As we approach the twenty-second anniversary of the catastrophic collapse of the World Trade Center, one of the world's signature symbols of capitalism, Dr. Charles H. Thornton, a preeminent structural engineer, has written a book applying his engineering design principals from the construction of two of the world's tallest buildings: the twin Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (built 1999), and Taipei 101 in Taiwan, ROC (built 2003). Dr. Thornton has the insight and design expertise to finally set the record straight on what really happened on September 11, 2001.
In the early 1960s, as David Rockefeller's sixty-story Chase Manhattan Bank Headquarters near Wall Street was nearing completion, David, together with his brother Nelson and Austin Tobin, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, quietly, for the most part, launched a venture into real estate. None of them really had any experience or mandate to start or accomplish this by charter.
Borrowing a page from The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography about New York's Robert Moses, this cabal of capitalists conceived an ill-fated financial and real estate venture, the World Trade Center Corporation, which was responsible for an even more ill-fated design and construction process.
The new established World Trade Center Corporation, led by two political and technical rogues, Guy Tozzoli and Malcolm Levy, violated all the rules set by national and local building codes, manipulated the adoption of a New York City building code three years before it was readily accepted by the New York City real estate and construction industry, and manipulated a malleable out-of-town architect and structural engineer, both of whom at the time of design in 1962 had never designed a building higher than twenty stories. Most consequentially, the corporation bypassed the checks and balances and processes of the New York City, New York State, and State of New Jersey building codes through the improper use of a compact from the 1789 US Constitution that a bistate agency was not required to comply with the code of either state.
The die was cast and set for the worst terrorist attacks on two of the most vulnerable tall buildings ever designed and constructed. This was all accomplished without the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ever knowing whether the buildings could survive a full floor fire. And as the record shows, they did not survive one.
