On March 6, from noon to 2 p.m., the U. S. House of Representatives Committee on Science will hold a hearing investigation on the topic “Learning from 9/11: Understanding the Collapse of the World Trade Center,” at the Rayburn House Office Building.
The following witnesses will address the committee:
- Robert Shea, acting administrator, Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, and Craig Wingo, director, Division of Engineering Science and Technology, Federal Emergency Management Administration.
- Dr. W. Gene Corley, P.E., S.E., American Society of Civil Engineers, chair of the Building Performance Assessment Team reviewing the World Trade Center (WTC) disaster.
- Professor Glenn Corbett, assistant professor of fire science at John Jay College, New York City.
- Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.
- Dr. Arden Bemet, director, National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The witnesses will testify on the catastrophic collapse of the WTC complex and subsequent efforts by federal agencies and independent researchers to understand how the building structures failed and why. The Committee will explore several questions that have arisen concerning the WTC collapses and the ensuing investigation; among the questions will be the following:
- What has been learned about how the federal government investigates catastrophic building collapses? Are any changes warranted?
- What has been learned about the collapse of the WTC, including which structural elements failed first, and why?
- How will we know what changes, if any, are warranted in building and fire codes as a result of the lessons learned from the WTC collapse?
- Has the WTC disaster exposed any gaps in our understanding of buildings and fire? Are changes needed in the federal government’s research agenda?
The Committee’s hearing investigation will seek to sort out several issues, among them the following:
- Because the WTC disaster was unique in its magnitude and complexity, even though those investigating the WTC collapses were architects and engineers with experience in other structural collapses, including those involving natural causes and terrorist attacks, they had not been prepared for a disaster of the scope of the WTC.
- The efforts of the building performance investigators may have been frustrated by the concurrent Federal Bureau of Investigation criminal and the National Transportation Safety Board investigations.
In addition, the Committee will seek to determine whether any of the following conditions and circumstances may have hampered the investigation:
- There was no clear authority or effective protocol for how the building performance investigators should conduct and coordinate their investigation with the concurrent search and rescue efforts and ongoing criminal investigation. There was confusion over who was in charge of the site early in the incident. Investigators did not have the authority to impound pieces of steel for examination before they were recycled; consequently, important pieces of evidence were destroyed early during the search and rescue effort. In addition, a delay in the deployment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) may have also interfered with access to valuable data and artifacts.
- Independent researchers had difficulty obtaining documents (blueprints, design drawings, and maintenance records) essential to the investigation from the building owners, designers, and insurers. This situation also delayed the BPAT team from gaining access to pertinent building documents, primarily because of liability concerns. Such documents are necessary for validating physical and photographic evidence and developing computer models that can explain why the buildings failed and how similar failures might be avoided in the future.
- The confidential nature of the BPAT study may have prevented the timely discovery of potential gaps in the investigation. Such gaps may never be closed if important, but ephemeral evidence, such as memories or home videotapes, is lost. Independent researchers could not determine if their work was complementary to, or duplicative of, that of the BPAT team. The agreement also prevented the sharing of research results and the ordinary scientific give-and-take that facilitates scientists and engineers in their tasks of winnowing ideas and strengthening results.
- The BPAT team does not plan to, nor does it have sufficient funding to, fully analyze the structural data it collected to determine the reasons for the WTC collapses. (Its report is expected to rely largely on audio and videotapes of the events.) Nor does it plan to examine other important issues, such as building evacuation mechanisms. Instead, FEMA has asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to take over the investigation. Yet so far, NIST has not released a detailed plan describing how it will take over the investigation, what types of analyses it will conduct, how it will attempt to apply the lessons it learns to try to improve building and fire codes, and how much funding it will require.
