All Episodes
Previous Next
June 28, 2021 - Jim Fetzer
50:25
SPECIAL REPORT: What Caused the Condo Collapse? The Real Deal (27 June 2021) with Joe Olson, P.E.
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is Jim Fetzer in Madison, Wisconsin.
I'm your host today on The Real Deal, a special report with an engineer who's qualified in structural engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, Joe Olson, who's in Houston.
And we're going to talk about what happened in Florida.
Joe, just give a thumbnail sketch.
What is the deal here in terms of the big picture?
Well, you have one of two scenarios.
Either you have a house of cards built on a series of defective decisions on the part of the engineering and code writing boards, or you have a criminal act.
And so without having a motive, it's hard to assign criminal.
But regardless, we have a crime scene that involves gross negligence or homicide, and it needs to be treated as a crime scene.
And we need to make sure that we get preservation of all the forensic data that indicates what really caused this failure.
And we're going to go through a pretty Pretty good description of what needs to be found in the way of discovery on this.
And we'll start with a little bit of history of how this type of construction evolved.
I'm going to show the video of the collapse and then we'll talk.
Yeah.
Yes, sir.
Here we go, some video.
You see the center part going down.
Surveillance video shows the moment a 136-unit condo partially collapsed near Miami.
Here you have the rest of the building going down.
Authorities said they responded to the call around 1.30 a.m.
local time with a large-scale rescue operation, and we can see them working on it, Joe.
Officers said more than 30 occupants were rescued after the collapse, but Joe, I'm fairly dumbfounded that we don't have hundreds and hundreds of dead.
Here at the time, there was only one person dead, others injured, but look at the enormity of this collapse.
And here you see a pretty good sign.
Miami Dade Commissioner Sally Heyman said at least 99 persons were still unaccounted for.
But that may or may not mean that they were actually in place.
Governor DeSantos.
...a massive structure like that.
Right now, we have the fire rescue.
They are in search and rescue mode.
So he's talking about being in search and rescue mode.
He's saying we need a definitive explanation in a timely manner as to why the 12-story condo building, partially, not entirely, two-thirds of it, about it, look like collapsed and surfside.
Which is a small suburb north of Miami Beach.
The mayor, who is a Democrat, while the governor is a Republican, both agreed there needs to be a definitive explanation.
There are a lot of people throughout this community in Florida who want to know, well, how can a building just collapse like that?
The governor said.
A unique type of tragedy.
Here you have the governor with the mayor together.
In the upper photograph, on the lower of the building's 136 units, about 80 were occupied, according to reports.
The Champlain Tower itself was built in 1981, was in the process of being recertified as part of Florida's 40-year recertification program.
It was undergoing roof construction and other repairs prior to the collapse.
It's hard to imagine, said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett, that roof work gets done all the time, and it's hard to imagine that could have been the impetus.
I'm sure it probably wasn't, but of course this guy is not an engineer.
He also added this again, being the mayor of Surfside, there's no reason for this building to go down like that unless someone literally pulls out the supports from underneath or they get washed out or there's a sinkhole or something like that because it just went down.
And of course, Joe, when they're talking about pulling out all those supports, I mean, that's basically describing a controlled demolition such as we saw with Building 7 on 9-11.
Yeah, and I've written two excellent papers on 9-11 that are posted at Veterans Today, and I would recommend everybody read those before you make any criticism of me or my engineering talents.
This is unequivocal 9-1-1 nukes.
Which was followed by a reader saying, you need to check out Heinz Palmer work, and this was also published at Veterans Today, Breathtaking Solving Nuclear 9-1-1, which brought up a bunch of interesting factors, but they failed to mention the number of available isotopes that worked as a gamma sink.
So I wrote, Exposing NIST 9-1-1 Jenga game.
Those are all three available at Veterans today, and we can put them in the show notes.
Those are excellent references, but of course you're talking about the Twin Towers.
I was referring to Building 7, because the Twin Towers did not come down by a controlled demolition, but Building 7 does appear to.
Where all the floors came down at the same time, about the speed of free fall, very analogous to what we saw at the condo.
That was the comparison I was drawing, rather than with the far more complicated and sophisticated destruction of the North and the South Tower.
Please, please do continue, my friend.
