September 11, 2001
Televised images of the attacks on the World Trade Center suggest that explosives devices caused the collapse of both towers, a New Mexico Tech explosion expert said Tuesday.
The collapse of the buildings appears "too methodical" to be a chance result of airplanes colliding with the structures, said Van Romero, vice president for research at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
"My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse," Romero said.
Romero is a former director of the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center at Tech, which studies explosive materials and the effects of explosions on buildings, aircraft and other structures.
Romero said he based his opinion on video aired on national television broadcasts. Romero said the collapse of the structures resembled those of controlled implosions used to demolish old structures.
"It would be difficult for something from the plane to trigger an event like that," Romero said in a phone interview from Washington, D.C.
Romero said he and another Tech administrator were on a Washington-area subway when an airplane struck the Pentagon.
He said he and Denny Peterson, vice president for administration and finance, were en route to an office building near the Pentagon to discuss defense-funded research programs at Tech.
If explosions did cause the towers to collapse, the detonations could have been caused by a small amount of explosive, he said.
"It could have been a relatively small amount of explosives placed in strategic points," Romero said. The explosives likely would have been put in more than two points in each of the towers, he said.
The detonation of bombs within the towers is consistent with a common terrorist strategy, Romero said.
"One of the things terrorist events are noted for is a diversionary attack and secondary device," Romero said.
Attackers detonate an initial, diversionary explosion that attracts emergency personnel to the scene, then detonate a second explosion, he said.
Romero said that if his scenario is correct, the diversionary attack would have been the collision of the planes into the towers.
Tech President Dan Lopez said Tuesday that Tech had not been asked to take part in the investigation into the attacks. Tech often assists in forensic investigations into terrorist attacks, often by setting off similar explosions and studying the effects.
The towers each survived the impact. The structural steel is covered with fireproofing rated at 2-3 hours. The steel is also rated at twice the load it is designed to carry: i.e. the weight of everything above any point in the building. The towers were also designed as stiff tubes due to the tremendous wind load at the higher elevations.
The south tower was hit closer to the middle. I expected that tower to fall from the damaged floor up, and it should have fallen at whatever corner or side the fireproofing burned through first, thus buckling the steel and causing a collapse. That's not what I saw on TV. I saw a straight down collapse, similar to an implosion caused by demolition charges. In reality, the top of the tube should have fallen to one side.
If we say that the steel at the bottom gave way, which is possible due to the first four floors being engulfed in flames, thus the fireproofing could have been burned through and the steel weakened, I would have expected the building above to fall in a semi-intact state.But it seemed that the building disintegrated downward, as it fell. That doesn't add up. The steel in the other parts of the building had not been engulfed in flames, thus the "tube" in some parts should have been intact.
Then the north tower fell within minutes of the south tower. That tower had much less damage, and the damage was much higher up than the south tower. Yet it fell in the same pancake fashion, straight down. One tower collapsed right down to ground level, one down to twenty floors. Controlled demo charges seemed to be at work here.
My take is that the buildings were to be hit by the planes-plan A- and then plan B would be to demo the towers an hour later. Plan B would happen whether plan A succeeded or not, as plan A had more visual impact to the world then a straight demo job.
if there were explosives planted, why would they wait an hour to let the building occcupants flee.
a new report just came out that NYPD cops caught a truck full of explosives on the george Washington bridge over the hudson River.