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CNN Live Today

Interview with James Glanz

Aired September 09, 2002 - 12:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Nearly a year after the twin towers disappeared from New York's skyline, we have a clearer understanding of what happened.
Garrick Utley takes a look at the engineering of the building, and the structural failures that caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

Given the subject of this report, it does contain images of the collapse, and some viewers may find it difficult to watch.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): As the towers burned, and people watched in horror, who imagined that one millions tons of buildings, more than 1,000 feet high, could come crashing down?

GENE CORLEY, STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: We'll go in a frame at a time. The aircraft completely buries itself in the building.

UTLEY: Gene Corley, a structural engineer, saw the fire on television.

CORLEY: I said to one of my colleagues, "Well, they didn't collapse under the impact of the aircraft, but if they don't get the fire out, they're going to collapse.

UTLEY: When it was designed in the 1960s, the World Trade Center was the state of the engineering art. The traditional steel-grid system used in skyscrapers since they began going up was abandoned. Instead, each tower had a central core of columns to support half of the buildings weight, while columns on the outside walls supported the other half.

Under each floor, support trusses ran from the core to the walls, which provided lateral strength to the steel skin of the building. The design provided vast open office space on each floor.

(on camera): The architects and engineers anticipated every blow they thought the towers would have to absorb. A hurricane with winds up to 140 miles an hour? No problem. A 707 jet ramming into one of the towers? No problem. What no one imagined was the kind of intense fire that the aviation fuel would ignite, and what that would lead to.

(voice-over): When the first plane struck the north tower, it flew right into the core columns, cutting off elevators and stairwells. The second plane, which struck the south tower, hit closer to the edge of the building, destroying nearly two thirds of the outside columns on one side.

In each building, 90,000 gallons of jet aviation fuel became a giant flame thrower, igniting the fire which spread upward. The fire, estimated to have burned at up to 1,500 degrees, weakened the steel columns and the supports connecting them. The fire-resistant material, which had been applied to the steel, was knocked loose by the impact of the planes.

CORLEY: Once that fireproofing is gone, the steel heats up very rapidly and loses its strength in a few minutes, rather than in a few hours.

UTLEY: The immediate threat was not in the vertical columns, but in the steel trusses under each concrete floor. As those cross beams began to weaken, they no longer supported the columns on the exterior wall. The south tower, which was struck lower and therefore had more weight bearing down on the failing steel, was the first to fall.

Gene Corley was a member of the team that investigated the collapse.

CORLEY: The collapse starts there and then spreads across. The building tilts to the east and then disappears into the cloud.

UTLEY: And then, 15 minutes later, the north tower.

CORLEY: We believe in the north tower that the core, which was supporting the antenna, lost its strength first and started to collapse. That transferred the load to the exterior columns of the building, the tube surrounding the building, and then the whole building started down on the north tower.

UTLEY: Engineers say there was never a real danger that the towers would tip over. They were so heavy they could only come straight down, although no one could ever imagine that they would.

Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: "New York Times" reporter James Glanz has spent a great deal of time reporting on the structure of the World Trade Center towers. He also spent extensive time reporting on the final minutes of the men and women who worked in the towers. Some of them managed to escape. Others did not. Many of those stories are featured in a two-hour special on A&E.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We would test what was below. If we ran into flames and smoke and they were -- we can't get past, well, then we would have gone back up and followed other people, or looked for other ways down, but I was not personally ready to just commit to going higher. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Stanley was battered and bleeding, but they managed to climbed down past the debris in stairwell A without too much difficulty.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We were sliding and walking, holding on to the rail, but I had my hands, most of the time, around Brian's neck for support.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When we came to the drywall that was leaning against the railings, some places I recall we seemed to be able to push it. Others, we slithered underneath. We moved fairly quickly.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Brian and Stanley met no one going down, and never got the chance to tell anyone about the safe passage they had found.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There was no panic. Neither of us were running, and, of course, wondering where everybody was, I remember having that feeling, it was very strange that there were just the two of us for the entire descent.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: Joining us now from New York is "New York Times" reporter James Glanz -- James, good to see you.

