The Progressive Collapse Challenge

You have voted HowardRoark for the Way Above Top Secret award. You have two more votes this month.

Good post Howard.

The data provided by NIST is very good, and if someone has a problem with the burden of proof is on them.

There is already tons of data showing that the collapse was not caused by explosives.

How about one of the doubters out there making a model that proves demolition.

www.implosionworld.com...

In that link you'll find many pictures of buildings being collapsed with controlled demolition. You'll notice that most of them have explosives on the ground floor.

The WTC towers did not collapse like the ones in those pictures.

Even the kingdome, which was collapsed roof first, you can see all the explosions around the building.

www.implosionworld.com...

Much different from these pics.

www.civil.usyd.edu.au...

No outward explosions all over the building. No explosives on the ground floor.


How can you compare the two. The differences are obvious.

I'm sorry folks, you're all competely wrong

The real cause of the WTC towers collapse was

Intelligent Falling

More drivel, Howard?

The challenge is to reproduce your theory with some sort of model or simulation and prove that it isn't drivel, not explain it to us again, as if we have somehow forgotten with what we disagree.

But since you brought up this point-by-point excrement, I might mention that there was one point in particular that I notice you left out totally in your recap of NIST's whitewash.

• Explosive ejections of debris and dust tens of floors below the collapse level.
  

Ie,



To which you say:

Maybe it's because NIST also totally neglected to address these explosions in their in-depth, "scientific" report.

Well, go ahead, Howard. Just take a shot at it and fail. Get it over with and out of your system so we can move on and get to some modelling or simulations or something testable. You know you're going to keep seeing them anyway.

Try not to contradict yourself, though, because you're on record here ridiculing the idea that air travels like a solid projectile. We all know that it does not. We also know that compressed air equalizes immediately upon meeting less dense air. So you'll have to pull something else out of your imagination to get the job done on this one.

Some commentary on other points..

Given the forces involved, why do you find it hard to accept that some of the debris was thrown out as the steel warped, twisted and bent when the massive bulk of the building collapsed?

This is one of the things you should test when you finally get around to trying to prove us wrong. That is to say, when you finally get to work on some models or simulations or something. I say this because you offer absolutely no evidence that such ejections would be possible with a gravity-driven collapse. Rather, you imply we should just accept that it could happen without any evidence.

Also, give that he buildings were well over 600 feet high, the distance that the debris traveled doesn't seem that far to me.

So let me guess: since the buildings were over 1350 feet high, the debris should've shot out over 1350 feet laterally?

I'm sure you realize how ridiculous it is to assume the height of the towers had much of anything to do with the force applied to the debris to send it laterally. There is no such connection, as you imply, between a downward, gravity-driven fall, and a lateral ejection by a separate force. Two totally different forces at work.

Provide proof that all of the concrete was ground into "nano-dust."

Why would all of the concrete need to be ground into dust, anyway? It's certainly an amazing point that most all of it was turned to a powder (the slabs between floors), but that even a majority was turned to dust is odd, wouldn't you say? A vast majority of fine, powdery dust, rather than small pieces or even pebbles. And no large pieces were apparent during collapse at all, or appeared shattered on the ground afterwards. Just dust covering the streets like a fine, dirty gray snow.

If you want to prove that this would be possible without explosives, you know what you could do?

Create a simulation showing that there was indeed enough energy to do so without explosives, and then give us the procedure so that we may duplicate it and confirm it.

Hey, wait - isn't the whole point of this thread to encourage such a thing? Who would've thought.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace

• Complete destruction of the undamaged lower levels once the potential energy of the upper "caps" was spent.

That statement stands on its own in demonstrating you lack of understanding in the impact forces generated by a falling object and the capability of the structure to withstand those forces.

The point was, there was no longer a falling object per se, and yet the floors continued to collapse at the same rate of speed.

How?

It's plain as day that the tops of the buildings were no longer acting as solid masses - single, unified objects - into the collapses. Rather, the top sections were completely destroyed and the debris was scattered. The tops of the buildings no longer existed as tops of buildings. Yet the buildings continued to fall, of course, at the same incredible rate of speed.

