The towers survived the impact and probably could have been repaired. They were designed to survive such an impact. It was the intense fire, fueled by thousands of gallons of jet fuel, which weakened the steel structure and caused it to fail. This has been all over the news.
I thought the towers were designed to collapse, like they did, before falling over so if one was destroyed it would do as little damage as possible to anything else in the area.
I fail to see how they could design the building so it wouldn’t “fall over”. If the front or one side got knocked out lower in the building, I wouldn’t want to bet that it wouldn’t fall sideways.
In an Explainer on the question of insurance payouts, Slate said that, in the last twenty years, some insurers have started adding clauses excepting acts of terrorism along with acts of God. Presumably, one could get acts of terrorism covered for extra premiums.
The question now is which policies have that clause.
A building can be designed to fall straight down, and the World Trade Center was. It carried a lot of the load on its outer skin, so it would collapse inwards. In other words, if one floor falls on the one below it, the first things to go will be the interior structure, which tends to pull the force of the implosion back in towards the center of the building.
Certainly pieces of it can go off at an angle, and in fact that’s what happened. But the vast bulk of the towers went straight down.
I think the engineers of that building should get a medal. They designed it to withstand the impact of a jet, but one that is about half the size of the ones that hit. Even so, those towers stood long enough to evacuate most of the people that were in them, and when they fell they went straight down which further saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars worth of buildings in the surrounding areas.
I used to commute through the WTC regularly.
The A,C,E,N,R,1 and 9 trains all stopped at WTC. The E train is the only one that terminated there, and the other stops are technically called “Cortlandt Street”, not WTC.
Also, can’t forget the PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson) Trains to New Jersey that were also down there, WTC was one of the four major endpoints of the system.
I don’t know for sure how which or how much of these stations was damaged/destroyed, but my assumption would all of them.
This is from memory, since someone swiped my paper.
The E station is done. The A/C station at Courtlandt street (Which may acually be called Chamber St. – the tracks themselves are pretty far north of the complex) is slightly damaged.
The Courtlandt St. 1/9 station, directly under the plaza, is done. The Rector St. station one stop south was heavily damaged.
The Fulton St. Station (2/3, A/C, 4/5, N/R) seems not to have been heavily damaged.
The Path station is done. Rescuers were only recently able to determine there were no signs of life there (Jersey City rescuers were previously trying to get to it from the other side.)
Just a note about other buildings damaged in the complex- my friend Amy worked in #6, and it’s gone. Not, from what she says, collapsed, but destroyed through fire and falling debris. I haven’t seen pictures of it myself, but her boyfriend (who walked to the WTC looking for her) saw it and was sure Amy was dead, based on the condition of the building.
A decidely non-GQ aside: none of us could reach Amy until much later that day. I learned later that her cell phone was buried in what used to be her cubicle… gives me chills to think I was calling it all day. She did get out safely, though, thank God…
According to this article, the lease holder, Larry Silverstein, said the buildings are, in fact, covered against acts of terrorism.