11 of September 2001: Analysis of The Tragedy and Its Conspiracies

On the 11 of September 2001, a beautiful blue sky was shining above the World Trade Centers in New York City. No one would have guessed that this day would turn into the worse day in American history. On this day the lives of everyone in the United States of America and all around the world would change in one way or another. Without the knowledge of any security or so that is what is to be believed hijackers entered four airplanes, beginning their journey to the Twin Towers. These planes were hijacked by thirteen different people, two of which hit the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon, and the other landing in a field in Pennsylvania. (Cook 2018) Out of curiosity, people, not only scientists but your everyday, ordinary human being looked into some conspiracies of the tragedy that happened that day. Some scientist, however, spent the next decade proving these wrong. Some of the conspiracies, a conspiracy being a secret plan to do something unlawful or harmful to a group of people, are harder than others to prove wrong. Conspiracies or not, everything that happened on Ground Zero, or the foundation point of the Twin Towers, is a loss and tragedy for the world to mourn.

The Twin Towers were two Largest buildings consisting of 110 stories in each, hence the name Twin Towers. These towers, Combined with the five other towers although not as big, were apart of the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center was the workplace for more than 10,000 employees at the time of the attack. (Editors 2009) These people went to work just as if it was any other day. However, at 0846 a shock was going to hit them that they would never forget. Flight 11 hit the North Tower and it landed between floors ninety-three and ninety-nine. A short nine minutes later the South Tower was declared secure and the employees did not have to evacuate. Then as time went by slowly as they gazed onto the smoke of the North tower the would get the order to evacuate at 0902 and at 0903 Flight 175 collided with intense impact into the South Tower. The South Tower burned for fifty-six minutes before collapsing at 0959 killing hundreds of people still in the building. The North Tower collapsed at 1028, a mere twenty-nine minutes after the devastating collapse of the South Tower. The collapse took the lives of 1600 innocent people that day. By 1230 the first responders were able to find and free thirteen first responders and one bystander. Roughly sixteen hours later the rescuers were able to find and rescue the final survivor. 

Many people believe the tragic events on this day to be the work of Al-Qaeda, the organization of Osama Bin-Ladan who actually made a video taking claim for this event. Others, however, believe the work of this day was part of the government's way to start a war with the Middle East. Some believe that the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled destruction and not by airplanes hitting them. (McGreal) There are also conspiracies about the towers being hit with an airplane that was being controlled by remote and had bombs inside of them. It was also said that the World Trade Center 7 was destroyed by bombs as it was not hit by another plane. Today Scientist spends hours and millions of dollars trying to prove whether these theories are real or made up.

One imparticular event that happened just six weeks before the attack was the amount of money put into the terrorism insurance. Larry Silverstein just prior to the Twin Towers attack had received the lease to them. Larry believed that because there were two different airliners hitting two separate Towers that he should be reimbursed for two different attacks. This would allow him to get the most out of his insurance claim on each tower at seven billion dollars. However, before the attacks the insurance file had not been finalized, therefore it left the court wondering whether this claim or the one drawn up by Silverstein lawyer in 2001 was the claim to go by.

Architectural engineers all across the United States of America spend thousands of hours trying to debunk the conspiracies behind the tragic events that happened on September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers being destroyed by controlled demolition was one of these. (McGreal) This, though, has been shown it could be true in numerous ways. The fact that steel has a melting temperature of 2700 degrees Fahrenheit and the jet fuel that was onboard the plane could only burn up to can only burn up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, making it impossible for the airplane's fuel to have caused the molten that was seen leaking from towers that day. Many believed the molten that came from the Twin Towers was from the metal of the airplanes, which were made out of very light aluminum. (Jones, Pg 15) The NIST or National Institute of standards and technology reported that it was the aluminum as it had a melting point of 475 - 650 degrees Celsius. That was proven wrong as aluminum cannot catch on fire and the colors of the molten dropping was a salmon to yellow color which takes between 840 to 1050 degrees Celcius to cause. 

World Trade Centre 7 was one of the buildings included in the suspicious collapses. This trade center had collapse nearly symmetrical all the way down, even though there was twenty-four big trusses line in the tower in an irregular pattern. In order for this Building to collapse symmetrically, as it did, it would need many of these columns having tremendous pulling on them at the same time which is highly unlikely. (Jones, Pg 20) In a case like this where they are blaming it on the fire and debris from the other World Trade Centers, which evidently there was no debris hitting this building it has a low percentage of actually causing a symmetrical collapse without having cutter explosives. A cutter explosive is an explosive device, usually used in a controlled demolition, that causes a cutting effect a symmetrical place. (www.thefreedictionary.com/cutting charge) With all the evidence of this tower being able to withstand fire before this and having no other structure of the such ever collapsing due full due to a fire, it is hard to believe that the WTC 7 was the first of it’s kind to ever do so.

New York city is filled with a lot of curious people, some of which were eyewitnesses to this event. One eye witness was an ABC news reporter “ There is an explosion in the base of the building… white smoke from the bottom of the building… something happened at the base of the building! Then there was another explosion. Another eyewitness was firefighter Edward Cachia who stated “We thought there was like an internal detonation, explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down…It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit.”(Jones, Pg 25) This is only hearsay, however, it is hard to argue it when more than one person had heard and saw the same thing.

One of the laws of physic was very much disturbed on the day of this freak accident. Conservation momentum, which is the momentum being transfer from one object to the next and being conserved if one is isolated, was disrupted as the steel beams which were designed to hold tons of weight had disintegrated instead of taking on the momentum of the falling objects. During the reports of the NIST, FEMA, AND THE 911 commission report the researchers and investigators had simply ignored this fact. The South Tower can be seen during the collapse with the top thirty floors being pulled to the east. (Jones, Pg 29) However, it was disintegrated into a powder where it should have had the momentum to hit the lower floors and actually topple to the east of the building leaving the other floors standing. 

During the collapse of the Twin Towers, bystanders and eyewitnesses from all around the streets, could hear and see explosions. Actually, in the many videos posted of the collapse, you can notice the explosions from the materials being thrown about 100 feet in a fraction of a second. ( Ryan, Pg 2) On average, The velocity of each of the explosions was about 170 FPS or feet per second.Some of the investigators tried to debunk this theory. One of the explanations given was by NIST Shyam Sunder in which he said 'When you have a significant portion of a floor collapsing, it's going to shoot air and concrete dust out the window. Those clouds of dust may create the impression of controlled demolition, but it is the floor pancaking that leads to that perception.' This, however, was later dropped as NIST could not follow up with the Pancake perception and they spoke out saying it was more like a piston effect with the top of the tower compressing the air beneath it. (Ryan, Pg 2) This theory is also false though, as with a piston the air is compressed in a tight area, for the Towers to create such force the floors would have had to collapse inside the walls creating a flat plane inside the building. Although this is possible in some cases, in the case of the Twin Towers it is not. The Twin Towers had no concrete left only pulverized concrete dust.

There are many scientists that have found facts that base this terrible day as an inside job, but there is just as many that have been fighting to prove as to why this was a terrorist attack. The National Institute of standard and technology was the main investigators of the event. The blame of the collapse of the World Trade Center 7 was the fires that spread from each floor due to the automatic sprinklers and the NYFD not being able to get any water to put out the fires. These fires started with the collapse of the WTC 1 or the North tower which caused extensive damage to the floors seven through to seventeen. It was because of this damage that the fires were unable to be controlled on floors seven through nine and eleven through thirteen. (Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center 7, Pg 21) Due to the excessive heat on these floors it caused the steel beams to overheat, or exceed 600 degrees Celsius, weakening them to the point where they could bend or become limp. Column seventy-nine is most likely the column that starts to buckle first which cause the collapse of floor thirteen created a cascade of other failures on the floors beneath it. (Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center 7, Pg 22) Once the floors between the fifth and fourteenth floor collapsed, the walls started to implode on themselves creating what looked like a controlled demolition. 