Try this simple experiment:

Take a 50 pound rock and drop it on a car from a height of maybe 20 feet. Then take 50 pounds of gravel and drop it on a similar car from the same height. Observe which causes more damage.

You'll find that the single rock will cause far more damage, because its force is concentrated on a single location, because it has a much greater mass, etc.

Common sense, right? Well, apply the same idea to the WTC towers. How did disjointed, destroyed masses that were once tops of buildings manage to carry the same amount of force down onto the lower floors as they did when they were still intact? Debris was coming off the sides in all directions, concrete was turned to dust, steel columns were shredded and sent in various directions.. And yet the building continued to fall at the same rate, with the same amount of utter destruction to all the floors it reached.

Again, I ask, how?

Build a model, or make a simulation, and show us how.

In response to the rate of collapse, you imply we're looking at the free-falling debris. Not so.

Note how the large sections in the above photo are falling in free fall, faster then the building behind it. Also note the lack of a "majority of the columns and beams snapped into 12 foot lengths."

Check out this bit of info taken from here:

For the South Tower we define onset of collapse as the moment downward movement of the highest point of the roof starts. Unfortunately this time is difficult to determine since the roofline is obscured by smoke when the fall begins. The fall is preceded by a leaning movement that begins around the time the movie begins and accelerates for about three seconds. At somewhere between two and three seconds the top starts to fall. Once the top starts to lean, the highest point of the roof is the northwest edge. 2.5 seconds may be a good estimate for the time that starts to fall. A good marker for this is a small white squib that emerges from the level of the impact zone about three-quarters of the way back on the right face. That immediately precedes the first large ejections from the southeast face.

Using that marker it is possible to time the fall of the South Tower's top up to the moment it gets swallowed up by the dust cloud. At that point the dust cloud rises only slightly above the level of the 78th-floor sky lobby visible as a two-story band on the adjacent North Tower. A small extrapolation gives a good estimate of the time of fall of the South Tower's roof to the level of the 78th floor of five seconds. That distance is about 384 feet (12 feet per story times 32 stories).

That info is based, as the site itself mentions, on this video footage.

A fall of 384 feet in 5 seconds is 76.5 feet per second. That's 6.4 12-foot floors in one second. That's about 0.15 seconds to crush each 12-foot floor, resisted by steel, concrete, air, and all.

I don't know how WeComeInPeace got his figures, but for all I know they may be more accurate than these. Maybe we can compare sources or something. But either way, 0.03 seconds per floor or 0.15, that is an extremely, no, ridiculously fast rate of fall when the force driving the collapse from above is shattered and coming off the sides. Hell, it would be ridiculously fast anyway.

And again, if you want to prove that this is possible without explosives... feel free to submit a model or simulation with instructions so that we may duplicate your trials.

Maybe you can even reread the first post to get an idea of what the objective here is again.

[edit on 23-8-2005 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by LeftBehind
How can you compare the two. The differences are obvious.

And in these two sentences, you sum up your post perfectly.

You can't compare the demolition of a baseball dome, or whatever the hell that thing is, with three skyscrapers. Nor bridges, apartment complexes, etc.

Notice most of those demolitions on that page involve the buildings being knocked to one side.

Do you know how incredibly horrific it would be if the Twin Towers were demolished in the same fashion, knocked to their sides, over crowded NYC? Do you think the buildings would be intentionally demolished like that? Or, if they were demolished, do you think they would be demolished straight down, the exact same way they actually collapsed on 9/11?

And what you would expect would happen from an uncontrolled, gravity-driven collapse is an unsymmetrical, lopsided fall.

Originally posted by LeftBehind
How can you compare the two. The differences are obvious.

You think that explosives can cause that? It lasted several seconds, it clearly wasn't caused by explosives.

And WTC 1 or 2 couldn't have fallen, steel structure can't provide enough support to other side. When the tower bends enough it just collapses, as sawn at tower 2.

I have some questions..

When the plane smashed into the building and the jet fuel ignited, why didnt the explosives go off?

How is it possible to wire a building for demolition and then smash a plane into that building without severing any of the wiring?

Food for thought..

