Access Restrictions

The Closure of Ground Zero to Investigators

While the steel was being removed from the site of the three largest and most mysterious structural failures in history, even the team FEMA had assembled to investigate the failures -- the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) -- was denied access to the evidence. ¹   The Science Committee of the House of Representatives later identified several aspects of the FEMA-controlled operation that prevented the conduct of an adquate investigation: ²  

• The BPAT did not control the steel. "The lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for investigation before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence."
• FEMA required BPAT members to sign confidentiality agreements that "frustrated the efforts of independent researchers to understand the collapse."
• The BPAT was not granted access to "pertinent building documents."
• "The BPAT team does not plan, nor does it have sufficient funding, to fully analyze the structural data it collected to determine the reasons for the collapse of the WTC buildings."

Gene Corley complained to the Committee that the Port Authority refused to give his investigators copies of the Towers' blueprints until he signed a wavier that the plans would not be used in a lawsuit against the agency. ³  

Bill Manning Condemns the "Half-Baked Farce"

Editor of Fire Engineering Magazine Bill Manning highlighted concerns among the firefighting community over the barring of investigators from the crime scene:

Manning also emphatically condemned the destruction of structural steel, declaring "The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately." Manning contrasted the operation to past disasters:

Manning indicated that the destruction of the steel was illegal, based on his review of the national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, which provides no exemption to the requirement that evidence be saved in cases of fires in buildings over 10 stories tall.

Respected firefighting professionals have harshly criticized the destruction of evidence from the World Trade Center.

Calls for an independent investigation even came from politicians such as Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Experts complained that the volunteer investigators selected by FEMA lacked financial support, staff support, and subpoena power. ⁵  

No Photographs!

On September 26th, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani banned photographs of Ground Zero. ⁶   An account by an anonymous photographer (AP), who took the photographs at the end of the Ground Zero photographs page, describes the treatment of this citizen investigator.