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Why The Towers Collapsed
The World Trade Center Building Performance Study Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City's World Trade Center (WTC), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers (SEI/ASCE), in association with New York City and several other Federal agencies and professional organizations, deployed a team of civil, structural, and fire protection engineers to study the performance of buildings at the WTC site. The events following the attacks in New York City were among the worst building disasters in history and resulted in the largest loss of life from any single building collapse in the United States. Of the 58,000 people estimated to be at the WTC Complex, over 3,000 lost their lives that day, including 343 emergency responders. Two commercial airliners were hijacked, and each was flown into one of the two 110-story towers. The structural damage sustained by each tower from the impact, combined with the ensuing fires, resulted in the total collapse of each building. As the towers collapsed, massive debris clouds consisting of crushed and broken building components fell onto and blew into surrounding structures, causing extensive collateral damage and, in some cases, igniting fires and causing additional collapses.
In total, 10 major buildings experienced partial or total collapse and approximately 30 million square feet of commercial office space was removed from service, of which 12 million belonged to the WTC Complex. As each tower was struck, extensive structural damage, including localized collapse, occurred at the several floor levels directly impacted by the aircraft. Despite this massive localized damage, each structure remained standing. However, as each aircraft impacted a building, jet fuel on board ignited. Part of this fuel immediately burned off in the large fireballs that erupted at the impact floors. Remaining fuel flowed across the floors and down elevator and utility shafts, igniting intense fires throughout upper portions of the buildings. As these fires spread, they further weakened the steel-framed structures, eventually leading to total collapse. The collapse of the twin towers astonished most observers, including knowledgeable structural engineers, and, in the immediate aftermath, a wide range of explanations were offered in an attempt to help the public understand these tragic events. However, the collapse of these symbolic buildings entailed a complex series of events that were not identical for each tower. The structural damage sustained by each of the two buildings as a result of the terrorist attacks was massive. The fact that the structures were able to sustain this level of damage and remain standing for an extended period of time is remarkable and is the reason that most building occupants were able to evacuate safely. Events of this type, resulting in such substantial damage, are generally not considered in building design, and the ability of these structures to successfully withstand such damage is noteworthy.
Preliminary analyses of the damaged structures, together with the fact the structures remained standing for an extended period of time, suggest that, absent other severe loading events such as a windstorm or earthquake, the buildings could have remained standing in their damaged states until subjected to some significant additional load. However, the structures were subjected to a second, simultaneous severe loading event in the form of the fires caused by the aircraft impacts. The large quantity of jet fuel carried by each aircraft ignited upon impact into each building. A significant portion of this fuel was consumed immediately in the ensuing fireballs. The remaining fuel is believed either to have flowed down through the buildings or to have burned off within a few minutes of the aircraft impact. The heat produced by this burning jet fuel does not by itself appear to have been sufficient to initiate the structural collapses. However, as the burning jet fuel spread across several floors of the buildings, it ignited much of the buildings' contents, causing simultaneous fires across several floors of both buildings. The heat output from these fires is estimated to have been comparable to the power produced by a large commercial power generating station. Over a period of many minutes, this heat induced additional stresses into the damaged structural frames while simultaneously softening and weakening these frames. This additional loading and the resulting damage were sufficient to induce the collapse of both structures.
Credit: Steve Greenberg, Ventura County Star, Calif.; posted with artist's permission The ability of the two towers to withstand aircraft impacts without immediate collapse was a direct function of their design and construction characteristics, as was the vulnerability of the two towers to collapse a result of the combined effects of the impacts and ensuing fires. Several building design features have been identified as key to the buildings' ability to remain standing as long as they did and to allow the evacuation of most building occupants. These included the following:
Similarly, several design features have been identified that may have played a role in allowing the buildings to collapse in the manner that they did and in the inability of victims at and above the impact floors to safely exit. These features should not be regarded either as design deficiencies or as features that should be prohibited in future building codes. Rather, these are features that should be subjected to more detailed evaluation, in order to understand their contribution to the performance of these buildings and how they may perform in other buildings. These include the following:
Several other buildings, including the Marriott Hotel (WTC 3), the South Plaza building (WTC 4), the U.S. Customs building (WTC 6), and the Winter Garden, experienced severe damage as a result of the massive quantities of debris that fell on them when the two towers collapsed. The St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church just south of WTC 2 was completely destroyed by the debris that fell on it. WTC 5, WTC 7, 90 West Street, the Bankers Trust building, the Verizon building, and World Financial Center 3 were impacted by large debris from the collapsing twin towers and suffered structural damage, but arrested collapse to localized areas. The debris from the collapses of the WTC towers also initiated fires in surrounding buildings, including WTC 4, 5, 6, and 7; 90 West Street; and 130 Cedar Street. Many of the buildings suffered severe fire damage but remained standing. However, two steel-framed structures experienced fire-induced collapse. WTC 7 collapsed completely after burning unchecked for approximately 7 hours, and a partial collapse occurred in an interior section of WTC 5. Studies of WTC 7 indicate that the collapse began in the lower stories, either through failure of major load transfer members located above an electrical substation structure or in columns in the stories above the transfer structure. The collapse of WTC 7 caused damage to the Verizon building and 30 West Broadway. The partial collapse of WTC 5 was not initiated by debris and is possibly a result of fire-induced connection failures. The collapse of these structures is particularly significant in that, prior to these events, no protected steel-frame structure, the most common form of large commercial construction in the United States, had ever experienced a fire-induced collapse. |