Originally posted by msdos464
You think that explosives can cause that? It lasted several seconds, it clearly wasn't caused by explosives.

And WTC 1 or 2 couldn't have fallen, steel structure can't provide enough support to other side. When the tower bends enough it just collapses, as sawn at tower 2.

So what did cause it then?

How long are explosive squibs suppose to last?

We'll be waiting for your answer.

The other comment I'll leave to who it was aimed at cause I don't know what the hell you're talking about, do you?

Originally posted by QuietSoul
I have some questions..

When the plane smashed into the building and the jet fuel ignited, why didnt the explosives go off?

How is it possible to wire a building for demolition and then smash a plane into that building without severing any of the wiring?

Food for thought..

Probably because the majority of jet fuel ignited outside the building as it hit. Fuel burns extremely fast. And who says the explosives at the impact point didn't get set off.

Another point, some explosives won't ignite just from fire.

And so what if wiring was severed? The majority of explosives would have still worked. Remember the actual damage area from the planes was only a very small percentage of the overall buildings.

And they could have used explosives that didn't use conventional wiring.

So there are many explanations for what you ask, pick one. Your argument is irrelevant.

I was considering whether to bother answering Howie's hand-waving and "ooga booga" all over again for the nth time, but I see brbray's done it nicely. A couple of additional points though...

I notice Howie failed to address this one:

The output energy of the collapse exceeding input energy in the system.

But I don't think Howie understands exactly what this means since it requires a basic understanding of high school physics and wasn't spelt out for him in the NIST report, so I guess we can excuse him this one.

HowardRoark wrote:
Wow, first it was 30 foot lengths, then they were 24 foot lengths, now they are 12 foot lengths.

30 foot lengths, Howie? You have become confused as to who you are addressing and who has said what. Not my problem if you can't keep up. I have maintained that the steel beams were snapped into floor-length, 12 foot pieces from the very beginning. Here, check out my original post on the matter. CLICKY.

And this one is priceless:

""When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible," he recalled. "The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing...

Every sprinkler head was going off. I am thinking to myself, how are these sprinkler heads going off? It takes a lot of heat to set off a sprinkler head. It never dawned on me that there was a giant fireball that came through the air of the lobby...

That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby
"

Your honor, I have no questions for the witness at this time, unless the court would allow me to inquire as to the gentleman witness's drinking habits...I do, however, have video evidence showing the first firefighters on the scene entering the lobby, presented to the court at this time as EXHIBIT A - 5Mb, taken from the Naudet video. The court will notice that there is extensive damage to the marble sheeting and glass in the lobby, extensive dust present as observed in non-incendiary explosions, and yet there is a decided lack of ANY "soot and black", no charred bodies, no sprinkler heads going off, in fact no evidence whatsoever of any "giant fireball"[sic], all contrary to the defense witness' claims. The conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I leave to your astute judgment, however one must indeed wonder if the witness is either falling victim to the late great Ronald Reagan's particular malady, or if the witness himself simply does not exist...an "imaginary witness friend", if you will.

In fact the witness's account reads rather like a well-scripted speech..."It never dawned on me..." he intones in mock astonishment. With no fire damage visible at all in the lobby, if there were indeed any burnt people present, one wonders if they did not come from the basement where numerous explosions have been reported by eye witnesses, and yet completely ignored by the mainstream media.

HowardRoark wrote:
It only makes a difference to people who suffer from an excess of dopamine in the limbic system.

Ooooooooooo I'm burnin'. Musta struck a nerve... But seriously, was that meant to be a flame?? Please stop before you bore me to death.

bsbray11 wrote:
I don't know how WeComeInPeace got his figures

Below is how I arrived at my figures for the collapse time, plucked from an earlier post of mine in Howard's Merry-Go- Round Challenge thread. The figures describe the mean time added to the overall collapse time by each floor over free fall.
====================================================
The NIST report states:
"The upper section of the building then collapsed onto the floors below. Within 12 seconds, the collapse of WTC 1 had left nothing but rubble."

