BY PHILLIP WEARNE AND JOHN KELLY
It has been more than a year since the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC), yet a proper forensic engineering and fire investigation to discover how the WTC towers failed following the impact of the two Boeing 767 aircraft has only just begun. Yes, you read that correctly. The biggest structural and fire-induced building failures in history, which resulted in the biggest single loss of life on American soil since the Civil War (including 343 firefighters), has yet to be investigated.
The Building Performance Study (BPS), published by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), was a start; but, as many of its own team members were the first to admit, with limited time, money, and personnel, it was little more than that. As anyone who has followed two sets of congressional hearings, the press reports, and the lobbying efforts of the victims' relatives, in particular those of the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, knows, the BPS furnished us with far more questions than answers.
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