Why was 911 evidence denied to BPAT? (Building Performance Assessment Team )

Here's an aerial photo before the evidence was carted off. WTC 7 is sitting in it's own footprint on the North side of the street near the top of the photo. Note the metal pieces on the rooftops.

This is the same area zoomed in a little showing that large chunks of steel were thrown hundreds of feet from the Hmmm...Dare I call this an explosion...G:

Access Restrictions

The Closure of Ground Zero to Investigators

While the steel was being removed from the site of the three largest and most mysterious structural failures in history, even the team FEMA had assembled to investigate the failures -- the Building Performance Assessment Team (BPAT) -- was denied access to the evidence. The Science Committee of the House of Representatives later identified several aspects of the FEMA-controlled operation that prevented the conduct of an adquate investigation:

* The BPAT did not control the steel. "The lack of authority of investigators to impound pieces of steel for investigation before they were recycled led to the loss of important pieces of evidence."
* FEMA required BPAT members to sign confidentiality agreements that "frustrated the efforts of independent researchers to understand the collapse."
* The BPAT was not granted access to "pertinent building documents."
* "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."

Gene Corley complained to the Committee that the Port Authority refused to give his investigators copies of the Towers' blueprints until he signed a wavier that the plans would not be used in a lawsuit against the agency.


Rudolph Giuliani banned photographs of Ground Zero

No Photographs!

On September 26th, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani banned photographs of Ground Zero. 6 An account by an anonymous photographer (AP), who took the photographs at the end of the Ground Zero photographs page, describes the treatment of this citizen investigator.
At the end of this return walk a NYC police officer asked to be shown authorization for taking photographs. AP said there was none. The officer asked how access to the site was gained. AP said I just walked in. Other police officers were consulted, several said this is a crime scene, no photographs allowed.

A NYC police captain was consulted who directed that AP be escorted from the site but that the digital photos need not be confiscated. The captain advised AP to apply for an official permit to photograph the site.

A NYC police officer took AP to New York State police officers nearby who asked to examine the digital camera and view the photographs. Without telling AP, who was being questioned by a State police officer, the photographs were deleted from the camera's compact flash memory chip by another State police officer.

AP was then escorted to the perimeter of the site by yet another NYC police officer who recorded AP's name, and who issued a warning to stay away from the site or face arrest.