So NIST confirms the time of the collapse was 12s. The towers were 417m (1368ft) tall. Free fall from this height under gravity takes 9.23s discounting wind resistance. So that means, according to the govt.'s ridiculous "pancake theory", the resistance of each subsequent floor collision added a total of only 2.77s to the collapse time. Since there were 95 floors below the initial collapse point of WTC1, each floor slowed the collapse by a mean time of 2.78/95 = 0.029s or 29/1000ths of a second. You can't snap your fingers that fast, folks! To give you an idea how fast that is, think of the time counters they have for sports events, the Olympics, etc. The numbers in the 100ths of a second range are just a blur. The numbers in the 1000ths of a second...well...pffft. The only thing that added this measly 0.029s was the sequential exploding of each floor, as can be seen in this video.

It is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the floors in a steel and concrete building to collapse each other at that speed and with that little resistance solely under the influence of gravity. PERIOD. No arguments. No comebacks. No bogus reports. This is a FACT. Gravity-driven collapse of a building takes place in accordance with the principle of minimum resistance and breaks the building into large chunks. Even IF the bending steel and initial collapse of the upper sections from fatigue were true, which it isn't, the collapse would not progress beyond a few floors before the kinetic energy was spent, some of the top section would break apart into LARGE chunks and fall over the side, and the beams and concrete of the floors underneath which were UNDAMAGED BY FIRE OR AIRPLANE COLLISION would hold. The building would NOT be turned into powder and a pile of neatly snapped pieces of steel. The length of all the outer columns was 36 feet, i.e. three floors. The majority of them were snapped into neat, floor-length sections. There were no 11-foot pieces, no 13-foot pieces. Only 12-foot pieces.

Pancake theory, crepe theory, waffle theory, wedding-cake theory...it doesn't matter what kind of dessert they call it, NO ONE'S GOING TO SWALLOW IT.
======================================================
Your (bsbray) method describes the time taken to crush each floor including fall time. Different methods, same conclusion: impossible under gravity-driven collapse alone for each floor to collapse that fast.

Any computer simulation or real-world attempt at reproducing the collapses, with only gravity and the fires as the input energy, is going to get stuck when it includes in the system any single one of the conditions I listed. I didn't even have to list them all, one would have been enough.

All the Howard hand-waving and NIST voodoo pulled over from the Merry-go-Round Challenge thread to be repeated all over again here, but still no one can rise to the challenge herein? Come on, Howie, you can do better than this. Why not call Svenglezz over? I'm sure his "twinty y'rs exparience in da construxion industree" can help you build a model that will go into "runaway collapse".

Originally posted by QuietSoul
I have some questions..

When the plane smashed into the building and the jet fuel ignited, why didnt the explosives go off?

How is it possible to wire a building for demolition and then smash a plane into that building without severing any of the wiring?

Food for thought..

Some would argue about weither or not explosions went off when the planes hit. As a squib is clearly seen at the opposite site of the impact face of the tower. The timing on this squib is believed to be too early to be (directly) caused by the jet fuel.

This thread has turned into another witch hunt.. just like all the others

You didnt answer my question.. oh nooeess.... let me make rude remarks and belittle you because you have a different opinion then me! Grow up.

I think the kicker was when you brought insults in from other threads.. that was classic

From earlier in this thread:

Your argument:

Computer sims can prove any out come the user wishes and especially when information is estimated to fill in the areas which are unatainable.
Did they ever do a sim for a demolition? i'm sure they could re-create that with much more ease

According to this line of thinking, this entire "challenge" is a waste of time as well. If you can "prove any outcome especially when information is estimated to fill in the areas which are unatainable" using sims then you can obviously prove "charges" were in the building.







[edit on 8/24/2005 by QuietSoul]

[edit on 8/24/2005 by QuietSoul]

Originally posted by bsbray11
You can't compare the demolition of a baseball dome, or whatever the hell that thing is, with three skyscrapers. Nor bridges, apartment complexes, etc.

Notice most of those demolitions on that page involve the buildings being knocked to one side.

Perhaps you should take a look at that site a little more in depth.

www.implosionworld.com...

They show many different controlled demolitions. Saying that they all fell to the side is pure ignorance on your part, I doubt you looked at more than one page.

Once again here is the gallery.

www.implosionworld.com...

If you actually take the time to look you will notice that almost all of those buildings are imploding. They are falling in on themselves to control the damage. Exactly the thing you are implying about the WTC.

In the pictures I have presented you can clearly see the explosives. Usually starting on the bottom of the structures.

If the WTC was packed with explosives, why don't we see them going off?

In the picture of a tower falling above you can see that the lower levels are not exploding.

You guys can't have it both ways, so which is it? Is it impossible for the tower to collapse from gravity? Or were there bombs on the top which then led to a collapse from gravity?

There were no low level explosions. You can clearly see the windows intact on the lower floor as it collapses.

So really all this gravity talk is just saying that it was impossible for them to fall.

What proves you wrong, is that it did fall.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
I was considering whether to bother answering Howie's hand-waving and "ooga booga"

typical

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace

HowardRoark wrote:
Wow, first it was 30 foot lengths, then they were 24 foot lengths, now they are 12 foot lengths.

30 foot lengths, Howie? You have become confused as to who you are addressing and who has said what. Not my problem if you can't keep up.

I have maintained that the steel beams were snapped into floor-length, 12 foot pieces from the very beginning. Here, check out my original post on the matter. CLICKY.

From your referenced post, you claim that the picture below shows these 12 foot sections.



You seem to be confusing the exterior column trees with the aluminum façade covers.

Do you have that shows that those are steel columns and not the aluminum façade pieces?

Here, look at this picture below. The aluminum façade covers have been knocked loose by the impact. In addition, you can see the seams between the individual pieces. They are clearly the length of one floor height.


(thanks to bsbray for finding that picture. )

I can’t imagine that those covers weighed all that much. Given the large surface area of the covers, I can easily see how they might “sail” a bit on the air as they fell. If you are confusing these with heavier steel beams, I can see how you might suppose that these were heavy beams being subjected to “high energy ejection” when in fact they are only the light weight aluminum covers.

In addition, the picture below is also from your post.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
The exterior box columns of WTC 1 and 2 were each 3 floors high (36 feet), welded and bolted to spandrel plates at every floor (12 feet . . .

Exterior box colums and spandrel plates
external image

Note how each of the exterior column trees consisted of three columns welded to the spandrel plates. Thus there are no 12 foot sections of the columns that are not welded to a spandrel plate.

Going back to that picture that you claim to shows the “snapped off 12 foot sections,” how did the columns get separated from the spandrel plates?


Nice try, but I don’t think that your claim that the columns were “snapped into 12 foot sections” is valid.

This tiny demolition caused car alarms to go off: Big boom

I don't hear car alarms going off in this video, nor did I hear any loud explosions.
Hohum..

I have personally witnessed 7 building demolitions. I have been as close as a few hundred yards to around a 3/8ths of a mile away.

If you have ever witnessed one of these, you would know that the sounds of the explosives going off are quite loud. If you are close enough, you will actually feel the pressure wave from the blasts hit your chest cavity. The sound carries extremely well also. Think of the 4th of July. Have you ever been a mile away from a fireworks show, yet you could clearly hear the sounds of the grand finale?

If there were explosives in the towers, everyone in Manhattan would have heard them.

How come none of these sounds has ever turned up on the audio portions of the tapes from 9/11?

Maybe Boris and Natasha used hush-a-boom.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
And this one is priceless:

""When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible," he recalled. "The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing...

Every sprinkler head was going off. I am thinking to myself, how are these sprinkler heads going off? It takes a lot of heat to set off a sprinkler head. It never dawned on me that there was a giant fireball that came through the air of the lobby...

That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby
"

Your honor, I have no questions for the witness at this time, unless the court would allow me to inquire as to the gentleman witness's drinking habits...I do, however, have video evidence showing the first firefighters on the scene entering the lobby, presented to the court at this time as EXHIBIT A - 5Mb, taken from the Naudet video. The court will notice that there is extensive damage to the marble sheeting and glass in the lobby, extensive dust present as observed in non-incendiary explosions, and yet there is a decided lack of ANY "soot and black", no charred bodies, no sprinkler heads going off, in fact no evidence whatsoever of any "giant fireball"[sic], all contrary to the defense witness' claims. The conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I leave to your astute judgment, however one must indeed wonder if the witness is either falling victim to the late great Ronald Reagan's particular malady, or if the witness himself simply does not exist...an "imaginary witness friend", if you will.

