Reply #28: Sure

[hack89]

I am willing to trust the FDNY - it wasn't a surprise to them.

One Battalion Chief coming from the building indicated that they had searched floors 1 through 9 and found that the building was clear.390 In the process of the search, the Battalion Chief met the building’s Fire Safety Director and Deputy Fire Safety Director on the ninth floor. The Fire Safety Director reported that the building’s floors had been cleared from the top down. By this time, the Chief Officer responsible for WTC 7 reassessed the building again and determined that fires were burning on the following floors: 6, 7, 8, 17, 21, and 30. No accurate time is available for these actions during the WTC 7 operations; however, the sequence of event indicates that it occurred during a time period from 12:30 p.m. to
approximately 2:00 p.m.

The Chief Officer then met with his command officer to discuss the building’s condition and FDNY’s capabilities for controlling the building fires. A Deputy Chief who had just returned from inside the building reported that he had conducted an inspection up to the 7th or 8th floor.392 He indicated that the stairway was filling with smoke and that there was a lot of fire inside the building. The chiefs discussed the situation and the following conditions were identified:

• The building had sustained damage from debris falling into the building, and they were not sure about the structural stability of the building.

• The building had large fires burning on at least six floors. Any one of these six fires would have been considered a large incident during normal FDNY operations.

• There was no water immediately available for fighting the fires.

• They didn’t have equipment, hose, standpipe kits, tools, and enough handie talkies for conducting operations inside the building.

At approximately, 2:30 p.m., FDNY officers decided to completely abandon WTC 7, and the final order was given to evacuate the site around the building. 395, 396 The order terminated the ongoing rescue operations at WTC 6 and on the rubble pile of WTC 1. Firefighters and other emergency responders were withdrawn from the WTC 7 area, and the building continued to burn. At approximately 5:20 p.m., some three hours after WTC 7 was abandoned the building experienced a catastrophic failure and collapsed.

http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/NISTNCSTAR1-81.pdf