Last week, the House Science Committee, apparently driven to
mouth-frothing jealousy by the spectacle of their Senate colleagues
preening on network news about Enron, decided that they had had
enough, and that they wanted to get on television, too. Summoning
various eager experts and a handful of hapless officials from the
Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Institute for
Science and Technology, Committee members strutted and bloviated
and demanded to know why the World Trade Center towers had fallen
down.
The legislators ran through the classic repertoire of
congressional threat display, including:
Browbeating: Anthony Weiner, New York Democrat, asked the
witnesses at one point who was in charge of the investigation.
Three men tentatively raised their hands, like little boys about to
wet their pants — exactly the point of Weiner’s question. “We’re
operating as if we’re in charge,” said Arden Bement, director of
the NIST.
Tut-tutting: “It does strike me that six months after the fact
there shouldn’t even be any doubt [about who is in charge],” said
Connecticut Republican Chris Shays.
Making emotionally-charged, unanswerable demands: “Do you
believe that if we had this information before September 11, some
of those people sitting behind you would not have lost loved ones?”
That was the indefatigable Rep. Weiner again, referring to families
of some attack victims, who attended the hearing.
Inflammatory speechmaking: New York Democrat Joseph Crowley
bemoaned the recycling of World Trade Center steel, supposedly
without its being examined. “Conspiracy theorists are going to have
a field day with this,” he said. “It is not only unfortunate, it
borders on criminal.”
They marveled over mysterious difficulties, such at FEMA’s
seeming inability to examine World Trade Center blueprints, owned
by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
And, of course, the Committee slavered over the testimony of
selected experts who said preposterous things. FEMA’s Robert Shea
and University of California engineer Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, for
example, insisted that the hijackers had deliberately crashed their
jets into the twin towers’ most vulnerable spots.
The entire circus of self-righteousness ignored one thing. The
Learning Channel (TLC) broadcast “World Trade Center: Anatomy of
the Collapse” at 10 p.m. EST on February 6. Allowing for the
production lead-time, everything the Science Committee demanded to
know was known, in the private sector, at least a month and a half
ago.
Expert testimony and investigation for the program were provided
by MIT and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The program’s
producers apparently had no trouble examining the damaged steel
from the WTC; they simply got off their butts and did it, unlike
FEMA. They had no difficulty obtaining the WTC blueprints, owned by
the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — apparently because
they were willing to promise not to testify against the Port
Authority. Indeed, they showed those blueprints, full-page, on
TV.
Most important, “Anatomy of a Collapse” explained clearly why
the towers fell down.
The World Trade Center was built not around an interior “cage”
of steel beams, like traditional skyscrapers — for such big
buildings, those beams would have taken up all the rentable
interior space. Instead, they were designed to be supported by
rigid skins, assembled like Lego from giant grids of steel. The
rigid exterior boxes would, in turn, be supported by each floor,
acting like a brace. And the floors themselves rested on trusses,
socketed at each end into shackles attached to the exterior
walls.
The designers calculated the dangers of such things as wind and
even the impact of an airliner of the day, a 707. But, as a fireman
quoted in a broadcast said, “You can’t trust a truss.”
Burning jet fuel melted some of those truss-anchoring shackles
enough to allow them to fail and drop at least one truss. Once a
single floor fell, the entire structure lost its integrity and
began to twist, and further floors fell, in a chain reaction.
That’s not guesswork. The program’s investigators actually found
deformed shackles and trusses, numbered to indicate which floors
they came from.
As for that supposedly diabolical calculation to hit the towers
at just the right spot, Osama bin Laden himself admitted he didn’t
think the buildings would fall down (in that nauseating
self-congratulatory party video broadcast on Al-Jazeera). The
hijackers couldn’t hit the towers any lower; other buildings were
in the way. They couldn’t take a chance on hitting them any higher;
struggling to control the planes, they might have missed.
I suppose it’s too much to ask the members of the House Science
Committee, the NIST, and FEMA just to shut up and order the video,
here.
