Douglas Loizeaux

Immediately after seeing the attacks on the the World Trade Center on television, Mark Loizeaux, the president of leading building demolition firm Controlled Demolition Inc (CDI), tries to contact government officials to warn them that the Twin Towers will probably collapse. [US News and World Report, 6/22/2003; New Scientist, 7/24/2004] Loizeaux will later recall his initial reaction to the crashes in New York. After the first tower is hit, he will say, “I told Doug [Loizeaux, his brother] immediately that the tower was coming down, and when the second tower was hit, that it would follow.” According to US News and World Report, “Horrified, the Loizeaux brothers watched first responders streaming into the doomed towers and tried frantically, and unsuccessfully, to phone in warnings.” [US News and World Report, 6/22/2003] Mark Loizeaux will recall, “I still had some cell phone numbers, so when the second plane hit I said, ‘Start calling all the cell phones, tell them that the building is going to come down.’” However: “It was frenetic, nobody could get through even with speed dialling.… Of course, building number 7, where the emergency management headquarters was, was on fire. I’d been in that office two months before.” Loizeaux then phones a couple of people on the National Research Council committee involved in assessing the impact of explosives. They ask him, “What do you think this is, that they’re going to fail, that they’re both going to fail?” Loizeaux will recall: “The expression around was they’re going to pancake down, almost vertically. And they did. It was the only way they could fail. It was inevitable.” [New Scientist, 7/24/2004] Soon after the attacks, Loizeaux, as a recognized expert, will be called upon to comment on the fall of the WTC towers. [Construction (.com), 9/13/2001] In addition, his firm will be involved with the clearing of Ground Zero. (It was also tasked with bringing down the remnants of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after its partial destruction in 1995 (see 8:35 a.m. – 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995 and 7:01 a.m. May 23, 1995).) [Construction (.com), 10/1/2001]