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New Seismic Data Refutes Official WTC Explanation
By Christopher Bollyn
Exclusive to American Free Press
9-5-2

Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from
Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the
ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers
immediately prior to the collapse.
American Free Press has learned of pools of "molten
steel" found at the base of the collapsed twin towers
weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source
for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be
explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts
of energy, which caused unexplained seismic "spikes"
at the beginning of each collapse.

These spikes suggest that massive underground
explosions may have literally knocked the towers off
their foundations, causing them to collapse.

In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47
central support columns connected with the bedrock,
hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered
more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent
and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface,
in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how
these crucial structural supports failed.

Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of
Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw pools of
"literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center.

Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to re
move the debris from the site.

Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled
Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for
consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls
itself "the innovator and global leader in the
controlled demolition and implosion of structures."

Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC
site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for
the entire operation.

AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on
the site.

"Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the
basements."

These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms
of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven
[basement] levels," Loizeaux said.

The molten steel was found "three, four, and five
weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,"
Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at
7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late
afternoon.

Construction steel has an extremely high melting point
of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully
said, "Think of the jet fuel."

Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were
fueled by "paper, carpet and other combustibles packed
down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they
'pancaked' into the basement."

However, some independent investigators dispute this
claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the
other combustibles normally found in the towers,
cannot generate the heat required to melt steel,
especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep
basement.

Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC
collapse, Painful Questions,* told AFP that due to the
lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed
down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably
be "a smoky smoldering pile."

Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate
such heat.

This is impossible, they say, because the maximum
temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like
jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because
the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the
thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not
reach this upper limit.

The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where
abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than
the molten steel found in the basements.

Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer
(AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots.

Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in
the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature
of 1,377 degrees F was recorded.

This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten
steel in the basement.

The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep.
At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the
bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the
structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns
were four inches thick.

Videos of the North Tower collapse show its
communication mast falling first, indicating that the
central support columns must have failed at the very
beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP,
"Everything went simultaneously."

"At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower
had been severed from the base and began falling
down," Hufschmid writes. "If the first event was the
falling of a floor, how did that progress to the
severing of hundreds of columns?"

Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before
the connections between the floors and the columns,
Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA
assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."

Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I
would put explosives in the basement to get the weight
of the building to help collapse the structure."

SEISMIC 'SPIKES'

Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north
of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept.
11 that has still not been explained.

While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth
shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes
occurred at the beginning of each collapse.

The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude
earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South
Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second
collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.

However, the Palisades seismic record shows that-as
the collapses began-a huge seismic "spike" marked the
moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The
strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning
of the collapses, well before the falling debris
struck the Earth.

These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend
credence to the theory that massive explosions at the
base of the towers caused the collapses.

A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.

The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the
amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with
the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic
recording as the buildings began to fall.

Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked
before the towers actually hit the ground.

Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur
Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University's Center
for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, "This is an
element of current research and discussion. It is
still being investigated."

Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave
amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy
released. These "short-period surface waves," reflect
"the interaction between the ground and the building
foundation," according to a report from Columbia Earth
Institute.

"The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable
to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark
on Jan. 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology Group
reported on Sept. 14, 2001.

One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that
the Palisades seismographs register daily underground
explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.

These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium
nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude
1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did
not register on the seismographs because it was "not
coupled" to the ground.

"Only a small fraction of the energy from the
collapsing towers was converted into ground motion,"
Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that resulted
from the collapse of the towers was extremely small."

Last November, Lerner-Lam said: "During the collapse,
most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed
by the towers and the neighboring structures,
converting them into rubble and dust or causing other
damage-but not causing significant ground shaking."

Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground
beneath the towers was many times more powerful than
the total potential energy released by the falling
mass of the towers. The question is: What was that
energy source?

While steel is often tested for evidence of
explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of
explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in
the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such
tests.

Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the
government the cause of the fire at the Branch
Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City
bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering
assessment of the WTC collapse.

Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on
the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he
did not know about tests that show if an explosion had
affected the steel.

"I am not a metallurgist," Corley said.

Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to
Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J.,
and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer
East.

Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chi ca
go-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas
companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of
steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel
for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for
the steel.

Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India
and other Asian ports.

Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years
with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out
of Sydney, Australia.






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