Martin Sheen: 9/11 Questions 'Unanswered,' Building 7 'Very Suspicious'

[William Seger]

4. There are literally thousands of buildings in the country...

... that have the same potential for collapsing the way WTC 7 did. That's why NIST investigated it -- not to try to satisfy conspiracists (which would be a perfectly futile objective.) They did not "present a report insulting building engineers everywhere." It presented a report recommending changes to building codes.

The design of WTC 7 conformed to the existing building codes, and this may come as a shock to you, but most commercial building owners aren't willing to pay for going beyond that. Specifically, the WTC 7 engineers didn't actually design the beam-to-column connections that failed. They simply specified the gravity load each connection needed to carry, and the steel supplier simply looked up a suitable design in an ASTM manual of standard connections intended only for gravity loads. The connections were not designed to resist thermal expansion, and the other interior connections were not designed to resist the moment forces that developed when that first column failed. That's because there wasn't any code requirement to do so, and building a structure that could withstand that sort of damage would have been much more expensive.

Yes, the report is widely accepted by the engineering community because it makes sense. Rigging a controlled demolition of a 24x7-occupied building using magical silent explosives for no apparent reason, on the other hand... not so much.