Lehigh University - RCEAS News: Fisher live on CNN

Fisher goes live on CNN

John Fisher, professor emeritus of civil engineering, was interviewed live on CNN at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 9, on a program analyzing the collapse of the World Trade Center in last year’s terrorist attacks.

Fisher, who helped evaluate the design values of the World Trade Center in the 1960s at Fritz Laboratory, served on a national panel of experts who investigated the collapse of the towers and prepared a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Fisher told CNN what he has told other audiences and media: The simultaneous combustion of four to six floors on both towers – a fire whose size and quick origin had never before been seen in a building – triggered the failure of the towers’ steel columns. The cost of designing and building a building capable of withstanding such an
inferno is far too costly, he said. But although prevention is the only practical solution to an airborne terrorist attack on buildings, he called on structural and fire engineers to cooperate more closely on the design of future buildings.

		Fisher goes live on CNN John Fisher, professor emeritus of civil engineering, was interviewed live on CNN at 10:30 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 9, on a program analyzing the collapse of the World Trade Center in last year’s terrorist attacks. Fisher, who helped evaluate the design values of the World Trade Center in the 1960s at Fritz Laboratory, served on a national panel of experts who investigated the collapse of the towers and prepared a report for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Fisher told CNN what he has told other audiences and media: The simultaneous combustion of four to six floors on both towers – a fire whose size and quick origin had never before been seen in a building – triggered the failure of the towers’ steel columns. The cost of designing and building a building capable of withstanding such an inferno is far too costly, he said. But although prevention is the only practical solution to an airborne terrorist attack on buildings, he called on structural and fire engineers to cooperate more closely on the design of future buildings.