Okay, but we're definitely talking about a controlled demolition to the extent that there's no resistance to the vertical force of gravity in all four of these failures.
So we'll just start with that, that the condo was... Well, Joe, I just say, you know, with the North and the South Tower, they're being blown apart in every direction from the top down and converted into millions of cubic yards of very fine dust.
So that with the North and the South Tower, when it's all done, there's no stack of debris, none.
Whereas with Building 7, we have the classic 12% of the 47 floors, five and a half floors, and it looks as though with this 12, I mean, 12% of 12 is going to be about two floors of rubble.
That looks very comparable, but that's what we get from a collapse, whether it was controlled or not.
Well, there was a parking garage underneath this condo building, which could have absorbed some of the debris falls.
So let's make sure that we include that into the calculus.
Let's start with a little bit of history on The type of construction that is most probable on this building.
And there again, I'm going off of the sketchy grainy photographs that I've seen of the site and my general knowledge of how these systems developed over time.
So we'll start with the history of prestressed concrete.
I have some images that show the building very much better, perhaps, where scientists allegedly discovered a year ago that the Miami condo was sinking and needed extensive repairs for rusted steel and damaged concrete.
This is pretty fascinating.
Built in 1981, as we've observed, the building cited 877 Seven.
Collins Avenue.
I'm sure glad it wasn't 666, Joe.
Florida International University professor Shimon Widowski said he knew instantly which building had collapsed when he heard the report because he had studied the building report published before.
Now I just bring this in, Joe, because here you can see the balconies and the role of that, you know, poured concrete is getting more and more obvious.
The Seaview Condo was southeast corner of Surfside.
It had A few two-bedroom units currently on the market for $600,000 to $700,000, where the area is a mix of new and old of apartments, houses, condominiums, and hotels.
And here, Joe, I think this is perfect for your purpose.
We see the collapsed section, and we get a pretty good idea of the kind of slab, you know, design.
Do you want to pick up from there, my friend?
Well, first of all, I want to discount the fact that two millimeters of settlement per year is a major structural issue, number one.
Number two, if you go to Wiki, and look up wiki on the Champaign Towers, it says that the elevation measurements were based on the European remote sensing satellites, and as you and I both know, if you also go to wiki earth underline tide, you can see that the crust of the earth lifts 18 inches and drops 18 inches every day, and to think that over the course of several years you wouldn't have a two millimeter
differential in the orbit of a satellite and that that projection is allowed to stand as being a fact in this case is absurd.
We need to completely eliminate that as a vector for failure in this building completely.
So the next item is there's a defect involved in the type in this type of construction and here's the history of it.
After World War II, we had leveled every city over 50,000 people in most of Europe, between
us and the Nazis and the Russians.
And so they had an enormous need to have low-rise construction that could be easily implemented
and could take the enormous load that they had in the way of housing and light manufacturing.
So the Europeans developed a system called lift slab construction.
And the reason they did that is because you have to pour a slab continuous In order to avoid having a cold joint, which is going to be a failure point.
So when they built Hoover Dam, if workmen fell into the dam, they didn't stop to dig the guy's body out.
They just kept pouring 24-7 so that they had a continuous pour of concrete so that they didn't have a cold joint that would end up being a failure plane.
Same thing with flat slabs.
Well, at the end of World War II, we didn't have pumped concrete trucks, so the way you could do multi-story concrete construction was to use one-yard buckets called trimmies that were lifted up by cranes and filled by either on-site batch plants or later in rotating mixed trucks.
And that's how you got concrete up to the upper floors, but it was a real tedious process.
And then there again, you had the problem of not getting enough material
up to the upper floors to avoid having a cold joint.
So the Europeans developed a lift slab technique where you could pour all of your slabs on the floor.
You erect the columns and block outs inside those slabs.
And then you jack the slabs up.
We've got slides that show this type of construction.
And the problem that they were having is depending on the length of spans between the columns,
the slabs were either eight to 12 inches thick, which is a pretty thick concrete slab, number one.
Number two, it was heavy.
And number three, when they started to jack them, sometimes they had failures.
The Europeans developed a system of anchoring and tensioning where they put cables inside the slabs and that way they could put tension on them and the tension would hold the slabs together as you and Herman and I discussed on Thursday and I recommend that viewers review that material also.
