Invitation to an Inquest

Could Better Design and Construction
Have Helped Save the Twin Towers  ?
Why Were Tenants Told Not to Leave ?
Were Rescuers Unwisely Endangered ?

 

By Thomas H. Lipscomb

 
    The release of the Port Authority communications logs and after action reports by its employees provides us with a moving record indeed. But it contains further evidence that many of the emergency, fire and police personnel who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings should never have been allowed in them.
 
    It may seem odd that while accidents like the sinking of the Titanic, airline crashes, and shuttle disasters lead to meticulous investigations that often lead to significant design improvements and retrofittings throughout an industry, the emphasis for malevolent attacks like the one on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and at the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 seems limited to memorial services for the victims.
 
    If there were failures of judgment in the design of the World Trade Center and the conduct of the emergency operations on 9/11, no one seems very interested in investigating them and finding out who was responsible and what needs to be done.
 
    Even before the collapse of the first tower, Port Authority police officer Daniel M. McCarthy recalls that “Captain Whitaker arrived at the command post and advised all members of the department who were present not to enter the building.” According to The New York Times  “the captain of the Port Authority police precinct at the trade center ordered an evacuation of the entire complex—even before the second plane had struck….” Did Captain Whitaker make a lucky guess or is there reason to believe that competent Port Authority professionals were aware of the vulnerability of the revolutionary techniques used constructing the Trade Center to a jet air crash?
 
    Ten minutes after the crash of the first 767 aircraft into Tower One I called my father for his expert opinion of the incident. He had been responsible for some of the largest public construction projects in the country. In 1968, as director of the Delaware River Port Authority, he had been given a personal tour of the World Trade Center under construction by the longtime executive director of  what was then the Port of New York Authority, Austin Tobin.   Turning on his television for the first time, my father looked at the burning building for a minute and said, “They have to get those people out of there. That building is going down.”
 
    His response astonished me, but it wouldn’t have surprised John Knapton, the professor of structural engineering who the BBC contacted the next day for his opinion. “The eventual collapse of the twin towers was so predictable that the order should have been given to withdraw emergency services within an hour.  The hundreds of dead firemen and police officers should simply not have been there.”
 
    The construction techniques that saved immense amounts of money in building the World Trade Center only made it more vulnerable.  As experts have already pointed out, the tubular construction used an internal elevator core of weight bearing columns, and saved tens of millions of dollars for concrete by creating an external structure which helped bear the weight of the floor trusses connecting them to the core.  But while the external walls of a curtain wall building like the Seagram Building could be removed and the floors would remain stable, the removal of the external weight bearing perimeter columns of the World Trade Center created an entirely different level of risk of building collapse.
 
    Silverstein Properties, which held the lease on the World Trade Center, commissioned a study which found that 33 of the 59 perimeter columns of the north face of One World Trade Center and 29 of the 59 perimeter columns of the south face of Two were destroyed in the collisions with the two 767 airliners. Additionally core columns were damaged or destroyed as well. Add to this 23,000 gallons of aviation fuel per building burning at 1500 to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. According to former Deputy NYFD Chief Vincent Dunn “unprotected steel warps, melts, sags and collapses when heated to normal fire temperatures about 1100 to 1200 degrees F.” And everyone knew the collapse of one floor would overstress the 110-story structure and cause the building to pancake.
 
    Even engineers at the Bin Laden Construction Company in Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden, a construction engineer himself, could understand this.  FBI intelligence from the Philippines dating back to 1995 had learned that Al Qaeda was planning to attack the Pentagon and the World Trade Center using civilian airliners.  And Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind this plot, hatched in the Philippines in 1995, as well as the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, the explosion in the bar in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002, and other operations, is now the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operative in US custody.
 
    Much has been made of the Port Authority’s assertion that the World Trade Center was constructed to take a direct hit from a Boeing 707. But a 707-320B and a 767-200ER are virtually the same weight and vary in fuel capacity by 1/24th. And a 707 with its higher cruising speed might deliver 10% more energy in a collision than the 767. Clearly the World Trade Center couldn’t survive a hit from a fully loaded 707 either.
 
    The answer to these questions isn’t to be learned from the recollections or last transmissions from gallant emergency personnel rushing into doomed buildings any more than members of the Light Brigade could be expected to explain why they attacked Russian artillery. “Someone had blundered.” It is time to find out if any among those in the City of New York, the State of New York, the Port Authority, and the Federal Government who were there on 9/11 might have prevented their totally unnecessary deaths.
 
