![]() There had never been a reconstruction like this. My first realization was of the magnitude of what we were going to do. Howard Baum and Ron Rehm had modeled the combustion of the jet’s fuel following impact with WTC 1. John Gross and Terri McAllister had been to the site as members of the American Society of Civil Engineers team. Bill Pitts was already collecting videos and photos of the WTC site taken by New Yorkers, tourists, TV stations, etc. I quickly learned that the investigation had a head start. By 2001, I had been chief of the Fire Science Division for 18 years and had recently become a senior research scientist to better serve as the manager and technical leader of two large, interdisciplinary and interagency projects. Fire research is a multidisciplinary field, and I soon learned about engineering and human behavior from my colleague (and carpool mate during long commutes) Bud Nelson, the dean of fire protection engineers. However, my adviser was known for his work in combustion, and that led to my beginning a career in fire research at the Naval Research Laboratory.Ī few years later, I was offered a position in the new Center for Fire Research at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST). My thesis and postdoctoral research were in upper atmospheric chemistry. I had been interested in math and science since high school and studied math, chemistry and physics at a small liberal arts college in my home state of Connecticut. Let me say a few words about my path to this point. The overall leader was Shyam Sunder, chief of the Structures Division. After this was decided, Jack asked me to lead the reconstruction of the fires, one of the eight projects that made up the investigation. The first project under the Act was to be a reconstruction of how the two 110-story towers (WTC 1 and WTC 2) and the 47-story tower across the street (WTC 7) collapsed, along with guidance for preventing or mitigating future such disasters. ![]() In anticipation, NIST had already begun its investigation into the collapses a month earlier. 1, 2002, the National Construction Safety Team Act was signed into law. An idea was percolating through Washington for such an entity, and on Oct. The subject was the possibility of the creation of an entity that would deal with construction failures in much the same way the National Transportation Safety Board investigated airplane and motor vehicle crashes and the Chemical Safety Board investigated disasters in the manufacture and transportation of chemicals. Somewhere in this interval, I had a long conversation with Jack Snell, the director of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Can a steel structure really collapse?įor the better part of the next year, we all learned more and more about that day: who planned the attack, how the pilots were trained, and some information about the World Trade Center itself, but little about how the three skyscrapers came to collapse. Running through our minds were thoughts like: How could this happen? All those people started their day normally, not realizing they would not be returning home that evening. By the end of the afternoon, we also learned of the attack on the Pentagon and the thwarted attack that led to a plane crash in a Pennsylvania field. Shortly before lunchtime, Rita Fahy of the National Fire Protection Association, a member of the subcommittee, entered the room and, barely able to speak, managed to convey that airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and they had collapsed.Īmid an aura of unreality, we adjourned the meeting and charged back to our hotel rooms to learn more. One of the prime subjects was standards for the structural performance of buildings during a fire. As chance would have it, I was there for a meeting of the Fire Safety Engineering Subcommittee of the International Organization for Standardization. Everyone has a story about where they were when they heard about the disaster universally called “9/11.” Mine begins in Ottawa, Canada.
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