Concrete has a tremendous amount of strength and compression and almost no strength and tension.
So when you have a concrete beam or a concrete floor slab that's working as a beam, the top of the beam is loaded.
That causes the top of the beam to be compressed and the bottom of the beam wants to bend.
So that puts it under tension and that's where the failure is.
By putting a high tension steel, you can pull those two ends of that beam together,
and that will avoid having the tension failure.
Seven, they develop post-tension in the early.
Your image got flipped, Joe.
We had a brief break there in connection.
Okay, well, I didn't have anything to do with it.
Can you rotate it?
Go back to verticals?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there you are.
Okay, so bottom line is, yes, Just to make sure, when you talked about the cold joint and all that, you meant if you stop pouring, it would tend to harden, and then if you poured on top of it, it would already start to harden.
That's when you'd have a break point.
Yeah, the concrete will form a membrane.
Right, right, right.
And you're talking about inserting steel rods to create an opportunity for tension to keep the slabs in place, right?
Correct.
And so basically what they did is they figured out if you put a cable that was under tension, you could eliminate at that point 50% of the steel and you could make the concrete thinner.
You could have concrete sections that were six to eight inches thick with tension in them instead of having static steel and that would give you the same net floor strength.
and that way you could continue using the jacked floored system. Well the first failure of a lift
slab was in 1954 and we can bring that up. Well we can't bring it up directly Joe but we can get there.
Let me just point out, Joe's talking about this being lift slab construction here.
The towers had recently undergone construction work on the roof, sparking fears it might have piled additional weight onto the allegedly sinking structure.
But the point you're making earlier, Joe, is that the 2020 study from Florida International found that they were sinking at the rate of two millimeters a year In the 1990s, because it sits on reclaimed wetland.
But you're suggesting, contending, that that two millimeters really isn't significant, ought not to be considered to be part of the problem.
Here you see some of the rescue workers at work.
We do have a possible motive here in an email alleged to have come from John McAfee, who did this brilliant work exposing all kinds of governmental corruption.
Claiming he had 31 terabytes of files at this location.
But frankly, Joe, I think it would be absurd for him to be announcing where he had, you know, located his files.
So I tend to discount that.
Meanwhile, we have the death toll rising to nine, which to me is still a ridiculously small number.
Uh, officials released estimates emails from 2018, including a warning from an engineer about major or structural damage and that the tower needed 9 million in repairs.
So, so far, according to the date, Miami-Dade County Mayor, Daniela Levinkava.
Nine have died, while 150 remain missing.
Now a nine-page report from a structural engineering firm, Morabito Consultants of October 2018, was released by the city of Surfside.
Reporting the following.
Abundant cracking and spalling of varying degrees was observed in the concrete columns, beams, and walls.
Several sizable spalls were noted in both the top side of the entrance drive rate and underside of the pool entrance drive planter slabs, including instances with exposed deteriorating rebar.
Though some of the damage is minor, most of the concrete deterioration needs to be repaired in a timely fashion.
All cracking and spalling located in the parking garage shall be repaired in accordance with the recommendations of the International Concrete Repair Institute.
Now, Joe, my understanding is repairing concrete ain't easy, and it seldom results in a structure as strong as the original.
They're talking about having hope for recover.
Here's an aerial view.
Gives us a pretty good idea I don't think people need to live with the possibility or thought that their building may collapse.
I think this has caused fear throughout southern Florida, Joe.
This is very, very serious.
According to the Mar-a-Bando consultant report, the release of the 2018 cost estimate showed that on the ground floor pool deck was resting on a concrete slab that had major structural damage needed to be extensively repaired.
And then, of course, as we've already mentioned, abundant cracking and spalling of concrete columns, beams, and walls.
Now, we have a piece to which I take it you want to return, not begin here, with post-tension concrete, Joe?
Or do you want to pick up here?
Let's get back to post-tension, because I think that's going to end up being the failure mode for this building.
If it was accidental, and if it was a deliberate homicide, post-tension would be a very easy structure to sabotage.
So we'll get to those facts as well.
You want me to move forward?
Here we go, the Bridgeport Collapse in 1954, is that where you'd like to pick up?
Uh, yes.
