A University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher is working to unravel a lingering mystery of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. The collapse of Building 7, near the Twin Towers, has long been a centerpiece of theories that the 9/11 attacks were part of a government conspiracy. UAF Engineering professor J. Leroy Hulsey is taking a scientific approach to scrutinize what happened to the building.
Dr. J Leroy Hulsey is funded by the group “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” to research what brought down World Trade Center Building 7. The 47 story building collapsed 7 hours after the Twin Towers fell, over 300 feet away. Hulsey said an analysis by the National Institute of Science and Technology attributed the failure to numerous fires ignited inside the high rise by debris from the Twin Towers.
”The expansion of steel was such that it created a problem that occured on the 13th floor at column 79,” Hulsey said. “And because of that, it collapsed. So I’ve been asked by ‘Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’, who’s a group of professionals that have put together their own money to get another opinion.”
Hulsey said he was connected with the group through a friend. Hulsey, who has decades of structural engineering experience around the country, including forensic analysis of building failures, said he’s using Building 7 structural drawings to model failure scenarios.
“Get the structure put into a digital system where we can simulate its behavior,” Hulsey said. It’s very complicated.”
An alternate Building 7 collapse theory claimed it was a controlled demolition using explosives.
”People have put straight lines on the video to see if it goes straight down, and it’s almost perfectly straight down,” Hulsey said. “Yet the building is not symmetric. One might say, ‘Well. Why did that happen?’ And you can begin to see why people have all these ideas about why that building came straight down like that. And, as a matter of fact, the Twin Towers came down pretty straight too.”
Hulsey, who’s been working on the project for a year, stresses that he and 2 graduate students, are going about the analysis with open minds.
”There’s a lot of stuff that’s been written about this and I have absolutely refused to read it,” Hulsey said. “And I’m not going to read it ’til we have our results finished. And then I’ve told my students that they’re not allowed to read it either. So we do not want to have a bias. We’re going to try to do this purely scientifically.”
Hulsey said after the analysis is complete he’ll read everything he can find about Building 7 theories, and welcome feedback.
”And we’re in the process of putting together a professional team of experts to review our work,” Halsey said.
Hulsey said he intends to have some key research results available by this coming September 11th, and will give public presentations, including in Alaska.
Dan Bross is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
