Shafted

Mechanical engineer Gordon Ross, in his July 2007 talk on the destruction of the Twin Towers, pointed out that:

“Those [core] columns which were situated adjacent to and accessible from inside the elevator shafts failed at an early stage of the collapse.

Those columns which were remote from the elevator shafts, and not accessible from the elevator shafts, survived the early stages of the collapse."*

Well, that's a coincidence. According to USA Today: "On Sept. 11, ACE Elevator of Palisades Park, N.J., had 80 elevator mechanics inside the World Trade Center".

And NIST itself says that, on 9/11, "Elevators 6A and 7A were out of service for modernization". (NIST NCSTAR 1-8, p.43).

In addition, Ace worked in and around structural steel:

"A run of approximately 80 vertical feet, employed over 300 running feet of 2-1/2" x 8" and 2"x 2" trough raceway. This run traveled through plaster ceilings, concrete floors and around structural steel."

In addition:

• The Twin Towers had been evacuated a number of times in the weeks preceding 9/11

• Workers in the Twin Towers observed heavy work taking place on supposedly empty floors in the weeks before 9-11; supposedly, the work took place on floors the elevators would not stop on without a special access key (toward the end of the video).

• There was a power down in the Twin Towers on the weekend before 9/11, security cameras were shut down, and many workers ran around busily doing things. unobserved

• Bomb-sniffing dogs were inexplicably removed from the Twin Towers five days before 9-11

So there could have been plenty of opportunities to use the elevator shafts, evacuations, special-access floors, and power-downs to access and plant bombs on the core columns of the Twin Towers.

* Ross also pointed out that the columns accessible from the elevator shafts were stronger than those which weren't accessible. Therefore, they should not have been the ones which collapsed first.

I'm not accusing ACE Elevator of any wrongdoing. Bad guys could, of course, have forged maintenance badges or otherwise piggybacked onto legitimate maintenance efforts.