Beth Fertig

Numerous witnesses to the collapse of the south WTC tower think it resembles a demolition using explosives. Some initially believe this is what is occurring:
Reporter John Bussey watches the collapse from the Wall Street Journal’s offices across the street from the WTC. He says, “I… looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” [Wall Street Journal, 9/12/2001]
Deputy Fire Commissioner Thomas Fitzpatrick: “I remember seeing, it looked like sparkling around one specific layer of the building.… Then the building started to come down. My initial reaction was that this was exactly the way it looks when they show you those implosions on TV.” [City of New York, 10/1/2001]
Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory: “I saw low-level flashes. In my conversation with Lieutenant Evangelista… he questioned me and asked me if I saw low-level flashes in front of the building, and I agreed with him… I saw a flash flash flash and then it looked like the building came down.… You know like when they demolish a building, how when they blow up a building, when it falls down? That’s what I thought I saw.” [City of New York, 10/3/2001]
Firefighter Richard Banaciski: “It seemed like on television they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.” [City of New York, 12/6/2001]
Firefighter Joseph Meola: “As we are looking up at the building, what I saw was, it looked like the building was blowing out on all four sides. We actually heard the pops.… You thought it was just blowing out.” [City of New York, 12/11/2001]
Fire Chief Frank Cruthers: “[T]here was what appeared to be at first an explosion. It appeared at the very top, simultaneously from all four sides, materials shot out horizontally. And then there seemed to be a momentary delay before you could see the beginning of the collapse.” [City of New York, 10/31/2001]
Battalion Chief Brian Dixon: “I was watching the fire… the lowest floor of fire in the South Tower actually looked like someone had planted explosives around it because the whole bottom I could see—I could see two sides of it and the other side—it just looked like that floor blew out.… I thought, geez, this looks like an explosion up there, it blew out.” [City of New York, 10/25/2001]
Firefighter Timothy Burke: “Then the building popped, lower than the fire… I was going oh, my god, there is secondary device because the way the building popped I thought it was an explosion.” [City of New York, 1/22/2002]
Firefighter Edward Cachia: “It actually gave at a lower floor, not the floor where the plane hit, because we originally had thought there was like an internal detonation explosives because it went in succession, boom, boom, boom, boom, and then the tower came down.” [City of New York, 12/6/2001]
Firefighter Kenneth Rogers: “[T]here was an explosion in the South Tower… I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing.” [City of New York, 12/10/2001]
Reporter Beth Fertig: “The tower went down perfectly straight, as if a demolition crew had imploded it. I wondered if it was being brought down deliberately.” [Gilbert et al., 2002, pp. 78]
Paramedic Daniel Rivera: “[D]o you ever see professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear ‘Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop’? That’s exactly what—because I thought it was that.” [City of New York, 10/10/2001]
Battalion Chief Dominick DeRubbio: “It was weird how it started to come down. It looked like it was a timed explosion.” [City of New York, 10/12/2001]
The Guardian will report that police on the scene said the collapse “looked almost like a ‘planned implosion’ designed to catch bystanders watching from the street.” [Guardian, 9/12/2001]
However, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which conducts a three-year study of the WTC collapses, will reject suggestions that the WTC towers were brought down with explosives (see August 30, 2006). CTV will assert, “[F]lashes of light that seemed to indicate bombs detonating were not explosions. They were pockets of airs being forced out of windows as the sagging floors pushed downward.” [CTV, 9/12/2006]