Squib Explanations: From Popular Mechanics to the History Channel

History Channel 911 Conspiracies, Fact or Fiction? A Review 8/21/07

Jim Meigs of Popular Mechanics:

"A building like that is like a giant accordian. When the top of that building comes down all that air has to come out, and where it comes out it comes out the windows, it blows out the windows."

Mathys Levy, author of Why Buildings Fall Down:

"It was just an enormous amount of energy that was being formed by the collapse of the building, and that energy compressed the air and caused the dust to be blown out the side of the building"

Jim Meigs interview by Evan Solomon on CBC News 9/12/06

Solomon: "What about the notion, and you've seen in documentaries like Loose Change and other things, that there are squibs - that as the building collapses, you can see puffs of smoke bursting out under it, and then in some cases, some say, some even above where the collapse is. what do you make of those squibs which many critics say are evidence of controlled demolition?

Meigs: "You know, it's funny, if you go into a lot of these conspiracy websites, you see a lot of technical jargon like squibs and thermite, but they haven't actually talked to anybody who works in demolition. We talked to the major demolition firms in this country, and they all felt that this notion was really ridiculous. For one thing, it would take months to wire a building like that for demolition. You wouldn't be wiring squibs up and down the building, you would be taking that out from the lower floors, and it would be impossible to do this in some kind of surreptious way. When they wire a building for demolition, they gut the building and hundreds of miles of wire would run everywhere through the building, there would be no way to do this surreptiously. And in fact, they told us that the puffs of dust and pulverized concrete and sheetrock you see coming out of some of the windows, in some cases below the collapse zone, is very typical of a building collapse. If you think of a big building like that, it's really mostly air, it's like a giant accordion. As it's coming down, as all that air is being compressed, it has to find an escape route, it's going to take the path of least resistance, pushing down stairwells, elevators shafts. In some building collapses, you can even see puffs of air coming out of the basement of the building. So the notion that you see puffs coming out from the windows is actually to be expected in a major building collapse, and it doesn't require some pre-positioned explosives.