Do you have any idea just how large the WTC lobbies were? Almost an acre in size. Did the Naudet video cover every single area of the lobby? No.

Perhaps this quote from Firefighter Peter Blaich might help. Or is he drinking also?

We started going up the B stairway. As we got to the third floor of the B stairway, we forced open an elevator door which was burnt on all three sides. The only thing that was remaining was the hoistway door. And inside the elevator were about – I didn’t recognize them initially, but a guy from 1 Truck said oh my God, those are people. They were pretty incinerated. And I remember the overpowering smell of kerosene. That’s when Lieutenant Foti said oh, that’s the jet fuel. I remember it smelled like if you’re camping and you drop a kerosene lamp.
The same thing happened to the elevators in the main lobby. They were basically blown out. I don’t recall if I actually saw people in there.
What got me initially in the lobby was that as soon as we went in, all the windows were blown out, and there were one or two burning cars outside. And there were burn victims on the street there, walking around. We walked through this giant blown-out window into the lobby.
There was a lady there screaming that she didn’t know how she got burnt. She was just in the lobby and then next thing she knew she was on fire. She was burnt bad. And somebody came over with a fire extinguisher and was putting water on her.
That’s the first thing that got me. That and in front of one of the big elevator banks in the lobby was a desk and I definitely made out one of the corpses to be a security guard because he had a security label on his jacket. I’m assuming that maybe he was at a table still in a chair and almost completely incinerated, charred all over his body, definitely dead. And you could make out like a security tag on his jacket. And I remember seeing the table was melted, but he was still fused in the chair and that elevator bank was melted, so I imagine the jet fuel must have blown right down the elevator shaft and I guess caught the security guard at a table, I guess at some type of checkpoint.

Firefighter Steve Modica

So we started to go in towards the elevator bank area and just about every elevator bank had its doors blown off. They were just empty shafts, a lot of glass around, a lot of marble, a lot of granite off the walls, sheetrock down, some traction cable, scorch marks in a few elevator banks. No doors, no doors. The doors were blown off. Some of them were in the shafts, some of them were in the lobby. You had to walk over them

And slightly off the topic of this post, but Modica also related this little gem:

Then we heard this sound, this boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I’m like what the hell is that? It was four ESU cops coming down the stairs and they weren’t even touching the tread. They were going from landing to landing. We had to put our backs up against the wall to get out of the way.

Anyone with any basic knowledge of structural engineering would realize that this "Challenge" is not rooted in reality. In order for one to be able to recreate the events of the towers progressive collapse, one would need to recreate EVERY single factor invloved, down to each specific moment of intertia exerted on each and every structural member in the correct timing sequence... an impossible task as we are literally talking about billions, if not trillions of complex mathmatical eqations that need to be solved almost simulataneously... something that not even the best computer in the world could do.

Having sold engineering and analysis software for many years, I can tell you that when we attempted to recreate a progressive collapse of a building using the known variables available to us our results were all over the board. Simply changing one tiny variable (Such as wind speed or direction) has a propensity to change the outcome of the analysis. Also simply changing the material of the fasteners changed the results.

In short, there is no way (Unless completed in virtual reality) that one could accurately simulate all of the conditions present during a progressive collapse. Don't believe me? Simply check with people who specialize in actually creating controlled progressive collapses and they will tell you the same thing.

This should not be construed as meaning that the WTC towers could not have suffered a progressive collapse without the intervention of controlled demolition. What I am simply saying is that all of the appropriate variables were arranged in such a way as to create an environment that promoted a progressive collapse.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
It is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the floors in a steel and concrete building to collapse each other at that speed and with that little resistance solely under the influence of gravity. PERIOD. No arguments. No comebacks. No bogus reports. This is a FACT. Gravity-driven collapse of a building takes place in accordance with the principle of minimum resistance and breaks the building into large chunks. Even IF the bending steel and initial collapse of the upper sections from fatigue were true, which it isn't, the collapse would not progress beyond a few floors before the kinetic energy was spent, some of the top section would break apart into LARGE chunks and fall over the side, and the beams and concrete of the floors underneath which were UNDAMAGED BY FIRE OR AIRPLANE COLLISION would hold. The building would NOT be turned into powder and a pile of neatly snapped pieces of steel. The length of all the outer columns was 36 feet, i.e. three floors. The majority of them were snapped into neat, floor-length sections. There were no 11-foot pieces, no 13-foot pieces. Only 12-foot pieces.

