Trade center engineer backs new collapse probe

An international panel of experts should re-examine the collapses of the World Trade Center towers, says a retired engineering executive whose firm was a major contractor for the World Trade Center.

"On Sept. 11, I watched a live TV broadcast of the progressive collapse of the World Trade towers with disbelief, as the mass and the strength of the structure should have survived," reads a statement by Richard F. Humenn, former vice president of Joseph R. Loring and Associates, a major trade center contractor. Humenn endorsed a petition, being circulated by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, urging formation of such an investigative group.

Humenn, who specialized in electrical engineering, was listed as an alumnus of Brooklyn Polytechnic High School on one page I located, where his background with Loring as a 40-plus-year careerist was given.

(However, Google and other search engines were highly uncooperative prior to locating that page and when I tried to call it up again I got a replacement that said that Humenn was only listed in links. The 911blogger.com search engine returned "no match" for Humenn even though a post about him appears. As I write this, a "security token" emblem shows up saying "your request could not be processed" -- almost as if to explain the computerized difficulties in verifying Humenn's background.

At any rate, Loring's web site shows that it was a major contractor for the World Trade Center complex, having been "selected for the original electrical design" of the trade center in 1964; having conducted HVAC, fire protection and telecommunications maintenance for the entire life of the buildings; and having been responsible for extensive upgrading of various building systems.

I could not verify an online claim that Humenn was the trade center's top electrical engineer with 60 people working under him before his retirement in 1998 (a date that I could not check again after pages started vanishing), but the claim doesn't seem to be exaggerated in light of his position at Loring and in light of the firm's motto encouraging ambitious young engineers to progress inside the firm.

Humenn's statement (I was unable to view it directly at AE911truth.org but found it reproduced at 911blogger.com and at opednews.com) asserts that after viewing the video presentation given by Richard Gage, a founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Humenn became convinced that "fuel and planes alone could not bring down the towers" and urged that an international group of professionals investigate all "plausible causes for the virtual free fall and almost total destruction of the WTC structures."

One blogger reported that Humenn was nevertheless wary of the idea that the U.S. government plotted the destruction of the two major trade towers and building 7 hours later.