He predicted a historical first while witnessing a historical first. Up to that point, nobody had ever seen a 47 story building get mangled by a 110 story building collapsing on it, with zero firefighting efforts to save it.
The "structural damage" was superficial. Source: NIST. If WTC 7 collapsed from structural failure, than the engineer would have to have a 100% perfect understanding of the current situation, which means disagreeing with the firefighters there who though the damage from North Tower rubble was pretty bad. The firefighters went through the trauma of the Twin Towers collapsing, and the loss of their brothers. An engineer "from the office of emergency management", however, would have a fresher and more professional perspective. This engineer predicting the hour of the collapse when the big fires had only been burning for about 30 minutes to an hour is very suspicious.
Do you think firefighters just stop fighting fires in buildings after everyone's out? No, they keep fighting to try to save the building. They know that steel will ultimately fail in a fire. This is common sense. Nobody can refute that. It's fact.
Yeah right, we all know that tall steel buildings on fire just end up as charred skeletons except for 9/11. What does not happen is a collapse just like a controlled demolition like something out of Loony tunes.
Thus the prediction. In addition, they were there. They had access to senses that the keyboard warrior doesn't. Sense of hearing. Sense of sight. There is no way you will ever have as much information as the people standing in front of the damn thing. INSIDE the damn thing.
There is no
they. The one I'm talking about is the anonymous engineer guy, who for all we knew could have disappeared from city record as soon as WTC 7 collapsed. It would seem that his prediction is the genesis of the precise and certain foreknowledge. After that, the confirmation bias sets in and all of a sudden every firefighter there swears they knew that sucker was coming down. "Foreknowledge" is an appropriate term here, and it should be investigated.
I knew when I brought this subject up, I was going to get quotes from firefighters talking about the structural uncertainty they perceived well into the afternoon, rather than the 12:00 - 1:00 PM the engineer made his call. Of course, there is also evidence (in the form of a false media report that "fifty stories went down") of foreknowledge as early as 11:00 AM. I do not deny that the fires were intense on the floors they were on, I've read all of the firefighters quotes that everybody else here has.