WTC's design led to collapse, professor says

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Sep 12, 2007 | by Matt Krupnick

BERKELEY -- The civil-engineering industry's failure to admit that cost-saving design features led to the World Trade Center collapse amounts to "moral corruption," a UC Berkeley engineering professor said Tuesday.

Speaking on campus to memorialize the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Abolhassan Astaneh said his five-year study of the collapse of the Twin Towers revealed that a better design likely would have prevented many of the nearly 3,000 deaths that day.

Astaneh sharply criticized the American Society of Civil Engineers, which he said cared more about defending the industry than revealing the truth about the towers' design.

"It's just moral corruption," Astaneh said in response to a question from the audience. "I don't beat around the bushes."

Astaneh, who first researched the disaster in the days following Sept. 11, said he had access to well-guarded architectural drawings of the 110-story towers for his study. The schematics showed that the buildings were supported almost completely by thin steel beams around the outside.

Thicker beams on the exterior and more concrete surrounding the stairwells would have added at least $30 million to the cost of the buildings, he said, but could have saved hundreds or thousands of lives after airliners hit both towers. Instead, the resulting 1,000- degree fire easily destroyed the structure, he said. Most tall skyscrapers, including Chicago's Sears Tower, are sturdier and likely would survive such attacks, Astaneh said. Because of the industry's defensiveness, "the public is left with the notion that these buildings were like any other buildings, he said.

"These buildings had no other option but to pulverize."

An Engineering Association member who studied the World Trade Center collapse said that he believes most skyscrapers would collapse quickly after being hit by jetliners. The Trade Center performed better than could be expected, said Jim Harris, a Denver engineer. The industry has been cautious but not misleading, Harris said. "I think we're just trying to stick to the facts."

Another association member said there might be several reasons why the buildings collapsed.

"There's a lot of uncertainty in this business," said Andrew Kinane, a Benicia engineer and president of the group's Bay Area chapter. "We shouldn't be too quick to jump to conclusions."

Astaneh's presentation included computerized animations of planes hitting the towers. Using $270,000 software, each sequence showed a plane hitting first a realistic version of a tower and then the plane hitting a reinforced building.

With thicker beams, the animation showed the planes disintegrating almost immediately after hitting the tower. In contrast, the airliners punched through the unreinforced exterior with little resistance.

"Like a knife cutting through soft butter," Astaneh said. "Airplanes are not very strong, but this building was even weaker than an airplane."

New York building codes would have prevented the towers' flimsy design, he said, but federal laws allowed engineers to ignore those codes. The same exception has been granted to developers of New York's Freedom Tower, which will replace the World Trade Center.

Astaneh's study was completed on behalf of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, a group run by relatives of World Trade Center victims. The group hopes the results help its campaign to reform skyscraper- construction laws, the campaign's president, Sally Regenhard, said in a phone interview from New York.

"We need to change the system," said Regenhard, whose son, a New York firefighter, died in the collapse. "We could not save our loved ones, but perhaps we can save other people's loved ones."

Contact Matt Krupnick at 925-943-8246 or mkrupnick@bayareanewsgroup.com.