JAMES GLANZ, "NEW YORK TIMES": Thanks for having me.

PHILLIPS: Well, you were a science reporter on September 11, and you basically became an expert with regard to the World Trade Center building. Tell me about that.

GLANZ: Well, on September 11, I actually reached the office before the buildings fell, and after the planes had hit them. It already looked like a great tragedy. I was given assignment of figuring out what the structure was that held these buildings up.

A few minutes later, in fact, we were watching on the CNN monitor, the buildings both fell, and it bacame a story to explain how the towers fell down.

PHILLIPS: Now your thoughts initially were that the towers performed -- quote -- "heroically." How is that?

GLANZ: Well, the planes applied perhaps 25 million pounds of force on those towers, sideways force. Perhaps a lesser building would have toppled at that point. The fact that the buildings withstood that initial blast, those incredible blasts, meant that thousands of people could escape from the lower reaches of the tower, and of course, it also meant that people in buildings surrounding the site were safe. It didn't topple onto, say, another skyscraper near by.

PHILLIPS: So now, a year later, almost a year later, what did you learn as the year progressed? What did you uncover, what changed your mind from that very first day and what you saw on September 11? GLANZ: Well I think we gradually began to sharpen our view of how the towers did initially perform heroically, but also displayed later on a kind of an Achilles' heel. They weren't very well at warding off the affects of fire. That is what eventually brought them down, as you just heard Dr. Corely explain, and we also learned better the tragic fact of why so many people were trapped in the upper reaches of the tower, unable to escape while the fires raged. If they had been able to get down, if more of them had been able to get down like Brian Clark, then the death toll would have been lower.

PHILLIPS: You estimated 1,100 people, is that right?

GLANZ: That is right. About 1,100 people probably survived those initial impacts, as horrific as they were, and really just wanted to find a way down, but there wasn't a way down.

PHILLIPS: What could have saved their lives, James?

GLANZ: I don't think we know the answer to that for certain, but we do have some good ideas. And one is that if the stairwells in the World Trade Center had been made of masonry or concrete, something very heavy like the Empire State Building and its stair wells, they would have had a chance to get down there because it is unlikely the planes would have severed all of those stairwells, and it may also have been true that if the stairwells hadn't all been clustered in one place, it would have been easier to knock them out with one blow. Five of the six stairwells in the two towers were severed. There was one that was partially clear, and that was the one that Brian Clark and Stanley Praimnath got down.

PHILLIPS: Now a $23 million, two-year federal investigation is going on. What do you want to know, if you were a investigator with this team of investigators, what is it you would be looking for?

GLANZ: Well, the collapse -- we think, to our best understanding, was a kind of an avalanche. You know how an avalanche starts with a little rock, and then it starts -- it goes with a second rock, and a boulder maybe, and then a side of a mountain eventually comes down. What we really want to know -- we all the avalanche, we all saw the horrific ending of the story. We want to know what was that first pebble, what set it off, what was the thing that perhaps could have been done differently to keep the buildings from coming down, and that mystery, I think is still out there, and I think it is well worth the expenditure that the Bush administration is putting into it to try to figure it out.

PHILLIPS: How do you think all of this is going to affect the future of how high-rises are built, James?

GLANZ: Every disaster, as unfortunate as they are, and this was one of the great misfortunes of history, obviously, has lessons for the rest of society. That was true when the Titanic sunk, it was true in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 when the exit stairwells were locked, and I think it will be true of the World Trade Center. I think if there is any ray of light in this whole great disaster, it is that we will learn something about building high-rise buildings better, and more safely, and perhaps save lives in the future.

PHILLIPS: "New York Times" reporter James Glanz. I have enjoyed reading your work. It is nice to interview you, James. Thank you.

GLANZ: Thank you very much.

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