“I said you know maybe the smartest thing to do is ‘pull it’ then we watched the building collapse”

Larry Silverstein, leaseholder of WTC 7, in a PBS documentary: “I said you know we’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is ‘pull it’, and they made that decision to pull, and then we watched the building collapse.”

“Pull” is an often-used term in controlled demolitions, referring to pulling the building down.

It takes months of preparation to rig a building for a controlled demolition. How were the fire department and Larry Silverstein able to decide late in the afternoon on 9/11 that they wanted to demolish WTC 7?

(Silverstein later claimed that he was referring to “pulling” the firefighters out of the building. Believable?)