Two engineers’ recent opposing pieces of writing, HERE and HERE, related to the skyscraper collapses at the World Trade Center 20 years go last month might open the possibility of a colloquium on the subject.

The engineers are Roland Angle, new CEO of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and Leland Teschler, an executive editor at the trade publication Design World aimed at mechanical and electrical engineers.* They would make good participants on a panel to discuss whether the Twin Towers and Building 7 came down because of jet fuel and office fires, or because of pre-planted explosives timed to collapse them into their own footprints.

As noted HERE last weekend, Teschler, wrote an article in DW regarded as a “hit piece” by some at AE911Truth. It was headlined “The WTC collapse after 20 years.” He begins by noting “introspection the [9/11] tragedy has brought about in construction engineering.”

He cites the views of Arizona State University Professor Bargin Mobasher, who uses “the World Trade Center collapse” “to illustrate principles of failure mechanics” in a senior-level course in structural design, and to “show why engineers must adopt conservative design practices.”

Teschler writes that Mobasher disparages “spurious claims from 9/11 truthers who believe conspiracy theories about demolition of the WTC buildings.”

Mobasher: “When you look at the amount of misinformation out there, engineers and people skilled in the discipline have a responsibility to argue on behalf of science. I tell my students they are obligated to speak the truth about the WTC if they find themselves in a discussion. They know the charts and graphs that explain steel’s behavior, so they have a responsibility as an engineer to not just be silent when somebody throws mud at scientific ideas.”

Not long after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the professor says, “four or five people … wanted me to comment or support their theories. In those cases I would try to find out if they understood mechanics or materials. If they really didn’t understand, I would tell them they need to communicate in mathematical terms in ways people understand. There is nothing emotional about it. It is all about how the numbers work out.”

Mobasher continues: “There is a lot of data cherry picking. Science doesn’t work that way. The idea that demolition was involved is total nonsense. The studies of WTC5 give a clear explanation of why that building collapsed.”

(Building 5 is usually not mentioned by critics of the U.S. government’s Executive Branch accounts of the building collapses at the World Trade Center, who focus on the collapses of the Twin Towers and Building 7. Building 5, according to Wikipedia, “was heavily damaged as a result of the collapse of the North Tower during the September 11 attacks and was later demolished.”)

Writing in Design World, Teschler notes that the architects and engineers who signed the AE911Truth petition because they “feel” pre-planted explosives could have brought about the collapses of WTC Buildings 1, 2 and 7 constitute a tiny percentage of those in the United States, and that the civil engineers who signed (like Angle) were only a fraction of the total number of engineers signing.

When Teschler was an undergraduate (at the University of Michigan), he recalls, one could get a bachelor’s degree in engineering “with an exposure to static analysis that was limited to freshman and sophomore physics.” Some of the signers, he concludes, might learn “from auditing a structural steel design course of the type taught by Prof. Mobasher.”

In a colloquium on the destruction of WTC Buildings 1, 2 and 7,  Professor Mobasher, or someone he recommends, could explain why the idea that controlled demolition brought down Buildings 1, 2 and 7 is unscientific and nonsensical.

And Angle, or someone he recommends, possibly J. Leroy Hulsey,** professor emeritus of structural engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, could defend the hypothesis that planned controlled demolition brought them down on Sept. 11, 2001.

— Mark Channing Miller

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* Design World is a network of websites, online services and print publications aimed at mechanical and electrical engineers, with a monthly print circulation of more than 40,000 copies and online versions that reach an additional 100,000 readers.

** Hulsey is featured in the film “SEVEN,” about the four-year study he and two graduate students at the UAF conducted on the Building 7 collapse on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. A five-minute summary of “SEVEN” appeared on a number of PBS stations. An abstract of the final report, linked to the report itself, is available HERE.