This was the roof, a 250-foot slab roof collapsed in a Catholic high school in San Mateo, California in 1954.
Eight workers and spectators were injured.
Joe, it's a miracle people weren't killed there, too.
Go for it.
Right, okay, so we had a warning that we were doing experimental engineering with an unknown high failure rate in 1954, but then there's another article, Tragedy Sparks a Decline of Lift Slabs, and this was an accident that occurred on April 23, 1987, and that was at the Le Ambiance Plaza, a 16-story lift slab building that collapsed and killed 28 workers.
So here we are, 33 years after the first failure of lift slab in the United States, and we're still doing lift slab construction.
You know, apparently with even greater Failure rates and failure costs.
So I have a real issue with the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Concrete Institute, and the American Steel Institute for allowing these type of, and also the ASTM, NIST, all of the groups that are supposed to be in charge of monitoring experimental engineering have failed us.
And I think that's what's going to end up being shown as the root cause of this problem at Champlain.
Yeah, let me just read what it says here.
The lift slab method of construction involves casting post-tension floor slabs on the ground and then lifting them into place.
Successive levels are then cast on top of the previous slab and raised to their respective positions with hydraulic jacks.
A parting compound between the slabs prevents bonding.
Narrow openings around the columns allow steel collars to be embedded, which are then used for lifting the slab.
The technique is ideal in buildings with conventional and repetitive floor plates, or so they allege.
Your thoughts?
Yeah, well, that's what they allege.
Yeah, it was an awkward system to ever have been approved, and it has been abandoned, and I think that the same is going to happen for all post-tension slabs.
And this was rampant starting in about the 80s.
Now, I took reinforced concrete design And I have my 1973 addition to a textbook by Wang and Solomon, both from the University of Wisconsin, 900 pages thick.
And the prerequisites for reinforced engineering, it's a senior level civil engineering class, and we had to have four semesters of chemistry, two semesters of physics, four semesters of calculus, statics, dynamics, strength of materials, soils mechanics, all before we could qualify to take this particular class.
So it's not like it's a trivial subject and to have armchair reporters opinion on these things is absolutely absurd.
They need to get some people that are not subject to groupthink and not motivated to scapegoat the wrong Aspects of failure in this building because this is tragic in this individual incident but it's also going to be tragic to all of the real estate that was built all along the coast of the United States that had this similar construction.
A friend of mine has a condo high-rise condo that he bought in Gulf Shores two years ago and it's a post lab building it was built in 1991.
Now, what the life of that building is, as Carl and I mentioned, and you mentioned on Thursday, my estimate is less than 40 years, and now we've got one that failed at 40 years, so now we can say we have empirical evidence that post-tension concrete buildings, if they are improperly designed, cannot last more than 40 years, and even if they're properly designed, they have to be properly monitored.
There's a huge amount of this construction in South Florida.
There's a huge amount of this post lab construction in South Florida.
So I think realtors are going to be going out of their minds.
Owners and occupants at condos are going to be terrified.
I think they may want to suppress the seriousness of the situation to prevent panic by the public.
But, but Joe, I mean, the threat is real.
Exactly, and that's why we need to get this information out and be part of this debate immediately so that they're not able to hijack it and a year from now we end up with some whitewash.
Let's quickly turn to the Grenfell Towers in London.
That was a 24-story high-rise condominium that had flammable wall materials, had wood construction partitions and all kinds of flameload inside the building, but it was a reinforced concrete structure and it burned for 24 hours.
And a year later, they were still wondering how they were going to demolish the concrete
structure because it was still standing on the London skyline.
So there's nothing wrong with reinforced concrete if it's done in a proper design.
And that's the thing.
There's plenty of options.
There's poured joist pan construction.
There's concrete reinforced with beam and column construction.
There's a pre-stressed concrete tees and and a pre-stressed concrete proprietary company called Flexcore
that make fuller panels.
So just because it's a reinforced concrete structure doesn't mean that it has this
inherent defect. The inherent defect comes from the post-tensioning because you have
possible corrosion at your anchors on the ends of the thing and then you have a sloped
elliptical curve cable inside a very thin plastic conduit which can have moisture build up and if
it's in a Gulf Coast area that'll be corrosive salt infested moisture build up that will eat
those cables and once the cables fail you have no tension holding the end.
