as ill-founded as the story about the non-existent 10-story gouge.
NIST’s new magical thermal expansion hypothesis is plagued by a plethora of problems. We will list only some of the most obvious ones here.
NIST’s early insistence on the 10-story gouge, as dramatized in the 2005 Popular Mechanics magazine article, makes no sense, until you realize that the agency was reverse engineering its theory for the demise of Building 7.
In its infamous 2005 article, “Debunking the 9/11 Myths,” Popular Mechanics quoted NIST director Shyam Sunder asserting that falling debris from the North Tower poked a huge “gouge” in the front of WTC 7.