USA: Yahoo! News — Report: WTC Towers May Have Been Weaker: “The World Trade Center’s designers may have severely underestimated the forces that wind exerted on the twin towers, leading them to design skyscrapers less able to handle the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report says. Wind tunnel tests conducted as part of litigation over the buildings’ collapse found wind loads 20 to 60 percent higher than those found in tests performed during the towers’ design in the 1960s, according to the report released Friday by a federal institute examining the collapse. The buildings would have been stronger and might have performed better during the 2001 attacks by terrorists in hijacked jetliners if the higher wind load numbers had been used, said Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ”
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