Ends of the building together, and then you'll have a cataclysmic failure.
If all of the tendons fail, or all of them are compromised to a 50% strength level, and you have one failure, then you get very seriously have a sudden spontaneous progressive collapse, just exactly like we saw in this building.
So I don't have proof.
What we need to do is we need to demand that the Florida Board of Investigation Post the structural plans for this building online so that we can do a crowdsource engineering with all of the best minds in the United States making input on this so we can find out what the available defects are and when we'll get back to the photos I'll explain what I think the defects are from the photos that are available.
Well Joe, In my opinion, you've already done 90-95% of the analysis right here.
In other words, as a professional engineer and expert in multiple fields of engineering, you have, in my opinion, made a very astute diagnosis.
Now, the reason why they cannot cover it up, Joe, is that if they sought to cover it up now, other buildings with similar construction, which are abundant in South Florida, are going to collapse too.
And all hell is going to break loose when that happens, Joe.
All hell is gonna break loose.
Absolutely.
They'll revoke all of the insurance and then all of those people and here's the here's this is a cascading domino problem from a bunch of different standpoints.
What happens when all of those buildings are condemned and you take them off the tax rolls is being a liability instead of a tax asset and nobody's paying property taxes on those.
So you know you have enormous and then you have all this building material that has to be removed and then in order to restore housing it all has to be recreated.
So you're looking at enormous upheaval.
We need to identify if post-tension concrete was the underlying cause of the problem and if it was augmented by homicidal acts.
and we'll get into that in just a second. But bottom line is engineers
try to avoid extrapolation.
When you interpolate, you have two known data points and you're trying to find an answer in between them, and engineers are very comfortable with that.
When you're extrapolating, you have two known data points and you're trying to find an answer outside of those data points, which is really speculation.
And engineers do not like to speculate because there's just too many error modes
and too wide a margin of error.
So I don't like to speculate.
In this case, I have to.
Yes.
Let me go back to our opening exchange because you began, I think, mistaking my reference
to Building 7 for a reference to the North and the South Towers.
And while your research and mine and that of many others converges that the Twin Towers were taken down
by means of a sophisticated nuclear event, which was confirmed by the USGO.
Geological Survey by dust studies at 35 locations where they discovered elements barium, strontium, lithium, lanthanum, tritium, some of which only exist in radioactive form that would not have been present had this not been a nuclear event.
No.
Right, right.
No.
I'm going to go to the next one.
I want to address and eliminate three false hypotheses on the Champlain Tower.
One of them is the two millimeter per year subsidence.
That's absurd.
The next one is that there was a blast, which some have claimed was a nuclear blast, next to an aircraft carrier that was 100 miles offshore three or four days before the event.
People are saying, well, it caused an earthquake and that's what caused the building to fall down.
No, I'm sorry, that didn't happen.
And then our good friend, Gordon Duff at Veterans Today, has provided significant evidence that there were other nuclear events, including the possible Lebanon bombing of the Marine headquarters under Reagan, was possibly a nuclear event because of the crater size, that cobalt towers- Talking about small tactical nuclear weapons, which were also used in Iraq, by the way.
Christopher Busby- Oh, yeah.
International expert, I interviewed him about his travels to Fallujah, where he believed going in that it would be from depleted uranium used in anti-tank missiles, but discovered it was from enriched uranium from a new source of tactical nuclear weapons the United States was using in Iraq that was calling all these genetic abnormalities, two heads, no brains, no arms, all this sort of thing, just really awful, awful stuff.
On a stunningly large scale.
So here you have the United States perpetrating war crimes on the international arena.
If it was the case in Lebanon that they had a small tactical nuke, my impression was it was just a massive amount of conventional explosive, but I could be mistaken.
They most certainly were using tactical nukes in Iran.
I think Christopher Busby's research on this is conclusive.
So you're talking about among the alternatives here, the two millimeter thing is obviously, that's normal wear and tear, we could refer to it.
You're talking about the variations in the surface of the Earth.
And then beyond that, you're talking about there having been an alleged nuclear explosion somewhere in the vicinity six months earlier, and that cannot be responsible.
And then go to number three, Joe.
