Fairbanks, AK – On September 6, 2017, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Dr. Leroy Hulsey, Chair of UAF's Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, presented some damning findings and conclusions detailed in his team’s September 2017 progress report regarding the collapse of World Trade Center building 7.
Over the past 16 years many highly respected academics and experts have come forward to challenge the official narrative on the collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) towers forwarded by the U.S. government – with particular interest given to the collapse of WTC building 7.
The official government position elicited in the 2008 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report holds that the collapse of all three towers was due to intense heat inside of the buildings.
Now, for the first time, an ongoing peer reviewed academic study, WTC 7 Evaluation — is being conducted by Dr. J Leroy Husley of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Institute of Northern Engineering – and it directly challenges the findings of the official NIST report.
The NIST opened an investigation into the collapses of WTC 1, WTC 2, and WTC 7 in August 2002. NIST released its final report on WTC 7 in 2008, finding that the fires that were ignited by falling debris from WTC 1 caused the collapse of WTC 7.
Independent researchers, however, have assembled evidence that has raised profound questions regarding the notion that WTC 7 collapsed because of fire.
While many in the mainstream have attempted to label anyone that questions the official narrative as “tin foil hat” conspiracy theorist, many highly respected experts have come forward to lampoon the unbelievable idea that the buildings collapsed due to the intense heat and fires following two terrorist-directed plane crashes.
In 2002, NIST remarked that the case was exceptionally bizarre, as there were no other known cases of total structural collapses in high-rise buildings caused by fires. What's more, it had to document the fact that this never before seen anomaly happened three times in the space of one day, noted NIST.
Official investigations have never been able to thoroughly and coherently explain how this might have happened, and various teams tasked with examining the collapse have raised difficult questions about the veracity of the official government story.
The 47 story WTC 7 tower collapsed 7 hours after the Twin Towers fell — over 300 feet away — and was never hit by a plane. Dr. Hulsey said an analysis by NIST attributed the failure to numerous fires ignited inside the high rise by debris from the Twin Towers.
“The expansion of steel was such that it created a problem that occurred on the 13th floor at column 79,” Hulsey said. “And because of that, it collapsed. So, I’ve been asked by ‘Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’, who’s a group of professionals that have put together their own money to get another opinion.”
According to Alaska Public Media (APM):
Hulsey, who has decades of structural engineering experience around the country, including forensic analysis of building failures, said he’s using Building 7 structural drawings to model failure scenarios.“Get the structure put into a digital system where we can simulate its behavior,” Hulsey told APM. “It’s very complicated.”
An alternate Building 7 collapse theory claimed it was a controlled demolition using explosives.
”People have put straight lines on the video to see if it goes straight down, and it’s almost perfectly straight down,” Hulsey said. “Yet the building is not symmetric. One might say, ‘Well. Why did that happen?’ And you can begin to see why people have all these ideas about why that building came straight down like that. And, as a matter of fact, the Twin Towers came down pretty straight too.”
Hulsey, who’s been working on the project for a year, stresses that he and 2 graduate students, are going about the analysis with open minds.
”There’s a lot of stuff that’s been written about this and I have absolutely refused to read it,” Hulsey said. “And I’m not going to read it ’til we have our results finished. And then I’ve told my students that they’re not allowed to read it either. So we do not want to have a bias. We’re going to try to do this purely scientifically.”
WTC 7 Evaluation is a study at the University of Alaska Fairbanks using finite element modeling to evaluate the possible causes of WTC 7's collapse.According to the WTC 7 Evaluation project summary of the academic study:
Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth provided funding to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) to evaluate if fire caused the collapse of WTC 7 and to examine what may have occurred at 5:20 P.M. on September 11, 2001. Therefore, the UAF research team evaluated the structural response due to the reported fire. A structural framing virtual model of WTC 7 was used to conduct the study. The reported failure was simulated using three-dimensional finite element computer models of the building. The research team studied the building’s response using two finite element programs, ABAQUS and SAP2000 version 18. At the micro level, three types of evaluations were performed. In plan-view, the research team evaluated: 1) the planar response of the structural elements to the fire(s) using wire elements; 2) the building’s response using the NIST’s approach with solid elements; and 3) the validity of NIST’s findings using solid elements. At the macro-level, progressive collapse, i.e., the structural system’s response to local failures, is being studied using SAP2000 with wire elements, as well as with ABAQUS, and it is near completion. The findings thus far are that fire did not bring down this building. Building failure simulations show that, to match observation, the entire inner core of this building failed nearly simultaneously.The breakthrough report’s findings thus far are that fire was not the cause of the building collapse. Simulations of the building failure, which match the observations of WTC 7’s collapse, show that the entire core of the building would have had to fail virtually simultaneously for the building to collapse in the manner in which it did.Dr. Hulsey should be commended for being willing to tackle such a divisive subject with an impartial and open mind. Hopefully, his team’s research will lead to a new investigation into what actually caused the collapse of WTC 7.
Please share this amazing research to awaken others to the fact that WTC 7 was likely not brought down by fire, as the official government version of events – as per NIST – would suggest!
A draft report of the study will be released in October or November 2017 and will be open for public comment for a six-week period, allowing for input from the public and the engineering community. A final report will then be published in early 2018.
Below is the September 6, progress report by Dr. Leroy Hulsey in which he presented his team’s findings and conclusions: