Larry Silverstein, WTC 7, and the 9/11 Demolition

The Salomon Solution; A Building Within a Building
WTC 7 was a very solid construction

9/11/2001 radio broadcast: "We were just sitting here watching all the smoke pouring up from
number 7 ... we really couldn't see much damage on it ... I turned in time to see what looked like a skyscraper implosion, it looked like it had been done by a demolition crew ... that's number 1,
number 2, and now number 7 that have come down from this explosion and folks just simply can't believe it. ... I just never for the life of me imagined that these huge buildings would just fall, and that's what happened, they just crumbled." [338kB wma download]

The above photograph shows fires in World Trade Center 7 at roughly 3 p.m., as does this wmv video of the building.

If the FEMA collapse report were true then the fires shown would have been burning throughout entire floors, not just in a few rooms.

Larry Silverstein, the controller of the destroyed WTC complex, stated plainly in a PBS documentary that he and the FDNY decided jointly to demolish WTC 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11. In the documentary "America Rebuilds", aired September 2002, Silverstein 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." [wmv download]

In the same program a cleanup worker referred to the demolition of WTC 6: "... we're getting ready to pull the building six." [wmv download]

There can be little doubt as to how the word "pull" is being used in this context.

Note how WTC 6 collapses - straight down, lots of dust

Silverstein's "Pull It" Explanation Examined

The building fire alarm system [for WTC 7] was placed on TEST for a period of 8 h beginning at 6:47:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Ordinarily, this is requested when maintenance or other testing is being performed on the system, so that any alarms that are received from the system are considered the result of the maintenance or testing and are ignored. [NIST]

An explosion occurred in WTC 7 prior to the collapse of the twin towers:

After the initial blast [Flight 11 hitting WTC 1], Housing Authority worker Barry Jennings, 46, reported to a command center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. He was with Michael Hess, the city's corporation counsel, when they felt and heard another explosion. First calling for help, they scrambled downstairs to the lobby, or what was left of it. "I looked around, the lobby was gone. It looked like hell," Jennings said. [Traverse City Record Eagle 9/11/2001]

Barry Jennings

"We started walking down to the eighth floor. Big Explosion. Blew us back into the eighth floor." - Barry Jennings on 9/11 news video.

WMV video download (678kB)

"Just before the fall of the North Tower, we saw a large explosion coming from the street-level area around World Trade Center 7. I remember thinking that it looked distinctly like a bomb had been detonated underneath the city, and, of course, that's exactly what I thought had occurred." [Web Archive]

See also: Hanging Around WTC 7

Firemen evacuated the area as they prepared for the collapse of Building Seven. [Ground Zero Spirit]

Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall. [FOXNews]

"We had first reports that the building was unstable and that it was best for it to come down on its own or it would be taken down..."

"It's blowin' boy." ... "Keep your eye on that building, it'll be coming down soon." ... "The building is about to blow up, move it back." ... "Here we are walking back. There's a building, about to blow up..."

WMV video download (1 MB)

"We heard a Mayday for everybody to get out of the building [140 West] -- no, I'm sorry, an urgent, three urgents, and we came out of the building [before 4 p.m.]. ... We were then positioned on Vesey Street between North End and the West Side Highway because there was an imminent collapse on 7 World Trade..." [Brian Fitzpatrick, Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.)]

At 4:38 p.m. all of the windows between 13-44A and 13-47C were open, and the fires responsible for opening the windows had died down to the point where they could no longer be observed. Just prior to the collapse of the building at 5:20:52 p.m. a jet of flames was pushed from windows in the same area. The event that caused this unusual behavior has not been identified. [NIST Report]

The video on the right shows the penthouse of WTC 7 crumbling seconds before the collapse.

WMV video download of above (213kB)

The following video (screenshot left) compares the collapse of WTC 7 to a controlled demolition. The characteristics and speed of the collapses are all but identical.

WMV video download (190kB)

9/11/2001 radio broadcast: "...I was just standing there, ya know... we were watching the building [WTC 7] actually 'cuz it was on fire... the bottom floors of the building were on fire and... we heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder... turned around - we were shocked to see that the building was... well it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out... it was horrifying... about a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that." [197kB wma download]

Videos & Full Details
of the Controlled Collapse of
World Trade Center 7

Molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed [from WTCs 1 & 2]," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. [American Free Press]

Molten steel is a by-product of a thermite reaction.

A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Barnett said. [New York Times]

Burning diesel can't produce enough heat to melt steel, so it certainly can't evaporate it, but thermite can.

There had to be a very good reason for this building to be rigged for demolition whilst it was still occupied. Did Silverstein, the new World Trade Center owner who wisely invested in insurance against terrorism, have prior knowledge of the attacks?

One thing is for sure, the decision to 'pull' WTC 7 would have delighted many people:

Click for full sized image

[WTC 7] contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank’s Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions. [Online Journal]

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. ..."Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases." [New York Lawyer]

Click for full sized image

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack. [TheStreet]

Inside [WTC 7 was] the US Secret Service's largest field office with more than 200 employees. ..."All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building," according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran. [TechTV]

The collapse of WTC 7 also profited Silverstein Properties to the tune of ~$500 million through insurance payments.