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The 1975
World Trade Center Fire
The February 13, 1975 North Tower Fire has been carefully hidden from
you. Here are a few reports concerning it.

This 110-story steel-framed office building suffered a fire on the 11th

floor on February 13, 1975. The loss was estimated at over $2,000,000.
The building is one of a pair of towers, 412 m in height. The fire started
at approximately 11:45 P.M. in a furnished office on the 11th floor and
spread through the corridors toward the main open office area.

A porter saw flames under the door and sounded the alarm. It was later
that the smoke detector in the air-conditioning plenum on the 11th floor
was activated. The delay was probably because the air-conditioning
system was turned off at night. The building engineers placed the
ventilation system in the purge mode, to blow fresh air into the core
area and to draw air from all the offices on the 11th floor so as to
prevent further smoke spread.

The fire department on arrival found a very intense fire. It was not
immediately known that the fire was spreading vertically from floor to
floor through openings in the floor slab. These 300-mm x 450-mm (12-
in. x 18-in.) openings in the slab provided access for telephone cables.
Subsidiary fires on the 9th to the 19th floors were discovered and
readily extinguished. The only occupants of the building at the time of
fire were cleaning and service personnel. They were evacuated without
any fatalities. However, there were 125 firemen involved in fighting this
fire and 28 sustained injuries from the intense heat and smoke. The
cause of the fire is unknown.

Also, from the New York Times (Saturday 15th February 1975):

Fire Commissioner John T. O'Hagan said yesterday that he would make

a vigorous effort to have a sprinkler system installed in the World Trade
Center towers as a consequence of the fire that burned for three hours
in one of them early yesterday morning.

The towers, each 110 stories tall and the highest structures in the city,
are owned and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, which is not subject to local safety codes.
As Commissioner O'Hagan stood in the sooty puddles of the North
Tower's 11th floor hallway, he told reporters that the fire would not
have spread as far as it did if sprinklers had been installed there.

The fire spread throughout about half of the offices of the floor and
ignited the insulation of telephone cables in a cable shaft that runs
vertically between floors. Commissioner O'Hagan said that the absence
of fire-stopper material in gaps around the telephone cables had
allowed the blaze to spread to other floors within the cable shaft. Inside
the shaft, it spread down to the 9th floor and up to the 16th floor, but
the blaze did not escape from the shaft out into room or hallways on the
other floors.........

Only the 11th floor office area was burned, but extensive water damage
occurred on the 9th and 10th floors, and smoke damage extended as
far as the 15th floor, the spokesman said.
Although there were no direct casualties, 28 of the 150 firemen called to
the scene suffered minor injuries.
More from the New York Times (Saturday 14th February 1975):

"It was like fighting a blow torch" according to Captain Harold Kull of
Engine Co. 6,........
Flames could be seen pouring out of 11th floor windows on the east side
of the building.

So, this was a very serious fire which

spread over some 65 per cent of the
eleventh floor (the core plus half the
office area) in the very same building
that supposedly "collapsed" on 9/11 due
to a similar, or lesser, fire. This fire also
spread to a number of other floors. And
although it lasted over 3 hours, it caused
no serious structural damage and trusses
survived the fires without replacement
and supported the building for many,
many more years after the fires were put
out.

It should be emphasized that the North

Tower suffered no serious structural
damage from this fire. In particular, no
trusses needed to be replaced.

That the 1975 fire was more intense than

the 9/11 fires is evident from the fact
that it caused the 11th floor east side
windows to break and flames could be
seen pouring from these broken
windows. This indicates a temperature
greater than 700°C. In the 9/11 fires the
windows were not broken by the heat
(only by the aircraft impact) indicating a
temperature below 700°C.

So now you know that the WTC towers

were well designed and quite capable of
surviving a serious fire. I repeat that this
was a very hot fire that burnt through the
open-plan office area of the eleventh
floor and spread up and down the central
core area for many floors. This was a
serious fire.

Much was learned from the 1975 WTC

fire. In particular, the fact that the fire
had not been contained to a single floor
but spread to many floors, caused much
concern. The points of entry of the fire to
other floors were identified and the floors
of each building were modified to make
sure that this would never happen again.
For some strange reason, the
modifications failed to perform on
September 11, 2001 and again the fires
spread from floor to floor.

See also:

1975 New York Times Newspaper Clippings

The 9/11 WTC Fires: Where's the Inferno?

What Really Happened

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