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CNN Live Saturday

The Remains of the World Trade Center

Aired October 06, 2001 - 14:33   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: We want to take you now live, and pictures of ground zero, as it looks on this Saturday afternoon. The weather has turned abruptly here. It has gotten very cold. And it is extremely windy in New York, which is always a concern, given the stability of buildings that remain in that area.

Still, the sun has returned after what had been some rain. And has we point out, the cooler temperatures could make it somewhat easier for those working the recovery effort.

FEMA says that it is pulling out the last of its use are teams under the urban search and rescue teams essentially saying that leg of search and rescue has come to end. FEMA, though, has many hundreds, actually thousands of people still in the area supporting New York's recovery effort. They will remain.

The collapse of the World Trade Center building will likely change, in many ways, the buildings that are constructed in the future.

CNN's Michael Okwu takes a look at one engineer and what he's learning from the wreckage in New York.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHAEL OKWU, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is as close to ground zero as you can get, an actual point of impact, a steel column from an elevator shaft of one of the Twin towers.

ABOLHASSAN ASTANEH-ASL STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Certainly this shows that something round, heavy, fast, like a big bullet passed through here.

OKWU: According to Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, the jets that sliced through the Twin Towers were like bullets shot into people. It wasn't the impact that brought them down. It was all the internal damage.

Asl is a structural engineer, a specialist on steel structures, who led a team in a study of the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge, after it was damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Lately, he's been investigating ways to make buildings more bomb resistant. But for the past two weeks, he's spent time here.

At this Jersey City scrapyard, conducting an autopsy, of sorts of the Twin towers. Funded by the a grant from the National Science Foundation, he's been sifting through 40,000 tons of debris moved here from ground zero.

Here, pieces of airplane. A clear line here on the facade of one of the towers shows the impact of a plane's wing.

ASL: It's like a piece of butter and you put a knife on it...

OKWU: But right now, he has his eye on those beams. Before this, experts believed one of two things. The twin tower beams were so strong, the planes disintegrated in impact, or that the planes were so fast, they buckled the beams. Asl now says each plane literally tore a bite out of the steel.

ASL: This is that bite. What you see is the circle, exactly the curve of something, either engine or the fuselage.

OKWU: But Asl says, even though a row of columns was missing 40 percent of its mass, they still stood.

ASL: We all know generally what happened. The heat reaching 1000 degrees Fahrenheit made the steel lose its strength. and the whole thing collapsed.

OKWU: Asl is sending pieces to the lab to determine how fast the planes were flying and which columns collapsed first. He hopes one day, his work can be used to design a different structure, more resistant to catastrophic failure.

Michael Okwu, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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