Reply #31: What FEMA really says (and why NIST started over from scratch)

[plaguepuppy]

Just checking in to defend the good name of the engineering community (MIT, '74), and point out the obvious fact that the FEMA report did not even call itself a "study," and did not try to come up with a definitive explanation for the collapses. If you bother to read it (rather than using it as a blunt instrument, the preferred use of references by the debunkers here) you will discover that it offers a few different possible mechanisms for the collapses without attempting to prove or disprove any of them with the available evidence.

The ongoing NIST study says at the outset that it is starting from scratch, and does not consider any of the theories put forward in the FEMA report as proven or disproven. NIST's progress report is little more than a research protocol, and offers no further attempts to prove a particular collapse scenario. They are still at the information garthering stage, and have not yet undertaken a forensic engineering analysis.

Contrary to the claims of a large portion of the steel being carefully examined according to some "protocol," the vast majority of the steel was sent directly to scrap yards with no inspection at all. A grand total of less than 250 pieces of steel out of hundreds of thousands were saved for further study, and the effort to save a few pieces from the recycling yards was a spare time effort by a few of the ASCE investigators (who by the way got minimal funding and almost no access to the site). The first chapter of Eric Hufschmid's book relates the sad story:
http://members.aol.com/erichuf/PainfulQuestions_1.pdf

Here's an interesting observation from a real engineer, architect Matthys Levy, co-author of "Why Buildings Fall Down," speaking about the twin tower collapses:

http://www.plaguepuppy.net/public_html/video%20archive/discovery.wmv