Home > The 1975 World Trade Center Fire

The 1975 World Trade Center Fire

by Open-Publishing - Sunday 26 February 2006
7 comments

Attack-Terrorism USA History

The February 13, 1975 North Tower Fire has been carefully hidden from you. Here are a few reports concerning it.

This 110-story steel-framed office building suffered a fire on the 11th floor on February 13, 1975. The loss was estimated at over $2,000,000. The building is one of a pair of towers, 412 m in height. The fire started at approximately 11:45 P.M. in a furnished office on the 11th floor and spread through the corridors toward the main open office area.
A porter saw flames under the door and sounded the alarm. It was later that the smoke detector in the air-conditioning plenum on the 11th floor was activated. The delay was probably because the air-conditioning system was turned off at night. The building engineers placed the ventilation system in the purge mode, to blow fresh air into the core area and to draw air from all the offices on the 11th floor so as to prevent further smoke spread.

The fire department on arrival found a very intense fire. It was not immediately known that the fire was spreading vertically from floor to floor through openings in the floor slab. These 300-mm x 450-mm (12-in. x 18-in.) openings in the slab provided access for telephone cables. Subsidiary fires on the 9th to the 19th floors were discovered and readily extinguished. The only occupants of the building at the time of fire were cleaning and service personnel. They were evacuated without any fatalities. However, there were 125 firemen involved in fighting this fire and 28 sustained injuries from the intense heat and smoke. The cause of the fire is unknown.

Also, from the New York Times (Saturday 15th February 1975):

Fire Commissioner John T. O’Hagan said yesterday that he would make a vigorous effort to have a sprinkler system installed in the World Trade Center towers as a consequence of the fire that burned for three hours in one of them early yesterday morning.
The towers, each 110 stories tall and the highest structures in the city, are owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is not subject to local safety codes.
As Commissioner O’Hagan stood in the sooty puddles of the North Tower’s 11th floor hallway, he told reporters that the fire would not have spread as far as it did if sprinklers had been installed there.

The fire spread throughout about half of the offices of the floor and ignited the insulation of telephone cables in a cable shaft that runs vertically between floors. Commissioner O’Hagan said that the absence of fire-stopper material in gaps around the telephone cables had allowed the blaze to spread to other floors within the cable shaft. Inside the shaft, it spread down to the 9th floor and up to the 16th floor, but the blaze did not escape from the shaft out into room or hallways on the other floors.........

Only the 11th floor office area was burned, but extensive water damage occurred on the 9th and 10th floors, and smoke damage extended as far as the 15th floor, the spokesman said.
Although there were no direct casualties, 28 of the 150 firemen called to the scene suffered minor injuries.

More from the New York Times (Saturday 14th February 1975):

"It was like fighting a blow torch" according to Captain Harold Kull of Engine Co. 6,........
Flames could be seen pouring out of 11th floor windows on the east side of the building.

So, this was a very serious fire which spread over some 65 per cent of the eleventh floor (the core plus half the office area) in the very same building that supposedly "collapsed" on 9/11 due to a similar, or lesser, fire. This fire also spread to a number of other floors. And although it lasted over 3 hours, it caused no serious structural damage and trusses survived the fires without replacement and supported the building for many, many more years after the fires were put out.

It should be emphasized that the North Tower suffered no serious structural damage from this fire. In particular, no trusses needed to be replaced.

That the 1975 fire was more intense than the 9/11 fires is evident from the fact that it caused the 11th floor east side windows to break and flames could be seen pouring from these broken windows. This indicates a temperature greater than 700°C. In the 9/11 fires the windows were not broken by the heat (only by the aircraft impact) indicating a temperature below 700°C.

So now you know that the WTC towers were well designed and quite capable of surviving a serious fire. I repeat that this was a very hot fire that burnt through the open-plan office area of the eleventh floor and spread up and down the central core area for many floors. This was a serious fire.

Much was learned from the 1975 WTC fire. In particular, the fact that the fire had not been contained to a single floor but spread to many floors, caused much concern. The points of entry of the fire to other floors were identified and the floors of each building were modified to make sure that this would never happen again. For some strange reason, the modifications failed to perform on September 11, 2001 and again the fires spread from floor to floor.


