Farid’s Blog

Eight years after terrorists crashed airliners into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City, and into the Pentagon, the almost “perfect” vertical collapse of the two towers remains a mystery — at least to me. Everyone has her own theory on how this could have happened, which may or may not be the same than the official one. In this post, I’ll add my own theory, or rather, wild speculation: the towers could have been equipped with a self-destruct mechanism that was unintentionally triggered by some fire-caused short in its circuitry, or beginning collapse. I don’t claim it is more plausible than the others. Just some food for thought.

The official version has it, in a nutshell, that the impacts of the planes and the kerosene explosions blew away the protective coating of the steel structures, leaving them exposed to the fire for an extended amount of time. Weakened by the heat, some steel pillars gave way, which resulted in the collapse of the supported stories. This was too much weight for the steel pillars underneath, which also collapsed in a chain reaction, until the whole building was flattened.

What I don’t like about this theory is the way how the building came down in an almost perfect symmetry along its central axis. Of course, the towers were build symmetrically, but they were hit in a very asymmetric way, as can be seen in the TV footage of the plane crashes. Some pillars would have inevitably been deformed before others, resulting in a kind of oblique sliding. Once the pillars have started to deform, the towers would probably have been cut in two, with the part above the impact zone sliding off as if cut away, and falling down, leaving the rest of the towers more or less intact.

Even if this wouldn’t have happened this way, under normal circumstances and without additional interferences, the towers would still normally tilt and fall down to one side, perhaps in the midst of the collapse. A totally symmetric collapse just doesn’t look natural… and it perhaps wasn’t.

That’s the reason why many people, including myself, think that the buildings were blown away by a series of controlled explosions, just like we know it from explosives assisted demolitions. The puffs of dust (?) and debris that were ejected from the stories way below the collapsing wave could have been tell-tale signs of such controlled (thermite or something else) explosions. As an aside: even the best controlled demolitions fail to collapse long buildings in a perfectly symmetric way; so how much more improbable is it that an asymmetrically and randomly damaged building would collapse symmetrically?

Opponents of this theory rightfully point out that controlled demolitions of buildings require many weeks of preparations, and an insane amount of cabling to the explosives… that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed by the users of the towers. Rightly so. That rules out any conspiracy theory of last-minute ad hoc emergency demolition (to prevent the towers from damaging other surrounding buildings and killing even more people than those who were trapped inside), and even more so it rules out obscure and silly conspiracy theories where demolition preparations started some weeks before the attacks.

My own theory though is somewhat different, and IMHO more subtle. It consists of three parts, like a classic tragedy. Part I is this:

What if the explosives, fuses, and cabling have been built into the towers from the very beginning?

This would have given the construction workers (or at the very least those construction workers responsible for this subproject) more than enough time to install the explosives and cables, without being noticed by regular people — as the towers were not yet ready to be used at all. It would also have given them more than enough opportunity to hide the cabling alongside the other regular cables. All this could have been done in a very discreet way.

Why would anybody do this? Remember that the towers were being built on one of the most expensive parcels of real estate in the whole world. But judging from the rather cheap materials used to build them, it was probably clear to their architects and owners, that those towers weren’t meant to last 50+ years. They would eventually have been demolished anyway, to make room for an improved, more modern version. Now, how do you demolish a skyscraper in Manhattan? The only somewhat economic way is to use controlled explosions. But such an explosion would have to be done very carefully, because due to their extraordinary height, a lot of surrounding buildings could have been knocked off if the towers didn’t collapse cleanly.

The only way to create a high confidence in a clean collapse of such high buildings, is to include explosives (or some other, perhaps mechanical, collapsing mechanism) at carefully precalculated points… and the most logical time and way to install those mechanisms is to embed them in the towers while they were being built. This way, an architect has complete control over the vulnerable points and could predict with a high level of accuracy where the towers would come down, when they had reached their end of life (EoL).

Think of this as a building with built-in self-destruct mechanism.

But now to Part II of the tragedy:

What if the insulation coating of the self-destruct mechanism’s cabling was eventually damaged by the kerosene fire, causing a short-circuit, and thus starting the whole cascade?

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: the self-destruct mechanism laid dormant all the decades, but was unintentionally (!) ignited when its control cables shorted, due to the fire. It would also explain why it took so long after the impact to start: the cables could have been in a remote place and were eventually reached by the slowly propagating fire. After some time, the heat would have molten away the insulation coating, and triggered the secondary catastrophe.

This could explain the collapse of the first building, but not of the second one. The second tower may indeed have started to collapse according to the official NIST and FEMA theories: we clearly see from the TV footage how the upper part of the building starts to tilt to one side. But then, the collapse mysteriously turns back into a symmetric fall. And that’s where Part III comes into play:

What if the self-destruct mechanism was able to detect a beginning oblique collapse of the second tower, thus assumed that the building was about to be demolished anyway, and decided to rectify the situation by starting a correcting cascade sequence?

Now that sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Look at it from the perspective of the architect who designed this hypothetical self-destruct mechanism: it makes sense to tune the circuitry in such a way that it reacts to a beginning cascade, if something went wrong. As the second tower didn’t collapse as it should (from the perspective of the self-destruct mechanism), the control electronics would have automatically started to rectify the situation.

The “beauty” of this theory is that it would also explain why the few people knowing about this self-destruct mechanism (the original owners, the architects and a few construction workers) wouldn’t publicly admit it: their decision to embed such a mechanism into their buildings would have killed a lot more people that those plane crashes alone. This extraordinary high level of responsibility and liability would be enough to silence a large group of people. If you wish: a forced conspiracy of silence.

It would also explain why the New York City officials are quiet about this, even if they were aware of it: if it ever became known that most sky scrapers in Manhattan were actually equipped with a similar self-destruct mechanism, nobody would be willing to live and work there anymore. Just imagine the economic and financial, but also political fallout of the collective panic that would follow!

This post wouldn’t be complete without a list of weaknesses of this theory:

1. If a short circuit was able to ignite the cascade, isn’t the probability very high that the control cables would have been damaged by the planes’ impacts, causing an almost immediate collapse instead of the delayed one?
2. Since the planes damaged the structural integrity of the towers in an asymmetrical way, wouldn’t the pre-programmed cascade be useless, as it had to assume that the building was still structurally intact for it to create a symmetrical collapse? How comes the buildings still collapsed symmetrically, despite the long oblique asymmetrical wounds?
3. If explosives were being used, how long could they have remained effective? After all, 30+ years is an awfully long time, where chemicals can dry out or mutate into something more inert.
4. If explosives were embedded in the steel structures, how comes explosives sniffing dogs didn’t detect them on the usual patrols, or later when sifting through the ashes of the remains?
5. If something else was being used (like, say, some purely mechanical mechanism), since it couldn’t be tested, how comes it worked so flawlessly after such a long time?

No matter the theory, we’ll never know for sure why the towers collapsed symmetrically, causing the untimely death of so many innocent people inside… yet perhaps saving even more lives outside.