With a billboard in Times Square and a global ad campaign, a group keeps questioning what happened twelve years ago
Sept. 11, 2013
Smack in the middle of the northern half of Times Square there is a glass booth that sells tickets for Broadway shows. The scene is lit at all hours by hundreds of neon signs, news tickers and depictions of giant M&Ms climbing over Manhattan landmarks.
Stand by the ticket booth this week and glance across the street. Plastered to the side of the Doubletree Hotel, you’ll see an ad for a new ABC television show, digital posters for Broadway staples. Look east and you’ll see a 54-foot tall, 48-foot wide sign, that says, “Did you know a 3rd tower fell on 9/11?”
As the world marks the twelfth year since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, a campaign called the ReThink911 Coalition is drawing attention to one of the lesser-known events of that day–the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. Prior to the Sept. 11 Attacks, 7 World Trade Center was a 47-story building just north of the Twin Towers. When the North Tower collapsed, debris hit Building 7, igniting a fire that burned out of control over the course of the day. At 5:21 pm, nearly seven hours after the North Tower came down, 7 World Trade Center crumbled quickly to the ground.
“The heat from the uncontrolled fires caused steel floor beams and girders to thermally expand, leading to a chain of events that caused a key structural column to fail,” the NIST concluded. “The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building.”