Okay, and then Veterans Today also claims that the recent explosion of the fertilizer storage facility in Lebanon was also a nuclear event, and I don't argue with Veterans Today on some of these things that they claim are nuclear, so I don't want to get into that, but Gordon Duff sent me a thing about a Fire extinguisher-sized nuclear weapon that he thought could have been placed in the Champlain Towers, and I just want to discount, not only is that improbable, it's also excessive, and it would be subject to other methods of discovery, because you're going to have isotopes anytime you use any type of nuclear device, and those would be in a highly visible area.
So, that's not only not necessary, it would be extremely stupid on the part of whoever did this if it was an intentional act.
Now, getting back to the intentional act, in a post-tension concrete slab, as mentioned, you have a stranded cable, which is a high-tension steel.
You put that tension steel under tension, and you put anchors on both ends of it, and the ends are typically on the exterior of the building.
Now, you would have those longitudinally and laterally going across the building, What appears to me is that the construction of this building used a conventional probably 12 by 12 mesh rebar across the balcony which is cantilevered off of the face of the building and then inside four feet into the floor slab and this was centered on outside concrete load-bearing shear walls.
So that would I would seem to think would make it impossible to run lateral cables in those areas, and they don't seem to show up on the photos, which is why we need to have the State Board of Engineering in Florida post the approved structural plans for this building online so we can review it.
But what it appears to me from the photos is that the horizontal lateral cables We're eliminated in the locations where they had balconies for some oddball reason.
And the only ones that are visible appear to be about three foot on the center running inside the slab.
There's no of the exposed slab sections.
There's no other additional rebar that's visible.
There's conduits.
Let me replay it, and we can talk some more about it.
So you see the center section going down, and then you have the remaining on the right as we look toward.
And there are some flashing lights, Joe, and that leads some persons to speculate that we could be talking about a controlled demolition.
But your point is that those appear to you to be from fuse boxes that are blowing up.
Well, anytime you yank a live power cable out of a box, whether it's the main distribution panel or the individual panels inside the tenant units, you're going to have arcing.
So that is item number one.
Item number two is that The NFPA requires you to have strobes and audible alarms on every floor for fire exit and hazard purposes.
And the strobes are there for people who are hearing impaired.
So you would have those all up and down the corridor.
And when the building started to have a failure, it would set off the alarm system.
So you would have those strobes going off as the floors were collapsing.
So sure, you're going to have some arcs of light that you see, but that doesn't indicate that you had explosions in those locations.
And there again, if you've got a fully occupied building, it would be hard to to do multiple detonation locations throughout the building.
It would take a long time and it would be, you know, hard to coordinate those in a single event at 1 30 in the morning.
So here's the hypothesis that I'm working on that would be possible.
And that is you can go in with ground penetrating radar equipment, which is constantly used nowadays to locate where grade beams are and where conduits run inside slabs.
It's a very common technology.
You could go into that building.
Verify where the location of those cables were, drill down to them with a low-speed diamond core bit, and then you could plant thermite around that cable, and when you set off the thermite, it would burn through the steel, because thermite burns at 4000 degrees, and steel melts at 2750.
So, if you simultaneously pop all of the Bungee cords that are holding both ends of the building together, and the bungee cords that are holding both sides of the building together, if you simultaneously cut those just on two units on one floor, you could cause this type of sudden collapse.
And if you really wanted to stack the deck and make sure that you had a complete failure, you could also, while you're inside two of these units tampering with them, You could also drill into the vertical columns and set some thermite in there.
Concrete vaporizes at about 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
There again, thermite burns at 4,000.
So here we have a case where I discount the role of thermite in the World Trade Center building as proposed by architects and engineers for 9-1-1 Truth.
And I know those guys well.
I've had dinner with Richard Gage twice.
I've been to four of his meetings with him in person.
So it's not like I have an axe to grind with them for anything other than misrepresenting the role that thermite had in that building.
But this is a case where a very minimal amount of thermite, if you were a person of nefarious motives, could bring a building down.
And there again, without having a motive, I don't want to say that this is a homicidal act.
But if you do find a motive or a string of motives for the reason of bringing down this building, then certainly we need to make sure that all of the evidence is discovered and preserved in the process of looking for bodies.
