Building 7 and the Limits of Conspiracy

In the mid-afternoon of September 11, 2001, after the Twin Towers had already fallen, World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed at 5:20 PM. No one was inside—it had been evacuated, and no one died. But the building contained the Secret Service on the ninth floor, the SEC with open-case files on the thirteenth, Rudy Giuliani's emergency bunker on the twenty-third, and the CIA and Department of Defense sharing the twenty-fifth floor. A steel-frame building had never before collapsed solely from fire, and that fact has kept the conspiracy theories alive for more than two decades.

Why the Building Burned Unattended

The most straightforward objection to the official account is also the one with the simplest answer: why didn't the fire department put out the fires in Building 7? The water mains in the area were all under the Twin Towers, and they broke when the towers fell. The FDNY couldn't have fought those fires even if they had wanted to. But they also had a more urgent priority: a pile of rubble containing the bodies of thousands of people, including more than 340 firefighters. An empty building on fire was not going to get resources when there was a chance anyone in the debris pile was still alive.

The Controlled Demolition Problem