CarolC:

I took a look at the website you are drawing your information from. It looks polished and intelligently set up. The main quesion to me is whether Mr. Ryan is as he presents himself and whether what he says is true is true. He is contradicting information of UL and NIST and therefore the question comes up as to who or whom to believe.

He presents himself as a 'whistleblower' and maintains that got him fired. I am unclear on that.

I don't necessarily believe that simply because an organization with a bunch of capital letters, UL or NIST, comes out with a polished representation of the truth that that IS the truth, but I admit it is commonly how most of us arrive at our opinions when 'the authorities' explain 'em to us. And I (think I) know better than to believe authorites simply because they are authorites and even when they are well intentioned.

So I appreciate your link to Mr. Ryan and it helps me understand where you are getting your doubtful inclinations from. There is no objective reason for you to believe me over Mr. Ryan. However, I think you need to find some alternate grounds to choose between Mr. Ryan and NIST.

I have had experience with honest to God protected by the courts whistle blowers (long story). Being protected by the courts, they actually maintained their positions within the companies they blew the whistle on. Other whistle blowers left their positions and satisfied themselves with working on the outside looking in and howling wildly. It's not terribly efficient, but it's the price we pay for allowing everybody to have an opinion, and occasionally positive things come out of it. In the case I'm personally familiar with there were no great revelations of turn-the-tables misconduct, what was revealed was a great deal of benign neglect. As often happens, the big upward career moves were made by the non-involved.

Getting back to WTC, the Nova show that I saw, and that is referenced in Mr. Ryan's article, was pretty convincing. The big disjunction between what it presented and what Mr. Ryan maintains is that he says there was no evidence that any of the insulation was blown off the structural metal or that any of the metal was heated beyond 500 deg F. I think there should be evidence that proves one side or the other to be wrong.

From my own unrelated observations I've seen the results of trailer fires which only serves to supplement my belief that there is a lot of combustible stuff in a metal framework which can get very hot very quickly.

Mr. Ryan's web site claims that all the metal was recycled. The Nova program showed experts going through piles of WTC wreckage to find and mark and recover for analysis structural metal from the collision area. Obviously the great majority of wreckage would not be necessary to hang onto, and I'm sure most of it was recycled or used as landfill.

There is a website with the NIST story of what happened with WTC7 but I'm sure you can easily find it if you want to.