See also:

1975 New York Times Newspaper Clippingshttp://www.prisonplanet.com/Pages/A...
The 9/11 WTC Fires: Where’s the Inferno?http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/w...


Forum posts

  • Thanks for bringing this forward. I was completely unaware of that fire and it does add to the ongoing questions of 9/11 which remain unanswered.

    • Another great piece of evidence that proves that steel framed high rise buildings, and specificly,the World Trade Centre,can NEVER be structurely compromised by even intense,long lasting and very hot fire’s.
      So where does that leave the Official explanation of what happened to the ’Towers and Building 7,that fire caused them to completely collapse?
      Well done for finding this report!

    • Another great piece of evidence that proves that steel framed high rise buildings, and specificly,the World Trade Centre,can NEVER be structurely compromised by even intense,long lasting and very hot fire’s.
      So where does that leave the Official explanation of what happened to the ’Towers and Building 7,that fire caused them to completely collapse?
      Well done for finding this report!

  • this provers there was bomes in the towers otherwise thay would not have fell down

    • The big difference between the two fires was the amount of fuel (or combustible material) available. All the fuel spread and ignited at once, while the first fire ’ate’ through the material.

      1st fire: The hottest are moves along the path of the fire as the fuel is spent. Thus you have a very hot zone, and cooler zones before and after the fire.

      2nd fire: Maybe less intense, but equally hot over most of the floors where the explosion (and just after that) the fire was.

      I don’t think that there is any question that failure was due to molten steel. Steel’s properties change with temperature change. (have a look at a barbeque grid). Using basic engineering mechanics (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/linear-expansion-coefficients-d_95.html), you can calculate that a 1m long section of steel, heated up by 700deg C. would expand by 9mm. Apply this over the length of your beams (about 10 metres), and you get beams the are 9cm longer
      than usual. Now, these have to still fit into the existing structure (ignore the enormous forces that push columns apart now).

      You will have strange forces acting on the joints, torsion, etc. The whole structure would contort and twist.

      I assume that the WT buildings were bolted together. It is very likely that the rivets either just broke (failed). Once the connections fail, the best beams just come tumbling down...

      This, to me is the really plausible reason for failure, if failure was due to the planes colliding.

    • There is a problem with the reasoning in the above post. The fires that resulted from the plane impact on 9/11 were all but out; radio messages from FDNY members on the floors that suffered the impacts: Battalion Seven Chief: "Battalion Seven ... Ladder 15, we’ve got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones." This infers that the fires had almost burned themselves out; the jet fuel which started the fires burned off within minutes (most of it was consumed in fireball on impact, the greater part of that being outside the building itself).. see the numerous video recordings of the impacts.

      If the steel was in any way compromised, it would have been when the fires were burning at their most intense stage, and by the time the structure failed, the steel would have been cooling down rapidly, since there were few, and small fires still burning. Another thing to remember is that steel is an excellent conductor of heat, and hotspots in the girders would need to be continually fed with a very high temperature source of combustion, far hotter than the temperature of burning jet fuel or office furniture, in order to compromise the integrity of the steel in the affected area. Furthermore, the steel structure of the WTC towers would have acted as a huge heat sink, taking heat energy *away* from the source and distributing it throughout the structure. This point of basic thermodynamics was universally overlooked in the need to arrive at a quick and digestible explanation as to why both WTC towers failed so spectacularly and unexpectedly.

    • Yup, the tower should of collapsed in no more than 5-10 minutes with all that weight on top of 10 floors with heat that "half weakens" the steel.

      In fact some people go as far as saying it was the very design of the towers that led to the collapse. I would have to agree! Once they demolished the massive steel cores the office space turned to dust. Maybe next time they want to make a 400m tall building they should put in a lot more consideration than just a massive 46 steel column core 1300 feet tall.
      After all a steel core that takes up most of the buildings space encased in more steel and concrete is no match for an aluminum plane that can destroy it all in no more than 10 seconds.

      (I would also note I fail to see how occupants in the towers would of known what those managing security were up to in regard to the core of the towers)