This is just a few paragraphs of a longer article. My wife and I are usually passionate lurkers and don't often post, but this small piece really got to me this morning. Sorry if it's been posted already; I could not find it but am not the best searcher.

Well, it's the first time I've seen in & I've been on since about 4:30 AM. I worked construction off & on all my life; it's awful to see something you had a hand in building wrecked like that.

Thank you so much for posting this. It brought more tears but such profound sadness for the engineer and all those who worked so hard to make the Towers a reality. I just bought the book on the Towers by the Rutgers University Professor. He said that until this disaster, his mom was the only one who bought his book. The book reads like a novel and details the genesis of the Towers. Again, thanks Bilbo.

This fellow did the best that the GOVERNMENT would allow him to do. The best explanation I have heard for the building's rapid collapse can be laid at the feet of the eco-fanatics who forced the banning of asbestos. Asbestos-sheathed steel beams (which were used up to, as I recall, the 77th floor, or thereabouts) would have withstood the heat of the burning jet fuel long enough to completely evacuate the buildings.

The "post asbestos ban" substitute "mineral wool" (used from the 77th floor up) was not nearly as good an insulator, and failed much more quickly--resulting in the building's rapid collapse.

The eco-fanatics fanned the lung cancer scare about asbestos to coerce GOVERMENT to mandate banning the use of ALL forms of asbestos instead of only those forms which actually caused cancer. There ARE forms of asbestos which are not cancer-inducing.

Thank you.

The pain he feels must be terrible. That fact is they did stand for an hour after being hit with something far worse than they were ever designed to take.

The buildings were a work well done.

Don't know how. I was catching up on the week's back reading this morning and read the article on page B1 of the print edition. I just typed in the first paragraphs myself.

the building performed very well structurally during Sept 11. The steel columns were all coated with asbestos up to the 70'th floor. The reason there was no asbestos above the 70'th floor is because the builder was not required to put it on above the 70'th floor, not because somebody banned him from using it. It was obviously a mistake in hindsight to not put asbestos on all the steel. However, the asbestos may or may not be able to stop this type of a fire. I believe that the 2'nd building was hit at floor 67?

Amazingly though there was a 911 call from someone on the 105'th floor who said the 104'th floor below had collapsed to the 103'rd floor. This means that there was at least one floor that fell to the floor below and the floor below still stood for at least a minute or two. So, all the engineers are actually saying the building performed better than expected.

But very tall buildings have not been economical to build for a long time, that's why we haven't hardly built any for the last 20 years.

What non engineers fail to understand is that all things are designed with limits.

If a car was designed so no one riding in one would ever die in an accident they would look a lot like a military tank and cost the same. Not one person in a thousand could aford one.

Someone posted a scenerio for the failures here on free republic. He said each building had a huge water pump to run the sprinklers that could have contained a fire in either tower. He said the water supply to the towers was only big enough to put out one fire at a time. The first building was getting full water when the second tower was hit. Since the second tower never got the amount of water the first one did, it fell first. He also said it the second plane on Washington D.C. had hit the other side of the Pentagon the same thing would have happened their. Two fires in the pentagon could not have been put out and the entire pentagon would have gone up in flames.

That makes sense to me.

What also makes sense to me is that it is impossible for us to defend against every possible attack.

The only realistic defense is for every attacker to know that whatever cause he hopes to advance will be destroyed as a result of his attack.

If Osama bin Ladin had been certain that every Militant Muslim in the world would die as the result of his attack, he would not have done so. If the Japanese Nation had been certain they were going to be destroyed as a result of WWII they would never have bomed pearl harbor.

No nation was ever attacked because it was too strong and had too much resolve. Nations are attacked when they are too weak and appear to have too little resolve.

Twin Tower's Chief Engineer
Stands Up for His Masterpiece
By DEAN STARKMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Until this past weekend, the principal engineer of the World Trade Center had said little publicly about the total destruction of his signature work.

