

Untitled Document As Village Voice reports Friday that a federal judge has issued an important ruling in a little-noticed lawsuit about the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. The power company ConEdison had a substation beneath the WTC7, which suddenly imploded late on the afternoon of 9/11. ConEdison's reinsurers have sued the parties involved in the construction of WTC7 for recompense. Scanning through the copy of the ruling provided online by the Voice, we see the name AMEC pop up. Ths is interesting, because AMEC is the British construction company which was in charge of "reinforcing" the wing of the Pentagon which was bombed on 9/11. From United States District Judge's ALVIN K. HELLERSTEIN's Jan. 12 ruling: "Plaintiffs filed Civil Action 02 Civ. 7188 on September 10, 2002 against the City and the Port Authority,2 and Civil Action 04 Civ. 7272 on September 10, 2004 against the owners and lessees of 7WTC, and against the design and construction professionals who designed and built 7WTC and the leased floors of Salomon and the City. Plaintiffs seek to recover their damage. In order to ensure that a power outage would not disrupt Citigroup’s trading activities at 7WTC, the Citigroup Lease provided that Citigroup would have the right to install "diesel emergency power generators … together with all ancillary equipment therefor." (Citigroup Lease at C-10.) The Citigroup Lease included detailed provisions relating to the size and location of the generators and provided further that 7 World Trade Company would "arrange with the Port Authority for the installation of a diesel fuel storage tank on the property of the Port Authority and the installation of a fuel line from such facility running through the property of the Port Authority to the Tenant’s emergency power generators." In 1988, Salomon Inc., now Citigroup, entered into an agreement with Silverstein as 7 World Trade Company’s managing agent, pursuant to which Citigroup leased floors 28-47 and portions of floors 1-5 of 7WTC. By Order of January 7, 2005 (the "F&K Order"), I ruled: The complaint . . . mixes claims against numerous defendants labeled, "the Construction Defendants." It is impossible . . . to understand what each such defendant purportedly did in the construction of 7 World Trade Center, a multi-storied office building that collapsed 4. The Citigroup Construction Defendants

The Citigroup Construction Defendants—AMEC PLC, the general contractor; Skidmore Owings and Merrill, L.L.P. ("Skidmore"), the architect; Flack & Kurtz ("Flack"), the mechanical engineer; Centrifugal Associates, Inc. ("Centrifugal"), the infrastructure and mechanical subcontractor; and Irwin Cantor, the structural engineer—are alleged, by the same general allegations as were used in the previous groupings of defendants, to have been negligent in the design and construction of 7WTC. (Am. Compl. 7272 ¶¶ 183-88.) ----- So, Saloman controlled the first five and the top 20 floors of this building. AMEC was in charge of wiring Saloman's offices to diesel tanks elsewhere in the building. That would have given AMEC access to the enitre infrastructure of the building, to be powered for "back-up power" or.... whatever else. The judge has dismissed all charges against AMEC and will allow a limited negligence claim against leaseholder Silverstein and the Port Authority to go forawrd. More from Vllage Voice indicates how suspicious New York's literati are finally becoming of the anomalies: WTC7 was the last building to fall on 9-11. No one was killed there. Compared to the twin towers it was a relative nobody among New York skyscrapers, but it has enjoyed posthumous notoriety because of the mystery of why exactly it fell. Thanks to the neat and sudden collapse of the building, WTC7 is central to alternative theories about what happened on 9-11—and particularly to the notion that the buildings in lower Manhattan were brought down by planned demolitions. Mainstream inquiries also find puzzlement on WTC 7. The national investigation of Ground Zero building collapses has yet to issue its final report on building seven. An earlier study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency punted on trying to explain the collapse definitively. Not struck by planes, WTC7 appears to have collapsed solely because of fire—apparently a first for a steel-framed skyscraper. The diesel fuel was the most likely culprit, even though FEMA said this "best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence." The city's OEM command center used a 6,000-gallon diesel tank; this was one of several in the building. Hellestein's ruling doesn't delve into whether the diesel fuel caused the collapse, or if it was a particularly bright idea to have it there, but finds that the city is immune under a state law. AMEC's post-9/11 payoff



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