A PBS documentary about the 9/11/01 attack, America Rebuilds, features an interview with the leaseholder of the destroyed WTC complex, Larry Silverstein. In it, the elderly developer makes the following statement:
"I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it." And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."
This statement seems to suggest that the FDNY decided to demolish the building in accordance with Silverstein's suggestion, since the phrase "pull it" in this context apparently means to demolish the building. This interpretation is supported by a statement by a Ground Zero worker in the same documentary:
"... we're getting ready to pull the building six."
Building 6 was one of the badly damaged low-rise buildings in the WTC complex that had to be demolished as part of the cleanup operation.
An alternative interpretation of Silverstein's statement is that "pull it" refers to withdrawing firefighters from the building. However, according to FEMA's report there were no manual firefighting operations in Building 7, so there would not have been any firefighters to "pull."
That Silverstein would admit that officials intentionally demolished Building 7 is bizarre for a number of reasons. Silverstein Properties Inc. had already won an $861 million claim for the loss of the building in a terrorist incident. FEMA's report states that the cause of building's collapse was fires. Presumably FEMA and the insurance company would be interested in knowing if the building was instead demolished by the FDNY. Moreover, the logistics of rigging a skyscraper for demolition in the space of a few hours would be daunting to say the least, particularly given that demolition teams would have to work around fires and smoke.
A third explanation is less obvious but makes sense of the non-sequiturs in the above explanations: perhaps Silverstein's statement was calculated to confuse the issue of what actually happened to Building 7. By suggesting that it was demolished by the FDNY as a safety measure, it provides an alternative to the only logical explanation -- that it was rigged for demolition before the attack. The absurdity of the FDNY implementing a plan to "pull" Building 7 on the afternoon of 9/11/01 will escape most people, who neither grasp the technical complexity of engineering the controlled demolition of a skyscraper, nor its contradiction with FEMA's account of the collapse, nor the thorough illlegality of such an operation. Thus the idea that officials decided to "pull" Building 7 after the attack serves as a distraction from the inescapable logic that the building's demolition was planned in advance of the attack, and was therefore part of an inside job to destroy the entire WTC complex.
<http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc_7_cbs.mpg>
<http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7_collapse.mpg>
<http://www.911research.com/wtc/evidence/videos/docs/wtc7_collapse2.mpg>
<http://wtc7.net/buildingfires.html>
<http://wtc7.net/rubblepile.html>
<http://wtc7.net/demolition.html>
<http://wtc7.net/steeldisposal.html>
<http://wtc7.net/femareport.html>
<http://wtc7.net/collapsecause.html>
from the “...shores of Gitchee Gumee by the shining Big-Sea water.”
<gitcheegumee at earthlink.net>
Paul wrote:
> Yes, people were annoyed at the flagrant way the FEMA report swept the Guliani issue under the carpet (of
> course the champion for perniciousness was the EPA reporting). But to come back to the point, here is
> one example of hundreds of the widespread knowledge of Number 7 World Trade Center. This fellow only had
> to use google!
>
> NY TIMES 12/20/2001 City Had Been Warned of Fuel Tank at 7 World Trade Center
> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3081FFC3B5A0C738EDDAB0994D9404482&incamp=archive:search
>
> Fire Department officials warned the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1998 and
> 1999 that a giant diesel fuel tank for the mayor's $13 million command bunker in 7 World Trade Center, a
> 47-story high-rise that burned and collapsed on Sept. 11, posed a hazard and was not consistent with city
> fire codes. The 6,000-gallon tank was positioned about 15 feet above the ground floor and near several
> lobby elevators and was meant to fuel generators that would supply electricity to the 23rd -floor bunker
> in the event of a power failure. Although the city made some design changes to address the concerns -
> moving a fuel pipe that would have run from the tank up an elevator shaft, for example - it left the tank
> in place. But the Fire Department repeatedly warned that a tank in that position could spread fumes
> throughout the building if it leaked, or, if it caught fire, could produce what one Fire Department
> memorandum called "disaster."
>
> Joseph W. writes:
>
> >In fact:
>
> >What did the government do to investigate the unprecedented collapse of a steel frame building from
> fires? It gave FEMA the sole discretion to investigate the collapse, even though FEMA is not an
> investigative agency.
>
> > FEMA's BPAT, the only official organization that reported on Building 7's collapse, was completely
> indecisive. Their report stated:
>
> > 'The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at
> this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best
> hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are
> needed to resolve this issue.'
>
> > The report was published in May of 2002, just after the last building remains had been scrubbed from
> Ground Zero.
>
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