Experts Urging Broader Inquiry In Towers' Fall - December 25, 2001

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[sSRI-Research] 9/11-Experts Urging Broader Inquiry In

Towers' Fall. December 25, 2001

 

 

 

 

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A11FB3E550C768EDDAB0994D94044\

82

 

 

Experts Urging Broader Inquiry In Towers' Fall

by JAMES GLANZ AND ERIC LIPTON

 

The New York Times

December 25, 2001

 

Experts charge official obstruction/cover-up in WTC collapse probe;

say threats received, KEY evidence destroyed New York Times

 

-- 'In calling for a new investigation, some structural engineers

have said that one serious mistake has already been made in the

chaotic aftermath of the collapses: the decision to rapidly recycle

the steel columns, beams and trusses that held up the buildings. That

may have cost investigators some of their most direct physical

evidence with which to try to piece together an answer.' -- NY Times

 

-- ' " I find the speed with which potentially important evidence has

been removed and recycled to be appalling " -- Dr. Frederick W. Mowrer;

fire protection engineering department, University of Maryland and WTC

collapse probe member quoted in NY Times

Saying that the current investigation into how and why the twin towers

fell on Sept. 11 is inadequate, some of the nation's leading

structural engineers and fire-safety experts are calling for a new,

independent and better-financed inquiry that could produce the kinds

of conclusions vital for skyscrapers and future buildings nationwide.

 

Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, both of

New York, have joined the call for a wider look into the collapses. In

an interview on Friday, Mr. Schumer said he supported a new

investigation " not so much to find blame " for the collapse of the

buildings under extraordinary circumstances, " but rather so that we

can prepare better for the future. "

 

" It could affect building practices, " he said. " It could affect

evacuation practices. We live in a new world and everything has to be

recalibrated. "

 

Experts critical of the current effort, including some of those people

who are actually conducting it, cite the lack of meaningful financial

support and poor coordination with the agencies cleaning up the

disaster site. They point out that the current team of 20 or so

investigators has no subpoena power and little staff support and has

even been unable to obtain basic information like detailed blueprints

of the buildings that collapsed.

 

While agreeing that any building hit by a jetliner would suffer

potentially devastating damage, experts want to examine whether the

twin towers may have had hidden vulnerabilities that contributed to

their collapse.

 

The lightweight steel trusses that supported the tower's individual

floors, the connections between the trusses and the buildings'

vertical structural columns, as well as possible flaws in the

fireproofing have been drawing scrutiny from fire safety consultants

and engineers in recent weeks.

 

" Two buildings came down, " said Joseph F. Russo, director of the

Center for Fire Safety Engineering at Polytechnic University in

Brooklyn, referring to the twin towers. " That suggests some degree of

predictability. "

 

" And if it was predictable, " Mr. Russo said, " was it preventable? "

 

Family members of some victims have added their voices to the calls

for a wider investigation.

 

The exact scope of an expanded inquiry has not been defined. But the

central desire is to learn any lessons that might be hidden in the

rubble and to pinpoint the exact sequence and cause of the collapse,

regardless of whether it was inevitable from the moment the planes

struck, members of the investigative team and others said.

 

In calling for a new investigation, some structural engineers have

said that one serious mistake has already been made in the chaotic

aftermath of the collapses: the decision to rapidly recycle the steel

columns, beams and trusses that held up the buildings. That may have

cost investigators some of their most direct physical evidence with

which to try to piece together an answer.

 

Officials in the mayor's office declined to reply to written and oral

requests for comment over a three- day period about who decided to

recycle the steel and the concern that the decision might be

handicapping the investigation.

 

" The city considered it reasonable to have recovered structural steel

recycled, " said Matthew G. Monahan, a spokesman for the city's

Department of Design and Construction, which is in charge of debris

removal at the site.

 

" Hindsight is always 20-20, but this was a calamity like no other, "

said Mr. Monahan, who was designated by the mayor's office to respond

to questions about the investigation. " And I'm not trying to backpedal

from the decision. "

 

Interviews with a handful of members of the team, which includes some

of the nation's most respected engineers, also uncovered complaints

that they had at various times been shackled with bureaucratic

restrictions that prevented them from interviewing witnesses,

examining the disaster site and requesting crucial information like

recorded distress calls to the police and fire departments.

 

The investigation, organized immediately after Sept. 11 by the

American Society of Civil Engineers, the field's leading professional

organization, has been financed and administered by the Federal

Emergency Management Agency. A mismatch between the federal agency and

senior engineers accustomed to bypassing protocol in favor of quick

answers has been identified as a clear point of friction.

