I had seen this. What is curious is that there is no mention of this gouge in the NIST report. And this is the only image that seems to exist of it.
Once the very small, highly localised fires in WTC7 got going, they covered the entire south wall with smoke for the next seven hours, despite being very small and confined entirely to the fifth and twelfth floors. Funny, that. And, since only poor-quality TV images were available, NIST may have chosen not to include this damage because they weren't sure of its extent. But that's just being careful not to exaggerate, something conspiracy theorists could never possibly understand.
And eyewitness reports do not consistently describe it. It's the mystery hole. I'm very interested in the mystery hole.
Eyewitness reports very rarely describe anything consistently. And, again, the upper gash was obscured from ground level witnesses by smoke. But a couple of people saw something at some point.
"So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. "
Chris Boyle (Firehouse magazine).
"The whole south side of Seven World Trade had been hit by the collapse of the second Tower."
Fire Captain Brenda Berkman (Susan Hagen and Mary Carouba, Women at Ground Zero, 2002, p. 213)
But, hey, that's just me being rational and trying to understand what really happened and why, which apparently is nothing to do with 9/11 truth. Why should that stop you believing something you don't want to believe? Just stick those fingers back in your ears, close your eyes, and start singing the truther's mantra, "La la la la la, I can't hear you!"
Dave