http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/science/hsy77747.000/hsy77747_0.htm
The investigation has been hampered by a number of issues, including:
No clear authority and the absence of an effective protocol..... Early confusion over who was in charge of the site and the
lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for examination before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence that were destroyed early during the search and rescue effort. In addition, a delay in the deployment of FEMA's BPAT team may have compounded the lack of access to valuable data and artifacts.
Difficulty obtaining documents essential to the investigation …..,The documents are necessary
to validate physical and photographic evidence and to develop computer models that can explain why the buildings failed and how similar failures might be avoided in the future.
Uncertainty as a result of the confidential nature of the BPAT study: The confidential nature of the BPAT study may prevent the timely discovery of potential gaps in the investigation, which may never be filled if important, but ephemeral evidence, such as memories or home videotapes, are lost.
Why was it secret, Standard Loyal Bushie Duh Information is Dangerous Duh
Uncertainty as to the strategy for completing the investigation and applying the lessons learned: The BPAT team does not plan, nor does it have sufficient funding, to fully analyze the structural data it collected to determine the reasons for the collapse of the WTC buildings.
(Its report is expected to rely largely on audio and video tapes of the event.) Nor does it plan to examine other important issues, such as building evacuation mechanisms.
Instead, FEMA has asked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to take over the investigation. Yet so far, NIST has not released a detailed plan describing how it will take over the investigation, what types of analyses it will conduct, how it will attempt to apply the lessons it learns to try to improve building and fire codes, and how much funding it will require.
The 23-member BPAT team conducted an analysis of the wreckage on-site, at Fresh Kills Landfill and at the recycling yard from
October 7–12, 2001, during which the team extracted samples from the scrap materials and subjected them to laboratory analysis.
Why the analysis was conducted only after a delay of three weeks after the attacks remains unclear. Since November, members of the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY) have volunteered to work on the BPAT team's behalf and are visiting recycling yards and landfills two to three times a week to watch for pieces of scrap that may provide important clues with regard to the behavior of the buildings.
In the month that lapsed between the terrorist attacks and the deployment of the BPAT team,
a significant amount of steel debris—including most of the steel from the upper floors—was removed from the rubble pile, cut into smaller sections, and either melted at the recycling plant or shipped out of the U.S. Some of the critical pieces of steel—including the suspension trusses from the top of the towers and the internal support columns—were gone before the first BPAT team member ever reached the site. Fortunately, an NSF-funded independent researcher, recognizing that valuable evidence was being destroyed, attempted to intervene with the City of New York to save the valuable artifacts,
but the city was unwilling to suspend the recycling contract. Ultimately, the researcher appealed directly to the recycling plant, which agreed to provide the researcher, and ultimately the ASCE team and the SEAoNY volunteers, access to the remaining steel and a storage area where they could temporarily store important artifacts for additional analysis.
Despite this agreement, however, many pieces of steel still managed to escape inspection.
As a result, independent researchers are unsure how they can contribute to the understanding of how the buildings fell without unnecessarily duplicating work.
Others fear that the BPAT's silence on the scope of its report may allow critical aspects of the picture to be missed, and that, by the time the report is released and any such gaps are discovered, the trail of evidence that could provide answers may have grown cold.
How about 8 years later and Ice Cold
