Nearly five years after the first indications that the diesel tanks didn't play a role in the collapse, the BBC, after consulting with Popular Mechanics, were still claiming that the diesel was partly responsible for the raging fires. That suggests that the debunkers were not slowly and critically evaluating the information as it was discovered, but simply waiting for the next pronouncement from NIST so they'd know which story to defend.
As it turns out, the diesel tanks theory made more sense than the current one!
So, the BBC are "debunkers" now, huh? Interesting worldview.
But that's beside the point. What's truly interesting is why you take the BBC's special on this as being the summary, state, and mouthpiece of critical thinkers mindsets at the time when a more plausible hypothesis is that they're simply taking the initial FEMA reports, as well as many of the initial news and feature sources (including the PopMech writers involved with this subject) which derived from that as being the current state of information. Mistaking old, well publicized yet out-of-date information as being the "state of the art" tends to happen quite often with highly technical issues in the general press; as an example outside of engineering, look at how many stories you can find up until today emphasizing the complexity of passwords in computer security when it's been definitively demonstrated that password
length matters more.
But back to building 7 and the diesel fuel: A simple examination of Bechtel's report of recovered diesel by itself would raise doubt about the role it played in the fire. And
that was
written up in 2002, in the journal
Professional Safety.
Anyway, you commit multiple errors of assumption in your post. For one, you posit that the BBC piece sums up the state of thought among 9/11 researchers, and while that specific item might indeed have been what some thought, it was not what all thought, and you are not establishing any reason for anyone to think that the BBC does indeed summarize the consensus. Two, you seem to be stuck on this strange mindset that no one here jumps without NIST's say so; the fact that we've all been exposed to and give credence to both Dr. James Quintiere's critiques as well as Arup's differences over the effectiveness of the fireproofing gives total lie to that claim. We don't know which of them are right or wrong, but we accept Quintiere and Arup on their respective differences may indeed be correct over NIST. And intertwined with this point is the fact that NIST is far from being our only source of information. Again, the initial indication that diesel didn't play a big a role as was first thought came from a professional journal, not NIST. Furthermore, the background sense you give is that NIST is not a reliable source of information, and nothing can be further from the truth. They make transparent why they conclude what they do about their narratives, and nearly all of that information is freely and easily available to anyone with the skill to click on a link. Their conclusions flow from known engineering/construction principles and can be verified by anyone with the skill. You give no reason for why NIST should be distrusted. And beware of the tired, old "government mouthpiece" schtick; the fact remains that their information is well trusted by organizations like the afore mentioned ARUP, as well as the International Code Council, and
that is plenty of evidence that non-US organizations find plenty to accept about NIST's work. That, of course, is not proof that they're correct about WTC 7, but what it
is proof of is that they have much credibility. You give no reason to doubt that credibiilty.
You'll need to come up with a better argument than what you've presented so far if you really want to make your point about "debunkers" being NIST shills.