But 73-year-old Leslie E. Robertson broke his silence at a gathering of fellow structural engineers here, reviewing the project that he began as a 34-year-old wunderkind. What began as a matter-of-fact slide presentation soon became an emotional experience.

Mr. Robertson began his review by flicking through slides of prefabricated exterior panels being hoisted into place in the early 1970s. Gripping the lectern, he faltered. "Oh boy," he said, bowing his head. He gathered himself. "Next slide."

He used a laser pointer to highlight grim photos of Ground Zero: exterior panels torn into jagged sections, twisted steel columns, towering piles of rubble. The commentary continued, like a medical examiner detailing an autopsy. "Here you see classical tension failure. Next slide. You can see the columns displaced. Welds are sheared off. Classical failures. Next slide."

See a list of famous buildings that have tumbled through history from a variety of causes.

Then came the question-and-answer period. "Is there anything you wish you had done differently in the design of the building?" one engineer called out abruptly. The room fell silent. Mr. Robertson paused and scratched his head. "I guess I wish I had made it stand up" longer, he said, his voice trailing off. "I mean, every man was important … " He stood alone at the lectern and wept.

Another engineer, his voice breaking, called out: "I think you did a great job." The audience burst into passionate applause.

On Sept. 11, Mr. Robertson was in Hong Kong and couldn't return to the U.S. for several days. He gave his slide presentation at a long-planned meeting of the National Council of Structural Engineers Association. His previously scheduled topic -- the design of a building in Shanghai planned to be about 200 feet taller than the World Trade towers -- was moved to a later hour, to be preceded by one deemed more of the moment: "The Design, Construction and Collapse of the World Trade Center."

Mr. Robertson's views are much sought-after as architects, engineers, contractors and scholars draw lessons from the performance of the World Trade Center buildings in the face of jetliners smashing into them and fires reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The issues up for debate range from how tall is too tall to the type of fireproofing to be applied to steel columns.

A team of engineers led by W. Gene Corley, senior vice president of Construction Technology Laboratories Inc., Skokie, Ill., who investigated engineering issues following the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, will lead a review of the Twin Towers' performance on behalf of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He says an initial assessment indicated that the buildings "performed well," in that they didn't collapse immediately. "That did give people enough time to get out," he says. One tower stood for about 47 minutes after impact; another stood for about an hour and 40 minutes.

Mr. Roberston says that he and his firm, Leslie E. Robertson Associates RLLP, are cooperating with Mr. Corley's group. He also says he expects his New York-based firm, along with others, will be named in liability suits related to the buildings' collapse, as occurred after the 1993 bombing. He says any potential suits would be meritless. He is proud of his and his firm's work on the Trade Center, he says, noting that the towers were still standing after roughly two-thirds of their columns, the main vertical supports, had been destroyed on each building-face hit.

A native of Manhattan Beach, Calif., Mr. Robertson earned a science degree at the University of California, Berkeley. After engineering jobs in Venezuela and elsewhere, he says, he ran out of gas and money in Seattle on a cross-country drive in 1958 and took a job with an engineering firm named Worthington-Skilling. He joined that firm, he says, because it was the first to offer him an advance.

Worthington-Skilling was then a small but growing regional firm. But a partner, John B. Skilling, forged a relationship with architect Minoru Yamasaki that woke things up in a big way. In the early 1960s, Mr. Yamasaki won a competition to design the World Trade Center and hired the Seattle firm to handle the engineering.

Mr. Robertson, who had never designed a building higher than 20 stories, emerged as the engineer of record for the most high-profile project of its day. He credits Mr. Yamasaki, who died in 1986, with assigning him the job, though he says he wasn't afraid to play hardball. When an older engineer was originally assigned to help lead the project, Mr. Robertson threatened to stay home. "They dispensed with the older guy," he says.

Messrs. Robertson and Skilling came to a parting of the ways in 1983, when the firm split to become Leslie E. Robertson RLLP, based in New York, and Skilling Ward Magnusson Barkshire, based in Seattle. In subsequent years, the engineering of the World Trade Center became the subject of a tug-of-war over credit between partisans of Mr. Skilling, who died in 1998, and those of Mr. Robertson, says Jon Magnusson, chairman and chief executive of Skilling Ward. He calls the differences "unfortunate."