The same company was the company responsible for the investigation into the rest of the Trade Centers. The lead investigator and writer of the NIST report Shaym Sunder of the NIST believed that there were seven factors that took place that day to lead to the Twin Towers collapsing. The Twin Towers had damage to the structures from the direct impact of the airplanes in which the core columns were severed, the towers also had sustained fires with good amounts of oxygen to keep them burning for periods of time. Some of the fire-resistant materials were also dislodged from the impact of the 737 Boeing. (Final Report of the Collapse of The World Trade Center Towers, pg 45) When the 737 impacted the building there was jet fuel spraying all over the interior leading to more fires, this leads to weakening of the beams and columns.

The Twin Tower was designed to withstand a blow from bigger airplanes that a Boeing 737 or so that was what the rumor was. According to Sunder, there was no actual evidence in any of the documentation in the design of the Twin Towers. In 1975 a B-25 aircraft had collided with the Empire State Building so Engineers were taking into consideration about this possibility when building skyscrapers, although there was no actual code when the engineer was designing the building of the Twin Towers that implemented this. However, during the building of the World Trade Center, the engineers did implement the use of viscoelastic dampers(Final Report of the Collapse of The World Trade Center Towers, pg 65) A viscoelastic damper is a system that turns the energy from wind motion and earthquake motions into a heat source. (Samali) With these in place, the heat source would have increased with once the airplane had hit the building.  

The impact on the United States of America was tremendous. Due to the attacks, there was plenty of changes to the New York Fire Department. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG 19) This included changes to communication, protocols, elevators, protective clothing, and elevators. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG ix) There were multiple different issues for each of these. Some of these were preventable, some of them were unknown until after, and some of which could not be changed at all.

The communication of the FDNY was a vital sense to the fire department on this day, some of which was not available due to high traffic on the radios that day(Lawson & Vetorri, PG 19) An issue with the communication that was known before this was that there was no emergency signal to take control of the communication again, with twenty radios on the same channel chatting was getting out of hand. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG 19) This was known before the accident though due to the bombing in 1993 where a trapped firefighter had tried to call mayday but was unheard due to the communication traffic. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG 20)

After the bombing in 1993, it was decided that there would be intense protocol training with the NYPD and the FDNY to determine what each others role were, to prepare for one of these emergencies. This made the United States implement the Office of Emergency Management or OEM. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG 20) However, during this day The OEM was out of commission as it was located in the WTC 7 which was evacuated and was not established anywhere offsite. As for the elevators, which most people use to date for a large building, these are now put to be the number one priority. Protocol went into place so that elevator mechanics have to work with the FDNY when there is an elevator in place. 

The fire department has fire retardant clothing on so they do not catch fire while trying to evacuate a building or fighting fires. While wearing this clothing it adds extra weight onto the firefighter, causing the firefighter to exhaust easier. (Lawson & Vetorri, PG 22) It came with a recommendation that this equipment only is worn if they are able to reach the floor to which the fire is on or plan on going into the fire. This, unfortunately, would have no impact on the 9/11 incident as the firefighters were entire a building that was ablaze and did not know if they would be able to reach the floors of 90-99 which were on fire. Even if most of the fire department was wearing the fire retardant clothing, the ones who died did not die from the fire or the smoke but were crushed to death as most were never found but limbs.

Although there will never be anyways to know if the United States of America’s government, who at the time was under the Bush government, knew anything before the attacks or if it was an act of terrorism, this day will go down as one of the most destructive and terrifying attacks on America. This attack was on American grounds, but do not forget that these were the World Trade Centers which impacted the entire world. Twenty-Six Canadians had lost their lives that horrific day. Seventeen years later the only remains at the foundation of the World Trade Center are the fountains of ground zero, engraved with the names of all that was lost and remain missing to this day. The Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli created the teardrop memorial and donate it to the United States. The Teardrop memorial is in New Jersey at the Harbour View Park, it represents the fight against terrorism and the hope for world peace someday, with a forty-foot teardrop hanging in a 100-foot brass structure. In granite next to the stone are the names of all of the names, minus the hijackers, that was lost that day. Some conspiracies are believable and are hard to debunk, however, some of them are not and takes simple physics to prove wrong. It will be almost impossible to figure out what exactly happened on this day, but the research shows that it could be a totally different story then what was shown on the government-run news media.