Reading Time: < 1 minute

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Fire was the primary cause of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 in New York City, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Fires were caused by debris from one of the center’s Twin Towers, according to NIST, a federal agency that investigates building failures.

The towers were struck by airplanes as part of a terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001.

More than 200 people, including scientists and engineers outside of NIST, produced the 2008 NIST report on the center attacks.

The consensus among them and other investigators was fire was the primary cause of the Building 7 collapse, international engineering academics wrote in 2020.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, suggested April 21 that the 47-story building was felled by a “controlled demolition” and that the government has covered up something. He cited a film that raised the demolition conspiracy theory.

NIST said it found no evidence of a blast.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

Think you know the facts? Put your knowledge to the test. Take the Fact Brief quiz

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Tom Kertscher joined Wisconsin Watch as a full-time Milwaukee-based reporter in October 2024 after starting as a freelance Fact Briefs reporter in January 2023. In addition to contributing to Wisconsin Watch’s collaboration with The Gigafact Project to combat online misinformation, he reports on Wisconsin policy, labor, energy and the rapid expansion of data centers across the state. Kertscher is a former longtime reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and the author of two sports books, on Al McGuire and Brett Favre.