    The place to begin would be an examination of the after action reports complied by the Port Authority after the initial bombing in 1993. Surely its insurance companies, auditors, bondholders and board members reviewed the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to other threats at that time. What did they decide would be the principal threats for the future and what did they do about them?
 
    One of the keys to their potential liability will be the fragility of the pioneering spray-on asbestos fire retardant used in the World Trade Center. Sprayed on the steel frame to increase the time construction steel could withstand the weakening effect of fire, particularly in buildings which had far less concrete, the effect of the 767 aircraft crashing into the building was to abrade the fire retardant where they hit into insignificance.
 
    As Vincent Dunn has pointed out in his excellent website, changes to the New York buildings fire code of 1968 changed the inspection requirements from detailed instructions on material specifications to be used to performance requirements for 1, 2, 3, or 4 hours protection against fire. Since the World Trade Center was exempt from minimal New York building code requirements, there was a strange anomaly whereby the North Tower was protected by 38 millimeters of spray-on insulation and the South Tower by a mere 19 millimeters. That is thought to be one reason the South Tower, hit second, collapsed first.
 
    This vulnerability had not eluded then Chief of the New York City Fire Department (later FireCommissioner) John T. O’ Hagan who observed its construction with concern. His 1976 book High Rise Fire and Life Safety detailed the sloppiness of the application of the spray-on coating and its vulnerability.
 
    The National Institute of Standards of the US Department of Commerce has a Federal investigation underway which will report in about a year. NIST has already told Congress that the Port Authority’s assumptions about the projected performance of the spray-on insulation appear to be unsupported by evidence. And in 1996 Frank Lombardi, the Port Authority’s chief engineer, recommended the insulation in the South Tower be doubled. A slow process that could only take place as floors emptied of tenants, it was completed for only a third of the building by 9/11.
 
    These are just a few of the many questions still outstanding.   On September 9, Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York  ruled that 9/11 victims can sue the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein’s WTC Properties for negligence. The Special Master, Kenneth Feinberg, who headed the congressionally mandated September 11 Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 made the circuit of press and television outlets denying the obvious. For those puzzled as to whyfewer less than half of those eligible for the fund payouts running $250,000 to $6 million, and averaging $1.5 million had applied for them,
 
    Feinberg first jawboned the victims’ options in a direct suit—Hellerstein’s decision “doesn’t say they are going to win, it doesn’t say they won’t have to wait 10 years to see any funds, it doesn’t say they don’t have to pay their attorney bills.” Feinberg has redoubled his efforts to get the victims to settle and give up their right to sue, which was the outcome the Victim Compensation Fund was intended to effect. But ingenuously he claims “I am much more concerned with the people who haven’t done anything.”
 
    He needn’t be concerned for long. The filing deadline for the Victim Compensation Fund is December 22nd. With Hellerstein lifting the bar on negligence suits and the evidence piling up, Feinberg is likely to see a stampede of people filing, accompanied by their smiling tort attorneys, by Christmas.
 
    And with the World Trade Center tragedy now out of the containment shell offered by the Victim Compensation Fund, there is no foreseeable limit to the liability risk. This could now begin a collapse of insurance containment barriers as we have already seen in Silverstein Properties suit against its own insurance agency that could collapse the fiscal empire of the Port Authority the same way the Towers pancaked.
 
    In the meantime we still don’t know much more than we did about which New York high rises are vulnerable to insufficient fire protection nor what New York's official  fire performance specifications should be. Clearly not enough was learned about emergency procedures for an attack against the World Trade Center after 1993, given the mistakes made on 9/11. Are sufficient improvements now being made?  And, if so, by whom?
 
    But Al Qaeda still has a target every bit as vulnerable as the World Trade Center and a lot easier to reach with the new security in place in the United States.  One of the most porous borders for terrorists in the world is Canada’s.  One of the least secure airports in North America is Lester Pearson International, outside Toronto. And barely an hour away, heading southwest and flying the deck (under the radar) across Lake Michigan, you find the Sears Tower—constructed on the same kind of vulnerable external weight bearing perimeter columns.  Almost one hundred feet taller than the former World Trade Center,  it would be hard to miss.


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