And when you've got 125 pound per cubic foot concrete and you've got a slab that's like 8 or 10 inches thick.
That's 100 pounds per square foot of concrete and you've got 12 floors and a roof and they're crushing down on you.
What's going to be left in the way of human remains as you go down through these layers of debris is going to be thinner and thinner samples of nothing but DNA Onion skins.
You're not going to find anything.
So you think there could be 150 bodies still that have not been recovered and where the remains are going to be very slender indeed?
The remains are going to be, you know, paper thin.
They'll be squished between layers of flat slab concrete.
Let me elaborate the points you're making about thermite, or nanothermite for that matter, which architects and engineers have promoted.
T. Mark Hightower, who is a chemical engineer, and I published three articles in 2011 about nanothermite.
And why it could not have been responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers, where, through an examination of the scientific literature, we established the laws of material science that require, in order to destroy a material, an explosive must have a detonation velocity equal to or greater than the speed of sound in that material.
Where the speed of sound in concrete is 2100 meters per second in steel, 6200 meters per second, but the highest detonation velocity attributed to nanothermite is only 895.
Meaning you can't get there from there, Joe.
So your reservation's about thermite, nanothermite.
Yes, it does burn spectacularly hot.
It's used to weld railroad ties together, for example, and disable artillery.
Drop a thermite grenade down the barrel of a howitzer and it'll fuse the firing mechanism.
But it appears not to have been possibly responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers, though the argument is made it could have been supplemented with something that was powerful enough to do it, to which I reply, yes, but that's also true of toothpaste, which is also non-explosive, but could be combined with something that were explosive, meaning nanothermite can't cut it.
To put a bit of a pun on it, it doesn't explain it.
It was, I think, used in part of the cleanup on 9-11, Joe, so we have at least one very conspicuous beam with a cut in it that appears to have been from the cleanup using thermite.
Now, would it also be the case, Joe, that a laser mounted on a satellite could have been used if theoretically there were an effort to deliberately bring down this building knowing its design and that it was a weak structure?
I would seriously discount that.
The thing is with thermite, if you burn a hole in a couple of vertical columns and at the simultaneously you cut through all of the tendons laterally and longitudinally that hold the building together on one floor just in two units that are on opposite sides of the corridor, you would substantially weaken a building that, number one, was underdesigned because they didn't have any way of actually understanding post-tension slabs or calculating them in at
the time this thing was designed when it was started in construction in 81. So that's item number
one. Item number two, after we did our little interview with Carl on Thursday, I got comment
and thank God for comment sections.
I got a comment where it was posted at BitChute and the guy said there's a company called
Pure Technologies in Calgary that does ultrasonic testing of post-tension slabs and
they also do corrosion analysis with ultrasonic on the anchor ends.
So I looked them up and there's also another company called Vector Corrosion and you can go to either of their two sites.
They have advertisements for their non-destructive concrete testing of post-tension corrosion and stress weakening of the cables.
So there's those companies that would be perfect to do a diagnosis of this case.
Correct, and they've been around since 1995, and you wouldn't have a business for 25 years if you didn't have a market, and you wouldn't have a market if you didn't have a defect that they could discover and help you correct.
The problem with these type buildings is that you're not going to be able to go in there and cut the ends of the cable and stick in a new cable and put the cable under tension.
you have to remove the exterior of both sides of the building, which would actually end up being all
for the sides of the building to access those anchor points.
So this is gonna be almost impossible to retrofit those buildings.
I could think of ways that it might be done and possibly some other brilliant engineers will come up
with some ways of retrofitting them.
But regardless, we have a tremendous life safety liability issue in this type of construction.
And I'm certain that this construction contributed to this spontaneous progressive collapse, number one.
Number two was most likely inherently the cause of it, and if not as easily Subject to malicious actions.
This type construction is just controlled demolition waiting to happen.
So it doesn't matter whether you and I discuss this and make it public knowledge today.
The people that are nefarious that do these kind of things or have been well aware of this type of construction and this type of latent defect For far longer than you and I have been publicly discussing it.
So we need to get this out in the open so that we can have full disclosure on all of the defects that are involved in this type of construction.
And then we need to identify what those were as far as contributing factors to this particular failure.
Now getting back to the Marani report and I downloaded it.
