Tower Blueprints
Missing Evidence of the World Trade Center Attack
NOTE: This page is archived as a historical record. The current page is here.The blueprints to the Twin Towers and Building 7 remain off-limits to the public three years after the attack, despite the fact that the buildings were built with public money and that the engineering drawings of public buildings are supposed to be public information. 1 Incredibly, FEMA's team that investigated the collapses lacked access to the buildings' blueprints -- access which has been the subject of legal battles.
FEMA Misrepresented the Towers' Construction
Chapter 2 of FEMA's report, "WTC 1 and WTC 2", appears to be carefully crafted to support the "truss theory" or "pancake theory". The comments added to the chapter expose many deceptive techniques employed in the article. 2 Those techniques are nicely summarized by a comparison of the following two structural framing plans of a typical floor of the Twin Towers. The first is taken from the book Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel 3 The second is from FEMA's report.
It is clear that the FEMA plan is misleading because of the far too small dimensions of the core column cross-sections. If the first drawing can be believed -- and unfortunately it cannot be verified because accurate building drawings have not been made public -- then one can surmise that the FEMA plan has the following misleading characteristics:
- The core columns (red boxes in the turquoise region) are neither shown to scale nor in their correct positions. They are drawn far smaller than their actual dimensions.
- It fails to show the structures connecting the core columns to each other, implying the core is entirely dependent on the floor diaphragms for bracing.
- All trusses are shown with a spacing of one truss for every other perimeter wall column, instead of a truss for every column, with alternate spacing used only for the cross-trusses.
World Trade Center Master Plan
While detailed engineering drawings of the World Trade Center remain unavailable, 9-11 Research has been able to obtain drawings of the MASTER PLAN, dated December 16, 1963.
References
2. WTC 1 and WTC 2, FEMA.gov,
3. Multi-Storey Buildings in Steel, Second Edition, 1978