Posted on 04/30/2002 7:29:14 AM PDT by billorites
The image seems familiar: investigators poking around a junkyard looking for clues to a crime. A horrendous crime has in fact been committed, but these men are engineers, not detectives. By examining steel beams taken from rubble, they are trying to figure out if the way the World Trade Center was built made the tragedy there worse than it might have been. The engineering post-mortem feels urgent as plans for the reconstruction of the area are being developed. Tonight on "Why the Towers Fell," PBS's "Nova" series gives a lucid and compelling account of the investigation conducted by the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose report is scheduled for release today by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. (The New York Times reported findings from a draft of that report on March 29.)
Though television cameras and the world's immediate anxiety have shifted in recent months from ground zero in Manhattan to the West Bank, the "Nova" report is a reminder of how fresh the wounds are. Its approach is scientific and cool: "Nova"-like. But the subject at hand is the collapse of the twin towers, which necessarily involves watching upsetting images of destruction and terror.
We watch the scientists watch those images over and over on computer screens, as they hope to learn from the sequence and manner of the collapse. The head of the engineering team, Eugene Corley, performed the same task in Oklahoma City, after the bombing there. "I have now looked at two terrorist attacks," he says, "and I never want to look at another one in the future."
The program doesn't avoid the human aspects, including stories of escape as well as a poignant interview with Leslie Robertson, who was 34 when he was chief engineer in charge of building the World Trade Center. But it concentrates on the mechanics, examining how the towers' construction contributed to how they came apart. Their unusual design helped them withstand the explosive blows of the airplanes, but it may have also made them harder to evacuate and more susceptible to collapse from fire.
Traditional skyscrapers like the Empire State Building are supported by a dense mass of steel girders, which requires columns that take up floor space. The World Trade Center's design moved the supporting columns to the exterior walls, providing more rentable space and also making the towers sway less in the wind.
With smart computer graphics, the "Nova" program shows how these exterior columns were linked to a core of vertical columns with steel trusses. The little pieces clamping to the big ones look like a cool Lego structure.
But these were real buildings, gathering places for tens of thousands of people every day. So all the trusses holding the World Trade Center buildings together had to be fireproofed, and the method used has been called into question. The twin towers were built in an era when buildings were getting taller and lighter, so the metal was fireproofed with lightweight foam and walled off with sheetrock instead of concrete. When the planes hit the fireproofing went flying, leaving the steel naked and vulnerable to the intense heat produced by the ignited jet fuel. A man who escaped describes pushing aside drywall that had been blown apart by the blast and was blocking the fire exits.
Film taken by people in an architectural firm near the trade center shows the outer wall collapsing as the trusses fell and the supporting columns buckled. An engineer likens the effect to a sheet of paper crumpling.
Others describe the floors collapsing on one another as "pancaking" down. At the junk yard the engineers try to find the identifying numbers stamped in the corner of each supporting beam. These clues and detached descriptions provide yet another connection to horror, but also a way to think of alleviating any future similar damage.
Larry Klein, who produced the program, was in charge of "Building Big," PBS's excellent five-part series in 2000 about engineering and architectural ingenuity and foolhardiness. Reliving the destruction of the World Trade Center from yet another vantage, it's hard not to question the grandiose impulse in skyscraper architecture.
You don't need an engineering degree to understand that it's easier to evacuate a building with 40 stories than one with 100. Thinking small seems like a good idea.
NOVA
Why the Towers Fell
On most PBS stations tonight
(check local listings)
Paula S. Apsell, executive producer; Larry Klein, producer for "Nova"; Garfield Kennedy, producer for the BBC. A co-production of the BBC and WGBH, Boston, in association with Production Group Inc.
It was not the exterior walls that made the towers sway less in the wind. It was the huge computer-controlled mechanism at the very top of both towers which kept the towers from swaying so much, without which they'd make people sick.
A few months before the atrocity took place, the History channel ran an episode of Modern Marvels which detailed how they built the towers and exactly what it took to keep them from swaying. When they replayed it after 9-11, they cut out that entire part about the anti-sway mechanism. I've not heard anything from anyone concerning this important piece of info.
The post-mortuems are often reporter driven looking for news worthy "blame",
When I grew up, it was fashionable to look forward to the grand things we would do in "the future".
It now looks like civilization is going in reverse. No one want's to go back to the Moon, or to Mars. They want smaller buildings, not larger. Airliners actually cruise slower than when I was a kid.
How long will it take to go back to caves and flint tools? And how many people will die in order to get a small enough population that can support themselves in such a manner?
Yeah, let's keep our heads down. You don't want to antagonize the terrorists. It's best to play it safe. We don't need great structures or to be the best in the world. In the end all we really need to live is a hole in the ground we can cover up with a tarp. Then we'll be safe.
That is not the American way. The American way builds the biggest buildings, the greatest railways, the longest canals. The American way settled the West, built an economy that is the strongest in the world, harnessed the power of the atom, and landed a man on the moon. The American way does not take "no" for an answer and does not know the meaning of the words "good enough".
If those skyscrapers are not re-built to be the biggest, tallest, most beautiful buildings in the world, then the American way is at an end, and we will have begone our long painful slide into the second tier of human endeavor. That is the choice that will be made when the decisions are reached about what to do in Lower Manhattan. Do we want to lead the world, or do we want to duck our heads and hide.
The New York Times says we should duck and hide. What say you?
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