Since World Trade Tower Building seven is the most decisive evidence that the collapse of the towers was, as it seemed, the work of terrorists equipped with boxcutters, the troofers manipulatively announce it to be their strongest evidence to the contrary.

Building Seven begins its fall like a tree, falling sideways towards the holes blasted by the plane on the south Side, and the fires started by the plane on the south side.

In this video, shot from the north side it falls away from the viewer. The structure on top disappears not because it falls into the building, for at this stage of the collapse the outer shell of the building is tilting like a tree, falling like a rigid object, but because the tilt of the building takes it out of view:



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After about two or three seconds into the collapse it starts to fall downwards, as if in a demolition, but the start of the collapse is that the shell of Building Seven tilts and rotates southwards away from the camera like a tree falling towards the notch cut by the axeman. The change in the angle of the dark line shows that in the first few seconds of the fall, the movement is primarily rotation sideways, rather than droop downwards. The further end of the dark line drops by more than the north face of the building drops, indicating considerably more rotation southwards than droop downwards. In these images of the very first part of the collapse of the outer shell, the top of the building is moving away from the viewer a lot faster than it is moving downwards.

The image below, shot from the east side, shows it half way through its fall, transitioning from falling sideways like a tree, to collapsing downwards like a building.



Building seven was rated to survive three hours of uncontrolled fire, before the heat penetrated the insulation on the steel beams, softening them and causing them to collapse.

It instead survived seven hours of uncontrolled fire, roughly the amount of time predicted when it was built, when the builders considered the possibility of a fire raging for a long time without being brought under control.

They expected that any fire would be brought under control in three hours or less, and therefore the building could not be brought down by fire, but unfortunately the damage caused by terrorists crashing planes knocked out the water supply.

Building seven fell partly from damage, partly because the steel beams softened in the heat of the fire. When the building was designed the insulation on the steel beams was rated to withstand three hours fire:

The instructions to the bidders for the WTC 7 job were to bid on a 3 h rating for the columns and a 2 h rating for the metal deck and floor support steel, which corresponded to the more stringent fire resistance requirements for Type 1B (unsprinklered) construction. These ratings were to be achieved by application of Monokote MK-5, a gypsum-based SFRM that contained a vermiculite aggregate. According to the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Fire Resistance Directory (1983), these ratings required a thickness of 22 mm (7/8 in.) of Monokote MK-5 to be applied to the heavy columns, 48 mm (1 7/8 in.) to be applied to the lighter columns, 13 mm (1/2 in.) to be applied to the beams, and 10 mm (3/8 in.) to be applied to the bottom of the metal deck. Private inspectors found that the applied SFRM thicknesses were consistent with these values

which is a longer fire than would ever be allowed under normal circumstances. The reason for having insulation on the steel beams is that the builders expected that without insulation, fire would cause the building to fall – as it did. It fell because it reached and exceeded its design limits for not falling, and it fell as we would expect a building to fall from such a cause, in that it started its fall like a tree, sideways towards the notch.