Pancake theory, crepe theory, waffle theory, wedding-cake theory...it doesn't matter what

Once again you demonstrate your complete lack of understanding of how buildings stand up. You simply don’t understand the concept of structural stability.

A stable structure will stand up. An unstable structure will collapse.

Column buckling will cause a stable structure to become unstable.


How in hell can you claim that “the collapse would not progress beyond a few floors before the kinetic energy was spent?”

You do understand that the impact force of a falling object is much greater than the weight of that object alone, don’t you?

Are you familiar with the terms “live load” and “dead load” as they pertain to building design?

As for your 12’ steel sections claim, see my post above.

Wecomeinpeace said:

"It is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the floors in a steel and concrete building to collapse each other at that speed and with that little resistance solely under the influence of gravity. PERIOD. No arguments. No comebacks. No bogus reports. This is a FACT. Gravity-driven collapse of a building takes place in accordance with the principle of minimum resistance and breaks the building into large chunks. Even IF the bending steel and initial collapse of the upper sections from fatigue were true, which it isn't, the collapse would not progress beyond a few floors before the kinetic energy was spent, some of the top section would break apart into LARGE chunks and fall over the side, and the beams and concrete of the floors underneath which were UNDAMAGED BY FIRE OR AIRPLANE COLLISION would hold. The building would NOT be turned into powder and a pile of neatly snapped pieces of steel. The length of all the outer columns was 36 feet, i.e. three floors. The majority of them were snapped into neat, floor-length sections. There were no 11-foot pieces, no 13-foot pieces. Only 12-foot pieces. "


I say that is complete nonsense! This is purely supposition as does NOT take into account mean acceleration as a result of mass and momentum, material density and temperature and specific moments of intertia as exhibited upon the fasteners holding the tower together. Furthermore, the theory of the kinetic energy being "used up" is preposterous as each progrssive collapse generated further kinetic energy as the mass of the "force" continued to increase AND accelerate.

Beyond that I would love to see a credible source that stated that the outer columns were all snapped into "Neat floor length sections."

So a fireball went from above the 70th floor to the third and quite possibly the basement, where it wrinkled up that 40 ton piece of equipmet, throwing marble off the wall. I don't think I have to point out how strange this sounds.

What's more astonishing is that, the wtc consists of those sky lobbies, so those elevator shafts don't continue from top to bottom. The tower is split up in 3 parts, and to reach the top you need to get from one elevator to another. This was to speed up everyday "work-flow" and evacuation should it occur.

How about Michael Rodriguez who was head of maintenance in the towers for 20? years was it I believe. Who said there was an explosion in the basement, before any of the planes hit the tower ?

The only response to that was something along the lines of "the plane hit first but because of the speed of sound he heared the explosion in the basement first".



What about the seismographic AND video evidence about the explosion prior to the collapse, don't remember wich tower but I think it was the north.

I hear a lot of people saying "well, explosions are loud, we should've heard them". (Only talking about the charges during collapse now)
That's not true, you're thinking about a bottom to top demolition. This was not the case on 9/11.
The explosions started from the top, meaning, it would have to be very loud to make it that distance, especially with all the sound around you, it could easily be missed.
Plus, you would only be able to hear that first charge go off, after the first one the tower starts falling and creates an immense roar wich could easily block the sound from other explosions.

And don't forget that if there were charges, these were put in by the government, a few bucks more or less wouldn't matter if that meant to cover some of the obvious explosion sounds.

Not to forget that all I could hear on CNN that day was "another explosion" "we seem to be witnessing what sounds like secondary explosions" "we believe there was another explosion". ALL day long.