Morgan Reynolds: Kevin Ryan on WTC Collapse --Fire NOT!

For those who may be confused about how the WTC Towers collapsed and would like to see credible evidence offered concisely, here is Morgan Reynolds’s two page account, which he presents by way of Kevin Ryan, an environmental engineer who was



the site manager of Environmental Health Laboratories, a division of Underwriters Laboratories, which had certified the steel components used in construction of the WTC towers for their ability to withstand fires. In November of 2004, Ryan wrote a letter to Dr. Frank Gayle, a metallurgist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Ryan’s letter challenged the preliminary NIST metallurgical findings on the WTC collapses, saying: “This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers.”

Explaining his reasons for this statement, Ryan said:

[S]teel components were certified to ASTM E119…[T]he steel applied met those specifications,. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2,000⁰ F for several hours… [E]ven un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3,000⁰ F… [T]he buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.

Therefore, the suggestion by one expert, “that 2,000⁰ F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.” Ryan even pointed out that Gayle himself suggested, “that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500⁰ F (250⁰ C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.”


These findings were ignored, Ryan pointed out to Gayle, as the official summary effectively claimed.

that these low temperatures cause exposed bits of the building’s steel core to “soften and buckle.” Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that “most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250⁰ C degrees.” To soften steel for the purpose of forging, normally temperatures need to be above 1,1000 C,

four times higher. Ryan thereby rejected NIST’s implication that such low temperatures were able not only to “soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.”

The absurdity of the official story about the WTC collapses being caused by fires weakening WTC steel is further exposed by another fact: “Corus Constructions Corporations performed extensive tests in multiple countries in which they subjected steel-framed carparks, which were uninsulated, to prolonged hydrocarbon fueled fires,” writes Jim Hoffman, “and the highest temperatures they recorded in any of the steel beams or columns was a mere 360 C. At that temperature, structural steel loses only about 1 percent of its strength.” Besides the fact that steel conducts heat extremely well, so that the heat from the fire in any one part of one of the towers would have been quickly diffused throughout the rest of the building, the towers had redundant strength on the order of 600 percent. Another problem with the official story is that if the fires were hot enough to cause massive steel columns to buckle, some of the aluminum façade should have melted, given the fact that aluminum melts at less than half the temperature required to melt steel.

For these and many other reasons, the official theory about the collapse of the WTC buildings is physically impossible.

Morgan Reynolds, from “9/11, Texas A&M University, and Heresy,” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, eds., 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, (2007), pp. 112-113.

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