The Freedom Tower

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The MercuryNews.com reports:

The civil-engineering industry’s failure to admit that cost-saving design features led to the World Trade Center collapse amounts to “moral corruption,” a UC Berkeley engineering professor said Tuesday. Speaking on campus to memorialize the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Abolhassan Astaneh said his five-year study of the collapse of the twin towers revealed that a better design likely would have prevented many of the nearly 3,000 deaths that day. Astaneh sharply criticized the American Society of Civil Engineers, which he said cared more about defending the industry than revealing the truth about the towers’ design. “It’s just moral corruption,” Astaneh said in response to a question from the audience. “I don’t beat around the bushes.” Astaneh, who first researched the disaster in the days following Sept. 11, said he had access to well guarded architectural drawings of the 110-story towers for his study. The schematics showed that the buildings were supported almost completely by thin steel beams around the outside. Thicker beams on the exterior and more concrete surrounding the stairwells would have added at least $30 million to the cost of the buildings, he said, but could have saved hundreds or thousands of lives after airliners hit both towers. Instead, the resulting 1,000-degree fire easily destroyed the structure, he said. Most tall skyscrapers, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, are sturdier and likely would survive such Advertisement attacks, Astaneh said.