To Kevin
Hague
You wrote saying, "you seem to be arguing
that because the report says "probable" that leaves enough room for
doubt to spin a conspiracy theory - is that fair?"
No, that would be a wilfully absurd misreading of what I wrote. My original
tweet and subsequent post were both written simply to highlight the glaring
contradiction in the official explanation for what happened to WTC7, which
essentially consists of two strands:
a) the collapse can be innocently explained away by localised fires
which caused a central column suddenly to give way, bringing the entire
building down with it, in an event that was unforeseeable, and unique in the
history of high-rise steel-frame building (as outlined in the NIST
report);
b) premature news reports of WTC7's collapse can be innocently explained
away by fire officers having predicted to reporters that it would collapse,
more than three hours before it did so.
Like many people, I see a fundamental inconsistency between a) and b),
and am doubtful that they can both be true.
Moreover, although the NIST report has been endorsed by many official
bodies worldwide, the subsequent behaviour of the construction and
architectural industries makes me doubtful that they actually consider its
findings to be credible. If they did so, there would have been worldwide
demands for the modification of all existing high-rise steel-frame buildings,
and future design and construction methods would have been changed as a result.
But that has not happened, because they clearly are not prepared to spend time
and money on the prevention of a non-existent risk. Nor has the insurance
industry objected to insuring such buildings, although they would have to pay
out vast sums if NIST's version of what happened to WTC7 was really a genuine
risk.
All of which suggests to me (although perhaps not to you) that the NIST
report was a mere fig leaf, intended not to identify what caused WTC7 to
collapse, but to give some respectability to an official narrative that makes
no sense. The burned-out shell of Grenfell Tower looming blackly over the
London skyline (its steel frame not having been deformed at all by fires that
were far worse than anything burning at WTC7) sadly helps to underline that
point.
Victor Lewis-Smith
