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The BBC, instead of attempting to explain how it could have reported this, has attempted to both evade and cloud the issue. The truth is that no one could have possibly predicted the building would collapse and here's why.
Aside from the fact that previous to 9/11 no steel framed building in history had ever collapsed due to fire damage, Building 7, otherwise known as the Salomon Brothers building, was intentionally designed to allow large portions of floors to be permanently removed without weakening the structural integrity of the building.
In 1989 the New York Times reported on this fact in a story covering the Salomon leasing of the building which had been completed just two years earlier.
Salomon had wanted to build a new structure in order to house its high-technology operations, but due to stock market crash in 1987 it was unable to. The company searched for an existing building that they could use and found one in Larry Silverstein's WTC 7.
The Times reported:
BEFORE it moves into a new office tower in downtown Manhattan, Salomon Brothers, the brokerage firm, intends to spend nearly two years and more than $200 million cutting out floors, adding elevators, reinforcing steel girders, upgrading power supplies and making other improvements in its million square feet of space...
In some office buildings, that alteration would be impossible, but Silverstein Properties tried to second-guess the needs of potential tenants when it designed Seven World Trade Center as a speculative project.
''We built in enough redundancy to allow entire portions of floors to be removed without affecting the building's structural integrity, on the assumption that someone might need double-height floors,'' said Larry Silverstein, president of the company. ''Sure enough, Salomon had that need...
MORE than 375 tons of steel - requiring 12 miles of welding - will be installed to reinforce floors for Salomon's extra equipment. Sections of the existing stone facade and steel bracing will be temporarily removed so that workers using a roof crane can hoist nine diesel generators onto the tower's fifth floor, where they will become the core of a back-up power station.
The entire article can be read
here.
What this amounted to, as the Times pointed out, was that WTC7, specifically designed to be deconstructed and altered, became "a building within a building". An extraordinary adaptable and highly reinforced structure for the modern business age.
This is of course also partially the reason why in 1999 the building was chosen to house Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's $13 million emergency crisis centre on the 27th floor.
Remember that on 9/11 only eight floors of the building were subject to sporadic fires. The official NIST report failed to comprehensively identify how the building could have collapsed symmetrically into its own footprint given the damage that it had sustained.
A follow up report due soon has been forced to take into account a hypothetical situation whereby explosives were used to demolish the building, primarily because every other explanation thus far has failed to explain how it could have come down.
Furthermore, as has been thoroughly documented, building 7 was the furthest away in the WTC complex from the twin towers. Buildings much closer sustained massive amounts of damage from the collapse of the towers and did not come anywhere close to full scale symmetrical collapse.
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