Allegation:
9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished. The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary
American Rebuilds. Mr. Silverstein said:
I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, you know, "We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it." And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.
9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein's suggestion to "pull it" is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.
Facts: On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:
Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001, after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties employees who evacuated tenants from the building.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings. The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of WTC Tower 1.
In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.
Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a television documentary he stated, "I said, you know, we've had such terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it." Mr. McQuillan has stated that by "it," Mr. Silverstein meant the contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated unequivocally, "NIST has seen so evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition," in its
Collapse of WTC 7 report (p. 6). NIST's working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that it was caused by the collapse of a critical column due to "fire and/or debris induced structural damage." There was substantial damage to WTC 7 when the nearby WTC 1 tower collapsed and fires began shortly afterwards. Also, WTC 7 was a very unusual building because it was built over an existing Con-Edison power generation substation, which contained two large 6,000 gallon fuel tanks for the emergency generation of power. The fuel from these tanks could have contributed to the intense heat that apparently weakened the supporting columns in WTC 7.
