Susan Fensten

Artist. Book Publicist. NYC Native.
Author: YOU HAVE A VERY SOFT VOICE, SUSAN (WildBluePress)
My Audible Original podcast Dear Cousin

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

Out now! My new Audible Original Dear Cousin is available on @audible_com. Developed by @Venture_land I narrate the story of my book. I’m so proud of this project and can’t wait for you to start listening. #TrueCrimePodcast https://t.co/UG1K60GpOx

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@kikicrowley Means a lot. God bless.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@CHINNIE1380 So very sorry 😞

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@stephanierw @unikunka I lived in Brooklyn under the flight paths for 3 major airports. The silence in the sky was unreal.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@unikunka When I went back to work days later, I was shaking on on the subway platform at Union SQ waiting for the train. Never felt like that in my life. A random man came over and told me he was nervous.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@kane Great stuff.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@MyNameIsWojcik @Sept11Memorial so sorry 😞

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@RealKathreptis @RutgersU So sorry . 😞

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@hbulwark1 🌹

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@VaughnMColeman So sorry 😞

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@DETECTIVE4LIFE That's why they shouldn't be there.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@ZachBrowne Watching it happen across the river on the waterfront in Williamsburg Brooklyn.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@dmsimon Thank you. Really appreciate it. He didn't work there, so it was a tremendous shock. Everyone loved him so much. I went to his funeral in PA. There were 1,000 people there.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

Robert McIlvaine was my friend. We worked together at Vintage Books in the 1990s. He didn't work at the WTC. He was only there that day on 9/11 for a breakfast meeting at the top of Tower One. He was one of my favorite people. RIP sweet Robert.

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Bobby McIlvaine was 26 when he died in the September 11 attacks. In 2021, @JenSeniorNY wrote about grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the decades since 9/11. Revisit the Pulitzer Prize–winning story: https://t.co/An25pqfy0N

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@DinnerWed It always feels the same. It really traumatized me.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@TheAtlantic @JenSeniorNY He was my friend. We worked together at Vintage Books in the 1990s.

[Alex Boge @alexboge]

I find these World Trade Center simulations by Kostack Studio fascinating because they remove the smoke and let you see the collapse much more clearly.

In the real footage, so much is hidden by fire, dust, debris, distance, and chaos that many people come away with the impression that the towers simply dropped straight down into their own footprints.

But that is not really what happened.

These simulations make it much easier to see that the collapse begins in the heavily damaged and fire-weakened region, the upper section starts moving and tilting, and the destruction then propagates downward through the structure.

The towers do not simply disappear vertically into their own footprints. Large portions of the upper structure and exterior are moving outward and to the side as the collapse develops. Much of that motion is simply obscured in the real videos once the enormous debris cloud forms.

And this is also why I find these simulations useful when people describe the collapses as looking like “controlled demolition.”

Strip away the smoke and dust and the resemblance becomes much less convincing.

What you see is a highly asymmetric structural failure beginning around the aircraft-damaged and fire-affected floors, followed by an enormous moving mass progressively overwhelming the structure beneath it. There is tilting, rotation, exterior columns peeling away, debris being thrown far outside the building footprint, and structural failure occurring chaotically as the collapse moves downward.

That is very different from the neat mental image usually implied by “controlled demolition,” where structural supports are deliberately severed in a carefully timed sequence to produce a predetermined collapse.

And importantly, we already know what preceded these collapses.

Both towers suffered massive aircraft-impact damage. Fireproofing was stripped from portions of the structure. Large, uncontrolled fires then burned across multiple floors - for about 56 minutes in the South Tower and about 102 minutes in the North Tower - heating and weakening structural components until collapse initiated.

Once that upper mass began moving, the loads imposed on the floors and structure beneath became vastly greater than anything they had been designed to carry.

The result was progressive collapse.

No, an animation is not proof simply because it looks convincing, and these are not official NIST simulations. They are visualizations built under particular assumptions.

But as visualizations, I think they are extremely useful.

They let you see something the original footage often cannot show clearly: beneath that enormous cloud of smoke and debris was a complicated, violent, asymmetric structural failure - not two buildings neatly dropping straight down into their own footprints.

A note on the simulation: this is not intended to reproduce the collapse down to the exact motion of every beam, floor panel, and fragment of debris. No practical simulation could do that. Its value is in modeling the large-scale structural behavior - how the major sections deform, move, tilt, separate, and progressively fail. Think of it as a visualization of the mechanics and overall collapse behavior, not a frame-by-frame reconstruction of where every piece of steel ultimately landed.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@TheOlChippy I heard the explosion all the way across the river in my apt on the waterfront in Williamsburg Brooklyn. Then went outside and to my horror saw what was happening.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@furbalicious555 lol! my mother also worked on Beavis and Butt-Head!

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@MariamaJames13 My deepest condolences on the loss of your parents that day. You have my respect.

[Susan Fensten @SusanFensten]

@DrSarteschi He's your cat now. This is one of mine now. I rescued his pregnant mother from my yard last summer. She had her kittens in my apt. I kept two and everyone, mother included, all got adopted to amazing homes.