In my previous article, I rebutted the key claims of those who propose that WTC7 collapsed due to a controlled demolition. Despite this many critics of the official narrative continue to maintain that a controlled demolition occured on the basis of what witnesses claimed they heard.

I explained why the controlled demolition thesis is illogical but some critics on twitter skate over this and have instead moved onto the issue of thermite as part of the ‘controlled demolition’ process as an apparent explanation for what happened. l will endeavour to deal with this below.

That commercial aircraft laden with jet fuel travelling at high velocity struck the World Trade Center on 9-11 is incontrovertible. Commercial aircraft contain enormous amounts of aluminum, and WTC7 was an aluminum-clad, steel-cored building. Although airliners didn’t crash into WTC7, the enormous explosions and collapse of nearby towers generated as a result of planes that did, inevitably impacted on WTC7.

As I explained in my article, debris from WTC 1, 370 feet away struck WTC7 causing a gash in one corner facing Ground Zero, and by the time the evacuation order of the building was given it was visibly sagging. With debris strewn all around, we can expect to find aluminum and iron oxide and aluminum oxide and metallic iron in the debris without any thermite charges being required to explain it.

Thermite would not be practical for the demolition of WTC7. It would have spontaneously detonated at under 1000°F and would not have been controllable; no signal receiving device could have survived the fires and continued receiving the destruct command.

A more recent claim of critics is that traces of red-gray chips and iron-rich microspheres in the WTC rubble are best explained by thermite. This is held as their “smoking gun“. A study of the dust from Ground Zero contradicts this: “There is no evidence of individual elemental aluminum particles of any size in the red/gray chips…”

The chips are epoxy resins. More specifically, after further study, the red/gray chips were found to be Laclede Standard Primer by late polymer chemist Ivan Kminek, who demonstrated that they have the same chemical composition, identical XEDS spectra, and nearly identical ignition point.

Some witnesses and critics of the official narrative claim that the sound of explosions coming out the windows of WTC7 are indications of an explosive demolition. There is a simple explanation for this phenomenon: What happens to the air inside when you squeeze a balloon too much? These side-jets of air and dust were not explosions, but debris was expelled from the buildings as the floors pancaked on each other. There is a lot of air in a quarter-mile-tall office building; it has to go somewhere when compressed.

In addition, the WTC complex contained plenty of water in water mains, toilets, sinks, and beverage machines. Water heated to boiling temperatures expands violently and expands explosively if contained. Water has a high heat capacity, which usually precludes rapid heating to boiling temperatures. Still, the heat of burning jet fuel will force water to heat rapidly to boiling, which causes explosions of such objects as unopened soft drink cans or whiskey bottles. This explains many of the explosions that survivors heard.

Many things explode in fires: transformers, gas lines, water lines, air compressors, fire extinguishers, propane tanks, and refrigeration systems. An “explosion sound” is different from the high-brisance detonation necessary to cut even one 14″ x 22″ steel column of a major skyscraper (let alone 58–82 of them), which would exceed 140 decibels a half-mile away and be clearly audible from New Jersey.

Meanwhile, seismographs picked up the collapse of the interior (preceding the collapse of the exterior frame) but no detonations.Any detonation of explosives within WTC 7 would have been detected by multiple seismographs monitoring ground vibration in the general area. No such telltale “spike” or vibratory anomaly was recorded by any monitoring instrument.

As I explained in my previous article, claims by witnesses that the ‘explosions’ they heard were the sound of controlled explosives, are pure supposition. Testimonies from firefighters inside and outside of the building are consistent, and demolitions experts who saw WTC 7 collapse neither saw nor heard anything indicating an explosive demolition. 

Explosive demolitions would not be very controlled, or likely to work at all, if they involved slamming tons of skyscraper debris through a building and then setting it on fire for seven hours. Precision explosives, timers, and wiring don’t like that sort of treatment. Regardless, such blasts would be loudly audible on the camera footage seconds before the collapse began; there’s nothing on the tapes.

Here’s what a controlled demolition really sounds like. Here are 12″ steel pins failing, producing “explosion” sounds (at 0:40). No videos of the fall of WTC 7 provide audio of a demolition. If there was a controlled demolition, you would hear a series of closely spaced, thunderous bangs.

Finally, claims by critics that “pyroclastic flows” of dust appatrently indicating that explosives must have been used, have no basis in fact. A pyroclastic flow is a movement of hot gas. In the context of a volcano, it’s usually hot gases containing hot dust and other chunks spreading out. In this context, these flows were claimed to be the cloud of dust that dispersed during the collapse and when WTC7 hit the ground.

Aside from not being hot enough to qualify as a pyroclastic flow (see volcanoes and shuttle launches), most claims try linking it with the controlled demolition theory. This debris flow indicates a fast vertical compression that caused air inside the building to push dust outward over a large area. The same flows can also be seen during controlled demolitions, but are usually much smaller than what happened at WTC7. It’s been estimated that the total mass of sheetrock in the internal walls was 1,000 tons (US). An enormous cloud of white dust is, therefore, not entirely surprising or unexplainable.