Documentary explains science behind collapse of World Trade towers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/02/2002 (8667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BY now, the whole world knows what happened on Sept. 11.

And everyone has at least a passing familiarity with the extremist politics behind those deadly attacks.

Much less is known, however, about the science of the World Trade Center disaster — how and why the towers collapsed, why they fell straight down in the manner they did, and what lessons engineers and architects have been learned as a result.

Discovery Channel sheds some light on these practical questions with After the Fall, a fascinating investigative documentary that airs tonight at 8 p.m. The hour-long presentation, hosted by Valerie Pringle, offers viewers unprecedented access to Ground Zero and provides numerous expert perspectives on why events unfolded as they did on Sept. 11 and how engineers and recovery workers have dealt with the aftermath.

After presenting the inevitable and all-too-familiar images of airplanes smashing into skyscrapers, the film shifts quickly away from the grisly and gratuitous and focuses on the scientific. First, the matter of why the twin towers collapsed — which was particularly troubling to engineers because the World Trade Center was designed to withstand exactly such an impact.

What wasn’t accounted for, according to the film, was the fuel load the hijacked airliners carried into the buildings, and the heat caused by the enormous fires that resulted. Using structural diagrams of the towers and computer animation that re-creates the impacts, scientists explain why the buildings failed and, even more interestingly, why Tower 2 — which was attacked second — collapsed first.

We follow a couple of engineers as they sort through the tangled pieces of structural steel that have been ferried to a New Jersey salvage yard, and watch as they identify individual girders and locate evidence that shows exactly what happened at the moment of collapse.

The film also examines how the site cleanup was organized, clearing away and sorting through the 1.5 million tons of debris at Ground Zero.

Even if you don’t have a mind for science, you will find this film intriguing. The people and ideas profiled in After the Fall are, in a word, impressive.

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Not a pretty picture: They say that every picture tells a story; for Vera and George Gara, the story of the picture has been long, painful and frustrating.

The Ottawa couple has spent the better part of a decade trying to recover a painting that was stolen from her family when Hitler’s Nazis marched into Austria before the Second World War. The story of their struggle is told in tonight’s episode of CBC’s Witness (which airs at 8 p.m.).

The hour-long documentary Restitution, which was directed by Winnipeg film-maker Elise Swerhone, uses the Garas’ case to illustrate the difficulties faced by untold thousands of Jewish families whose art treasures were looted by Germany’s invading armies.

In France alone, more than 100,000 paintings, sculptures and other pieces of art were stolen — the most valuable of which ended up in the private collections of Adolph Hitler and his top henchmen. It took years after the war ended for the art treasures to be returned to their countries of origin, and it has taken decades for the rightful owners of the art to be able to lay claim to what belongs to them.

For the Garas, who moved to Canada from Austria in 1970, the painting in question is The Scythe Sharpener, by Austrian artists Albin Egger-Lienz. Seized by Nazis when Germany annexed Austria in 1938, the potential value of the painting only became clear to Gara in the mid-’90s, when sealed Nazi records were finally released, allowing Holocaust victims to trace what happened to their loved ones and their possessions.

The Garas’ search for their painting led them back to Austria, to the huge private collection of Dr. Rudolph Leopold, a wealthy eye doctor who amassed a post-war art fortune worth $500 million U.S.

One of the pictures in his gallery is The Scythe Sharpener. Leopold is unwilling to concede that it belongs to the Garas. This case is just one of many being fought by Leopold and other art “collectors” who don’t want justice to diminish their wealth.

For the Garas, it isn’t about the money. It’s about righting a wrong.

“He — Dr. Leopold — stole it,” says Vera Gara. “He stole it, so he has to give it back.”

It will be some time before the Garas learn if this picture’s story has a happy ending.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca