POLITICS: Physics Prof Says Explosives, Not Fires Brought Down WTC Towers

Originally posted by MacMerdin
BTW...anyone who has gotten this far....is it a good read?

Seriosly(sp?).....I have given my opionions, that is it.....nothing more. Howard...please keep up the good work...and WeComeInPeace...also keep up the good work. This is great. Although my opinions lie with WCIP....that does not negate the work that Howard has done. I hope this debate still continues....I'm learning a lot....most of you don't even know??????

Check your u2u. I'm not sure that you and I are seeing the same figures in the report.

labtop...keep up the good work also my friend. This is the best debate I've had on ATS.

Howard...

Nice talking with you. I've actually taken on a BIG task. At first I thought it wasn't going to be as bad. Yeah, I know...nothing is easy. But now, thinking about everything...it would take a person like me about 15 + years to do every calculation needed to officially say that yes or no it happened. I do have a program that is DOS based....yes that dates me...but my question was legitimate....is the inner core one piece or several different pieces? It makes a HUGE difference....don't ya think?

Originally posted by HowardRoark


You want to check that page number again?

Page 28 has no pertinent information on it.

Page 81 is an elevation showing the cross bracing in the sub levels,

Page 82 is a plan view of a typical floor,

Page 90 is a framing plan for a typical floor,

Figure 2-18 on page 95 is an elevation view showing the hat truss.





[edit on 29-11-2005 by HowardRoark]

Yes, it is page 90 of 280 on adobe...but it is the actual page 28 of the report.....sorry for the confusion. Yes, the framing plan of a typical floor is what I was talking about. You don't see the lateral bracing inside the core column? Hint: it's the lines that are connecting the columns running in both directions (x & z).

That is a plan view. Yes there was a grid of beams framing out each floor, but what I am talking about here is different.

Here is an elevation view of a typical building core frame (not the WTC towers):


This is a basic truss configuration. The diagonals provide the lateral stiffness, otherwise the structure would be prone to failure like so:



Thus the WTC core, without the surrounding floors and exterior walls to provide the lateral stiffness could never have stood on it’s own as some have postulated.

Here is the diagonal truss system that was present on the top floors only (the hat truss). It’s main purpose was to support the antenna and to tie the exterior columns to the interior core columns.



Hope that helps.

1. This really is a case of you standing in broad daylight arguing that the sky is green. The video and photographic evidence clearly shows that the cores indeed did stand, before collapsing straight down. Post as many line drawings as you want, the visual facts speak for themselves.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
Thus the WTC core, without the surrounding floors and exterior walls to provide the lateral stiffness could never have stood on it’s own as some have postulated.

2. You are only reinforcing my point here. The standing cores that we have all seen should have been weak laterally and strong vertically. They were continuous, massive columns that went into the bedrock. They should have fallen over sideways. Instead, they dropped down vertically as of they had zero vertical rigidity and support. This could only happen if the bases of the columns were destroyed.

Here is the diagonal truss system that was present on the top floors only (the hat truss). It’s main purpose was to support the antenna and to tie the exterior columns to the interior core columns.

3. You are either bold-faced lying, or you are woefully ignorant of the construction of the towers. Knowing your track record for knowledge of the towers, I can only guess that the former is true. If you continue attempting to sell this line of tripe, I will post the pictures and architectural data of the mechanical floors which had diagonal bracing, and also of the base of the structure from the 72' deep foundation right up to the seventh floor which all had massive diagonal bracing between the core columns.

4. You have still failed to provide, or avoided providing, any explanation for the molten metal in the basements, the massive thermal signatures of which were visible from space.



[edit on 2005-11-30 by wecomeinpeace]

did you two, Howard and MacMerdin actually read what I posted for you before my little political rant? I speedreaded it for you both, and in actual WORDS it is quite well explained how the core collumns were connected horizontally and diagonally.

The core collumn packet was designed to uphold at least 50 % of both horizontal and vertical forces, but had something like a 2.3 to 3.2 factor overload capacity calculated in.
If all floors would have "unrailed" themselfs from the plates on the collumns and neatly fallen down on each other (which is impossible since then they should have still hinged on the outside "tube"), then that core collumn packet would have still stood-up fierce and strong, for at least a few hundred meters, especially since the collumns were tapered, the lower, the stronger.

I will give you now some much better drawings, namely the original ones, so Howard can upload them to our internal database, as he did with his drawings :

wtc.nist.gov...

Page 112 to 131 from 216 is an actual appendix C on the original papers.
It's called : Standards for Structural Integrity, Inspection of WTC Towers A & B.
Read it and observe the drawings. The original ones, not those Howard gave.
Then go to these drawings :

Page 162 from 216, Typical Tower Floor Plan, Floor Live Loads.
All the loads are given in psf.
Page 170 from 216, Typical Floor with Double Truss.

Lots and lots of other drawings in front and after these 2 above pages.

NOTE : I forgot to address that Janitor-closet fairytale before, but since when is it ever allowed to have combustible chemicals stored in whatever place in highrises, f.ex. Janitor closets?
That's explicitely FORBIDDEN, all over the world, and was also in the Towers. Only waterbased chemicals may be used. Look it up in one of the Appendices, keeps you busy.
And I have news for you, a drum of f.ex. methanol would burst and plainly burn away if heated. And if the vapour above the fluid would feel the need to "explode", it would sound like a cows fart, pooofff, compared to the huge explosions you heard on the Danish audio/video.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
1. This really is a case of you standing in broad daylight arguing that the sky is green. The video and photographic evidence clearly shows that the cores indeed did stand, before collapsing straight down. Post as many line drawings as you want, the visual facts speak for themselves.

I said that the cores would not be able to stand on their own. You say that they collapsed. So I guess that I was right.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
2. You are only reinforcing my point here. The standing cores that we have all seen should have been weak laterally and strong vertically. They were continuous, massive columns that went into the bedrock.

Wrong, they were bolted together every 30 feet. Bolted connections will twist and break.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
They should have fallen over sideways. Instead, they dropped down vertically as of they had zero vertical rigidity and support. This could only happen if the bases of the columns were destroyed.

Wrong, this is exactly what happens when columns buckle under gravity loads.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace

Here is the diagonal truss system that was present on the top floors only (the hat truss). It’s main purpose was to support the antenna and to tie the exterior columns to the interior core columns.

3. You are either bold-faced lying, or you are woefully ignorant of the construction of the towers. Knowing your track record for knowledge of the towers, I can only guess that the former is true. If you continue attempting to sell this line of tripe, I will post the pictures and architectural data of the mechanical floors which had diagonal bracing, and also of the base of the structure from the 72' deep foundation right up to the seventh floor which all had massive diagonal bracing between the core columns.

Yes there were trusses in the subbasement. There were even transfer trusses in WTC 2 below the first floor. Who cares. As for the mechanical floors, there were three below the hat truss at 7, 41 and 75. They also used a different floor framing on these floors. This was because of all the additional weight that these floors had to carry (mainly elevator equipment, but also fans, expansion tanks, etc. ) Once again, who cares. It doesn’t negate the fact that the core columns would have buckled with the collapse of the building, which is exactly what they did.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
4. You have still failed to provide, or avoided providing, any explanation for the molten metal in the basements, the massive thermal signatures of which were visible from space.
[edit on 2005-11-30 by wecomeinpeace]

The buildings were on fire when they collapsed. The fire was hot enough to melt the aluminum from the aircraft wreckage. The buildings were filled with fuel (plastic, paper, etc) Why wouldn’t the fire continue to burn. It was nice and insulated now and could build up tremendous amounts of heat.

you are gravely mistaken with this remark of yours :

Here is the diagonal truss system that was present on the top floors only (the hat truss). It’s main purpose was to support the antenna and to tie the exterior columns to the interior core columns.

Just look at all the 4 Mechanical Floor plans, and the Lobby Floor Plan drawings I just gave you. The Lobby up to the 7th floor was heavily reinforced, just as all four mechanical floors were heavily reinforced.
Especially with diagonally trusses. LOOK.

Alone these 4 double high floors would have severely hampered the fluent collapse we saw with all our eyes, and why didn't we see a slowing down or halting when the collapse reached those floors?
Because you see them blowing to pieces when the collapses neared them.
And those very heavy pieces were launched up to TWO HUNDRED METERS away.
I gave you photo's of these events I believe on page 14 and thereafter.
The Winter Garden roof damage. The still not shown center hole in the WTC 7 south facade, but the shown southwest corner damage, and the verizon building damage, etc.

Anybody still believing that a natural collapse would throw pieces weighting hundreds of metric tons 200 meters away in a parabolic arc, is in need for psychologic treatment.

Just look at natural highrises collapses videos taken during earthquakes in Asia, and you will never believe your Administration anymore.
How you still can, after the lies of Collin Powell to start a war in Iraq, is beyond comprehension to me.
Btw, Collin Powell was the one pushing as hard as he could for US world supremation. He's not innocent, as perhaps many of you believed.

that buckled "core" collumn photo of yours is not even nearing the thickness of a real collumn, look at the one at the right corner of the collumn packet on this photo, and then at the 3 outside wall collumns, standing up alone, one of those, that's your "collumn" :



The real core collumns were BOXED collumns, as these :



Anybody ever asked themselfs, how the heck these 2 pieces of collumns could ever look like that?
It seems to me that they are 2 samples from a steel manufacturing exhibition, and dumped at Ground Zero.
The cut faces look like fresh from the factory to me.
I don't even see signs of a CUT with a grinder or whatever other machine, it looks like both are cut with a knife. Only a very heavy iron saw with cooling milk could do that. Did they have them at Ground Zero ?
Anybody ever heard of those standing around there?


[edit on 30/11/05 by LaBTop]

Let me go back to this picture*, if I may.



The exposure is a bit contrasty and dark, but it seems to me that those core columns and beams have a considerable amount of mill scale and surface rust on them. This was a major problem, because it interfered with the ability of the sprayed on fireproofing to adhere to the columns.


(*Before anyone asks, the thing in the center of that picture with all the cross bracing is not part of the building. It is the mast for the climbing crane and would have been removed after the building was topped out. )


There were reports of problems with the fireproofing going back to the construction when numerous areas had to be re-sprayed when wind driven rain would wash the fireproofing off before the building was weatherproofed.

From an article in the Fire Engineering Magazine:

These inspections revealed that the bond of fireproofing on core columns had failed in many locations and the fireproofing was falling off the columns in floor-high sheets. Photo 3, taken in 1994, shows a core column from which the fireproofing had fallen off in a sheet that is several stories high. The red circle and date was the Port Authority's response to the missing fireproofing. This resulted because the steel had not been properly prepared at the time of the initial spray application. Rust scale had not been removed prior to applying the fireproofing. The fireproofing had adhered well to the rust scale, but the rust was coming loose from the steel.

source (registration required)





As for the box columns in that picture, yes, those are the corner columns in the lower part of the core.

They transitioned from box columns to I-beams in the upper parts of the building.




In addition, columns 1005 through 1008 would have been directly in the path of the impact from the airplane in the south tower.

The buildings were on fire when they collapsed. The fire was hot enough to melt the aluminum from the aircraft wreckage. The buildings were filled with fuel (plastic, paper, etc) Why wouldn’t the fire continue to burn. It was nice and insulated now and could build up tremendous amounts of heat.

A fire which is hot enough to melt a few pieces of aluminum, is by far not hot enough to effect a massive packet of core collumns, which would btw efectively spread most of the heat away, to above and to under the heated collumns material.
And please, do not throw around that photo of a bit of aluminium melt pouring out a window again. That's a ridiculous small amount.

Plastic and paper and furniture and carpets etc can BY FAR NOT reach temperatures high enough to even start to affect steel.

The jetfuel according to NIST burned away in 6 to max 8 minutes.
So, you are serious and want to defend to me, that normal building material can BUILD UP enough heat, to reach a TEMPERATURE high enough to affect tempered steel??
Are you serious?
A fire can not reach a higher temperature than the highest combustion temperature of one of its constituents, combined with the ideal amount of oxigen.
And YOU KNOW THAT.
And that's the freaking important point here, if I would keep on feeding paper in a steel building fire, the steel wouldn't care a flying fart, since an office fire would not ever reach the temperature needed to soften or even melt tempered steel.
And the Towers fires were fed by oxygen blown in through the holes from the impacts, but it was clear after 20 minutes, that the fires on the first impacted floors were dying out, and only fires spreading to higher floors were in fact observable. On the lower impacted floors they died out because of lack of combustibles and enough oxigen to reach an ideal mixture which will ignite.
A woman stood in that impact hole!
Which is proof enough, that the fires were out and the wind had quickly cooled down the heated surfaces.

Those buildings were blown to pieces. And you know it.

Oh, my gosh look at that molten metal coming out of a car fire.

i see no steel melted in that car inferno.

an extra line to avoid being a 'one-liner' post.

Because you provided this photo* with that strange looking 45° CUT on the end of the bolted on plate :



That plate is NOT sheared off by a breaking force of weight from above or under.

It is CUT, so to see not with a torch, who would cut a plate under 45° ?
Perhaps with a grinder? I see something hanging on the left side of the cut, but not sure what it is. Could be molten steel from a grinder cut. The cut seems to be rosted.
And the bolts of BOTH connector-plates are still firmly tight, and holding the plates on the H-beam, as if it was still standing in the structure.

So, it looks as if the connector plates between this beam or collumn were firmly attached to the next identical part, before it was cut, or other wise they would not have needed to cut it to make it better transportable.
I do not know of explosive cutter charges which make so clean cuts, btw.
That means again that the structural integrity between this part and its neighbour seemed to have withstand the collapse.