It's nine pages.
I read it.
I looked at the silly photos.
Oh, there's concrete falling on the side of one of the columns.
Well, guess what?
That column is still there today.
The swimming pool was still full of water when the building had completely collapsed.
They drained the pool, but it was still holding water at the time of the collapse.
To think that Corrosion caused by the swimming pool managed to creep all the way over to the underside of the parking garage and caused 12 stories to fall down into the parking garage and leave the swimming pool intact is just beyond absurd and the reason why this guy is not answering any questions is because his report identifies seals around the sliding doors and the windows as being major problems and people coming in and putting tile on their patio decks
Which raised the elevation so that the patio didn't drain away to the seaside that it actually ponded a little bit of water along the wall.
If that's his claim for structural failure for this building, that's absolutely absurd.
I saw nothing in his report that identified post-tension concrete failures and nothing in this report that identified that as even being a possibility.
So the reason this guy's hiding is because he knows this report was completely superficial and any reporter that's relying on that and saying oh major defects found three years ago is lying to you.
So we we need to completely discount that too.
Correct.
Go ahead.
Joe, you're doing a brilliant job of critiquing what happened here.
My opinion?
This event signs the death knell from lift slab construction in the United States.
It's going to set off a panic in southern Florida because it's ubiquitous there.
You have a lot of retired, very wealthy people who are going to be very unhappy.
about the prospect that their building could collapse because it was designed in a similar fashion.
And if they don't face up to it, other buildings are gonna collapse.
And as I've said before, there will be hell to pay.
Joe, your final reflections?
Yeah, getting back to the John McCaffey aspect of this, I went online to find out if that was true.
And the first thing that pops up when you go to goo-goyle search is Snopes.
Fact check!
John McAfee files Miami building.
Well, they've proven that that was false, so if you want to have suspicion that it's true, go to Snopes.
If they say it's false, then there you have some Reasons to think that it's probably true.
Snopes is a disinformation site.
We all know it.
I know it.
You're being humorous about it.
I know.
The fact that they could come out with that statement within hours of the collapse of the building Yeah.
Indicates that they didn't do any thorough amount of research on it, number one.
Number two, as you mentioned, it would be absurd for him to publicly state where he'd hid his materials.
So let's discount the fact that it was McAfee-related destruction, but that doesn't mean there weren't other people inside that building that they would take out.
And if they'll kill 3,000 people intentionally on 9-1-1, they don't mind killing 159 people Let me just ask, what would be your relative weight of this having been inevitable because of structural failure at 1.30 in the morning versus having been deliberately precipitated?
Do you have an assessment of the relative probabilities?
Without a motive, I'd say that it's a 99 or a 90% chance that it's just was a house of cards poorly designed waiting to fall.
If you if you can throw in a motive that here are the people or the evidence that was wanted to be destroyed.
Then I would go back and say, well, then let's seriously look at the forensics of the material as it's being removed layer by layer and see if we can find evidence of coring around the locations where they might have possibly planted thermite for melted cable ends in the middle of a cable span.
If you have just a normal tension failure, it will not present as the same as having a thermite cut charge.
So it's going to be very careful analysis of those data points that allow us to make a decision one way or the other.
It's either gross negligence and a horrible accident that's repeatable in a number of locations if it's not corrected, or it's an intentional act which indicates a vulnerability in this type of construction that will be an equally damaging prospect moving forward.
So bottom line is that's where we need to go with this.
Joe, that was a brilliant critique, the sort of analysis I've come to expect from you.
You did a masterful job.
For those who want to know the show to which Joe was referring, he and Carl Herman last Thursday, we did a program on Need to Know.
It's accessible on my BitChute site, BitChute channel, Jim Fetzer, And on Telegram, Jim Fetzer News, and on Telegram under Need to Know.
You can look at that for a preliminary, but Joe has had more time and opportunity to be more thorough here and now during this presentation.
I want to thank Joe for joining me today on The Real Deal, and all of you for being here.
We shall continue to bring updates as this development, in my opinion, This is a catastrophe where they cannot cover up.
And the pressure to expose the truth, one way or another, is going to be immense.
This is one of the rare cases where circumstances, I believe, make it impossible to conceal what actually happened here.
▲
Export Selection