 

" This is almost the dream team of engineers in the country working on

this, and our hands are tied, " said one team member who asked not to

be identified. Members have been threatened with dismissal for

speaking to the press.

 

" FEMA is controlling everything, " the team member said. " It sounds

funny, but just give us the money and let us do it, and get the

politics out of it. "

 

A spokesman for FEMA, John Czwartacki, said the agency's primary

mission was to help victims, emergency workers and to speed the city's

recovery, and added, " We are not an investigative agency. "

 

But given the assignment to examine the structural failures at the

World Trade Center, the agency has so far spent roughly $100,000 and

Mr. Czwartacki said that more financing could be expected after the

group produced what he called an " interim document " in the spring.

 

" I've heard the calls for the N.T.S.B.-style investigation, " Mr.

Czwartacki said, referring to appeals by engineers and some families

of trade center victim for an exhaustive examination like those done

by the National Transportation Safety Board when a plane crashes. " I

don't think this study will do it for them. "

 

Mr. Czwartacki added that it was premature to comment on whether team

members were receiving necessary information because the study has not

been completed. Regardless of what any investigation might find, it is

unclear how many civilian lives would have been saved if the buildings

had not collapsed, because so many died on the burning upper floors.

 

Despite the universe of unknowns, the calls for more extensive

investigations of various kinds are coming from engineers, fire

experts and professional organizations in New York and across the nation.

 

" What some of us are calling for is a probe or reassessment, " said

Loring A. Wyllie Jr., a member of the National Academy of Engineering

and chairman emeritus and senior principal at Degenkolb Engineers in

San Francisco. Mr. Wyllie, who has investigated many building

collapses after earthquakes, said the work would involve " a critique

of our building practices " in search of greater safety after Sept. 11.

 

He added that intensive studies of building failures in disasters like

the Northridge earthquake near Los Angeles in 1994 had led to

important structural advances.

 

Calling an intensive new investigation " absolutely necessary, " Mr.

Russo, of Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, said the expense could

be justified by the payoff of better safety in high-rises of the

future. Other experts take a still wider view, favoring a study that

would look at the implications of the collapses -- a nearby, 47-story

building, 7 World Trade Center, also fell on Sept. 11 after burning

for most of the day -- for fire codes, building standards and

engineering practices across the board.

 

National organizations charged with addressing building and fire

safety issues have sent letters urging the federal government to

invest as much as $15 million a year to study the vulnerability of

buildings to terrorist attacks and possible changes to fire and safety

standards.

 

" There is an urgent and critical need to determine the lessons to be

learned from these events, " reads a letter from the American Society

of Civil Engineers, dated Nov. 15.

 

In other disasters, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers and other

federal agencies have played a more central role in making decisions

about cleanup and investigations. But from the start, they found that

New York had a degree of engineering and construction expertise unlike

any they had encountered.

 

" They wanted to do a lot of things on their own, " said Charles Hess,

who is in charge of civil emergency management for the Army Corps.

" Which they're very capable of doing. "

 

But during a recovery effort that received worldwide praise, the city

made one decision that has been endlessly second-guessed. To deal with

nearly 300,000 tons of crumpled steel, the city quickly decided to

ship it to scrap recyclers.

 

Dr. Frederick W. Mowrer, an associate professor in the fire protection

engineering department at the University of Maryland, said he believed

the decision could ultimately compromise any investigation of the

collapses. " I find the speed with which potentially important evidence

has been removed and recycled to be appalling, " Dr. Mowrer said.

 

But Mr. Monahan, the City Department of Design and Construction

spokesman, pointed out that members of the investigation team were

eventually allowed to visit the site and inspect steel at the

scrapyards and continue doing so.

 

Some experts have suggested that the only way to definitively

determine the sequence and cause of the collapse is to recover large

amounts of steel from the areas near where the planes struck, and

possibly reassemble sections of the towers.

 

Others say such a reconstruction of an entire section might be

impractical, but also expressed discomfort with the impediments they

said they have faced in their investigation.

 

For example, three months after the disaster, Ronald Hamburger, an

expert in structural analysis at A.B.S. Consulting in Oakland, Calif.,

and a director of the National Council of Structural Engineers

Associations, said he had not even been given access to basic

blueprints describing where the steel and other structural elements

had been when the World Trade Center was whole.

 

" I'd like to be able to have a set of the drawings for all of the

affected buildings, " Mr. Hamburger said. " I don't have that. "

 

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