Howard, I also see no buckled steel plates of any one of the doors, or any other visible steel parts of the car.
But I appreciate a good joke.

[edit on 30/11/05 by LaBTop]

Originally posted by LaBTop
And the Towers fires were fed by oxygen blown in through the holes from the impacts, but it was clear after 20 minutes, that the fires on the first impacted floors were dying out, and only fires spreading to higher floors were in fact observable. On the lower impacted floors they died out because of lack of combustibles and enough oxigen to reach an ideal mixture which will ignite.
A woman stood in that impact hole!
Which is proof enough, that the fires were out and the wind had quickly cooled down the heated surfaces.

Those buildings were blown to pieces. And you know it.

The buildings burned and smoldered for 3 months....
Maybe the government has some new type of explosives, but generally when explosives are used whatever's being exploded doesn't burn for 3 months.

There is so much wrong with the "exlosives were in the building" argument it's not even funny.
Has anyone come up with a reasonable explanation on how the explosives were put into place unnoticed at the exact impact sites yet?

So what happened to all of the aluminum rom the aircraft and the facade covers?

What happened to the oxygen tanks on the welding sets in the service areas when the buidlng fell on them?

What happened to the fuel in the emergency generator day tanks?

Has anyone ever heard of underground coal fires? they burn hot enough to melt steel.

Originally posted by HowardRoark

Has anyone ever heard of underground coal fires? they burn hot enough to melt steel.

Yes...I was watching some kind of documentary about somewhere in the USA (I know...very vague). The town has been living above an underground coal mine fire for the last 20 years or something like that....and they still don't think they can put it out for a long time. I know...off topic but Howard reminded of that fire. I was amazed when I saw that.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
I said that the cores would not be able to stand on their own. You say that they collapsed. So I guess that I was right.

I said that they would were strong vertically and would either stand, or if they did collapse they would do so sideways due to the lower lateral strength relative to vertical strength. You said that they were weak due to lack of lateral stiffness yet would somehow collapse vertically because of this, in direct contradiction with your own reasoning.

Wrong, they were bolted together every 30 feet. Bolted connections will twist and break.

Rubbish. The collapse was over and done with. All of the crushing action of any falling debris was finished and gone. And the cores still stood. There was nothing left to break or buckle those bolts + welds + splice plate connections + diagonal bracings --- nothing but gravity. Gravity is not enough to buckle and pile drive massive columns with a cross-sectional area over 1 foot x 4.5 feet; with 9+sq ft base plates made of solid steel more than half a foot thick; and with diagonal and horizontal bracing beams connecting to each other, through the reinforced concrete base and into the very rock of the Earth. The cores melted like butter and fell straight down for no reason. The only way they could do so and not either stand or fall over sideways was if the bases were destroyed, it's a simple fact. The base columns were melted, and all of the evidence supports that fact. None of the evidence and none of your arm-flapping supports your hypothesis.

Yes there were trusses in the subbasement. There were even transfer trusses in WTC 2 below the first floor. Who cares. As for the mechanical floors, there were three below the hat truss at 7, 41 and 75. They also used a different floor framing on these floors. This was because of all the additional weight that these floors had to carry (mainly elevator equipment, but also fans, expansion tanks, etc. ) Once again, who cares. It doesn’t negate the fact that the core columns would have buckled with the collapse of the building, which is exactly what they did.

Bollocks. The building collapsed away from and around the cores. They did not buckle with the collapse of the building, as can clearly be seen in the footage. The cores resisted the entire collapse, they were that strong. Again, it's a sunny day and you tell us the sky is green. Your only answer to the enormous vertical and lateral strength of the cores and their yet inexplicable vertical compression without anything crushing them is, "Who cares?".

Here is the construction of the core at the base.




Not even all of the diagonal braces are in place at this point. And this construction configuration went all the way up to the 7th floor, and 6 floors into the Earth to the foundation, yet even thicker and stronger the further down it went. Even if the cores had somehow turned to butter and buckled simply because of gravity as you posit, there should have been at the very least 7 storeys of the building sticking up into the air. There was NOTHING left but a flat pile of neatly snapped columns and dust.

Originally posted by wecomeinpeace
4. You have still failed to provide, or avoided providing, any explanation for the molten metal in the basements, the massive thermal signatures of which were visible from space.

The buildings were on fire when they collapsed. The fire was hot enough to melt the aluminum from the aircraft wreckage. The buildings were filled with fuel (plastic, paper, etc) Why wouldn’t the fire continue to burn. It was nice and insulated now and could build up tremendous amounts of heat.

That is the biggest load of twaddle I think I've ever seen you come out with.