In any case, the project consumed more than 10 years of Mr. Robertson's life and occupied his firm with maintenance issues until last Sept. 11. Breathtakingly bold from a technical standpoint, the building of the towers was studied by engineers world-wide. Innovations and advances included everything from its externally braced tubular framing system to the use of computerized punch-card system to order structural steel.

Since the destruction, Mr. Robertson says he has had trouble sleeping, wondering if there had been a way to make the buildings stand for "those extra minutes." He wonders about cylindrical trusses bracing the floors; T-shaped trusses are easier to coat with fire protection. But the round design was approved as part of the give-and-take of a construction project. "I didn't like it," he said, but added that the design had performed well in fires over the years.

Mr. Robertson said he has experienced a range of emotions -- anguish, doubt, pride, guilt. But in the end, he said, the towers "stood up under conditions far in excess of what they were designed for."

You look at the image of the fuel-air explosions caused by those jet impacts and it's fairly obvious that nothing other than one of the pyramids at Giza would have had any chance of surviving them.

The only thing they could have done differently which might have helped would have been putting a phalanx gun battery on the roof of each tower...

I'm not an engineer but I can't imagine any building standing up to the massive blast and subsequent fire of these attacks.

Except maybe NORAD. It's built into a mountain.

The "post asbestos ban" substitute "mineral wool" (used from the 77th floor up) was not nearly
as good an insulator, and failed much more quickly--resulting in the building's rapid collapse.

I know something about fire ratings of insulation. Wouldn't the "mineral wool" been sprayed on for the same exact
fire rating as lower floors? It worked as designed, allowing many people to escape.

And by the way, asbestos is a killer. It's not a hoax.

There ARE forms of asbestos which are not cancer-inducing.

Oh? Cite:

airborn asbestos in high or sustained concentrations presents some health risk. Intstalled asbestos insulation threatens no one except perhaps hungery rodents. In terms of principles of legal negligence, the 1970's environmental purists 'contributed' more to the consequential death toll in this tragedy than did any engineering weakness. It is the most recent and most visible example of the leathality of their dogma, but it is not unique.

He says an initial assessment indicated that the buildings "performed well," in that they didn't collapse immediately. "That did give people enough time to get out," he says. One tower stood for about 47 minutes after impact; another stood for about an hour and 40 minutes.

If more people had been told to evacuate immediately, instead of being told to return to work?

I guess the country needs to bring out that flag with the rattlesnake on it that says "DON'T TREAD ON ME".

I live about 10 miles from NORAD. At night I can see the lights of the enterence from my deck.

This attack would have left a large scar on the mountain, and thats it. It is so solid that i venture to say that the people inside wouldn't have noticed (except by monitors and instruments) and would have had to been told of the attack on them.

A nuclear attack however..........I don't think it could withstand serious bombing. Colorado Springs is in somewhat of a bowl, and a nuclear attack would certainly flatten everything. Including my deck, I'm afraid.

Every day I read something like this article and I cry and I am so proud of Americans like this man. I have been scanning an on-line Iranian newspaper called The Iranian for any news blips on their radar screen. There was an opinion piece the other day written by an Iranian man, a survivor of 9/11. He is an engineer for the Port Authority. He describes is harrowing escape and says this about the WTC:

As an engineer I was so impressed and proud that the architects had foreseen a disaster on this scale and made plans to minimize losses. So many lives had been saved because of their careful, well thought out design. When I later found out that a 767 loaded with fuel had hit the building I was even more impressed. The impact was so minor, the swaying of the building so much less than one would have expected, the explosion so muffled, that I could not believe how well the building had been constructed. Were it not for this, we would have all been dead. The buildings gave us a lot of time to get out. It was like they valiantly held themselves together as long as possible so the greatest possible number of people could get out, and then expired in a way that harmed the least number of people in their passing.