1. The fires were completely extinguished by the collapse. Are you suggesting the fires survived the collapse all the way down to the ground? Do you see any fires in this?



How did burnt-out fires, 95 storeys up in the sky at the top of the collapses, with all the pieces of building at the collapse regions being ejected out all over Manhattan, somehow get under all of the building beneath it to rest at the bottom of the basement and still keep burning for weeks and weeks, at temperatures that no ordinary fire can reach, especially not in an oxygen-starved environment under thousands of tons of rubble and dust?

2. The fires did not reach temperatures anywhere near enough to melt steel. In fact not even hot enough to make steel glow.

NIST NCSTAR 1-3: Mechanical and Metallurgical Analysis of Structural Steel - p43

Only three locations had evidence that the steel reached temperatures above 250C. These areas were:

* WTC1, east face, floor 98, column 210, inner web.

* WTC1, east face, floor 92, column 236, inner web.

* WTC1, north face, floor 98, column 143, floor truss connector.

Other forensic evidence indicates that the last example probably occurred in the debris pile after collapse.
[...]
Similar results, i.e. limited exposure if any above 250C, were found for the two core columns recovered from the fire-affected floors of the towers, which had adequate paint for analysis.

The visual evidence and the physical evidence gathered by your favorite government agency clearly show the fires did not reach temperatures enough to soften the steel, let alone melt it into huge puddles. No office fire can create temperatures that can turn steel into molten liquid...ever. Thermite can however, quite easily. Here, watch a home video and see how easy it is:
www.theodoregray.com...

3. That single picture you always carry around with you of alleged molten aluminum is laughable. Firstly it was captured by a camera at slower shutter speed which makes what are likely sparks look like flowing metal. Secondly, if it is molten aluminum, then why is the steel right next to it a nice cool grey? Third, there is no evidence anywhere else of any molten aluminum, even where the fires were fiercest, despite the fact that the entire exterior of the building was covered in aluminum cover plates. And lastly, NIST admits that they adjusted the intensity levels on the photograph. One photo of sparks 95 floors up is all you can dig up to explain huge pools of molten metal still at temperatures of 1000+K weeks after the collapse.





From Prof. Jones' paper:
==================================================
Dr. Keith Eaton toured Ground Zero and stated in The Structural Engineer,
"They showed us many fascinating slides" [Eaton] continued, "ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster’. (Structural Engineer, September 3, 2002, p. 6)

The observation of molten metal at Ground Zero was emphasized publicly by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center Towers, who reported that “As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running.” (Williams, 2001, p. 3; emphasis added.)

Sarah Atlas was part of New Jersey's Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue and was one of the first on the scene at Ground Zero with her canine partner Anna. She reported in Penn Arts and Sciences, summer 2002,

‘Nobody's going to be alive.' Fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet. (Penn, 2002; emphasis added.)

Dr. Allison Geyh was one of a team of public health investigators from Johns Hopkins who visited the WTC site after 9-11. She reported in the Late Fall 2001 issue of Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel.”
==================================================

Has anyone ever heard of underground coal fires? they burn hot enough to melt steel.

So now it was coal fires under the buildings. Good one, Howard.



[edit on 2005-11-30 by wecomeinpeace]

about the planes aluminium, your guess is as good as mine.
What about it just lay there, untill the building collapsed?
The alu facade coverplates, I saw most of them still attached, some of them buckled, but still there. At collapse, I saw heaps of them fly through the air, but I suppose you don't expect me to find a list of them online?

Oxigen tanks, they got crushed and exploded, or lived through it. Perhaps these ended up near an underground fire, and exploded, but I didn't read any stories about tanks exploding days or weeks later.
Most of them I expect in the basements btw.
the sound of any tanks exploding on the mechanical lebels while the towers came down with an immense loud sound, would disappear in that sound, and they will shear and spout out their oxygen, which will feed a fire. You think oxygen alone explodes? It needs another gas or combustible to form anm ideal mixture. Mostly the explosion you hear is the 100 psi pressure which suddenly got freed.

That fuel in the emergency generator day tanks was situated as far as I know, not higher than floor 7, and most of it in the basement B level, so it could have feed a fire, however, most of these week long fires spouted WHITE smoke, not black diesel smoke which also did not get enough oxigen to form an ideal fuel-oyigen mix.

Ah, those underground coal fires I once mentioned.
Did you climb down there to fix your horse.shoes?

Seriously, coal is burning at much higher temperatures, if mixed with enough oxigen, than paper or other office materials.

Never saw a blacksmith stick a horseshoe in a heap of burning paper, computers, carpet, desks and curtains.
Did you?