Ausie Engineers say Austrailian Buildings vulnerable to collapse

Originally posted by bsbray11
HowlrunnerIV,

What evidence is there to support that hypothesis? I've noticed that a lot of scholars like to speculate how structures like the Great Pyramid, and now I suppose the Temple of Jupiter were built, but I'm most always disappointed with the evidence. You do realize that's an 1,100 ton block of stone? Strong tree, indeed. You'd need quite a few slaves to haul that baby too, I would imagine. Just look at the image. Do you think that monument could be rebuilt today with the same methods? Or even with our modern tech?

The Egyptian spires, yes.

Because I watched them do it in Egypt on telly. Remember the program bit?

Well, why can't the same principle be used on your 1,100 ton block?

Yes, the tree is a joke. Your axle needs to take what? Half the weight of the block? Remember, it is resting on sand that is slowly being removed, but resting nonetheless. What you actually do is build a hard edge on which it pivots. Your measurements and sums need to be really good.

Even this non-engineer knows that the more block-and-tackle pulleys you use, the less force you need. So, when were they invented? Did the Egyptians or Romans have them, or did they have to do it the hard way?

Anyway, many hands make light work, and enough rope and slaves and a few rollers and you can haul this thing up your ramp.

You're pulling it the last, little bit of the way upright, it's already at somewhere around 80 degrees angle, nearly perpendicular.

edit:sp

[edit on 8-12-2005 by HowlrunnerIV]

Originally posted by HowlrunnerIV

Originally posted by bsbray11
HowlrunnerIV,

What evidence is there to support that hypothesis? I've noticed that a lot of scholars like to speculate how structures like the Great Pyramid, and now I suppose the Temple of Jupiter were built, but I'm most always disappointed with the evidence. You do realize that's an 1,100 ton block of stone? Strong tree, indeed. You'd need quite a few slaves to haul that baby too, I would imagine. Just look at the image. Do you think that monument could be rebuilt today with the same methods? Or even with our modern tech?

The Egyptian spires, yes.

Because I watched them do it in Egypt on telly. Remember the program bit?

Well, why can't the same principle be used on your 1,100 ton block?

I've seen a few doco's on techniques like that. The sand method doesn't always work and can be a lot more work than needed. I think it all depends on the stone and what your trying to do with it.

There was a doco on a farmer in America who worked out a way of standing these 5 tonne stones all by himself using just wood, dirt, rope and gravity. It was pretty cool, it took him a while to do it but he did manage to stand this massive rock all by himself without using any machinary. I think he just did it for his own amusement, he was retired and was always interested in how the Ancients did it.

Originally posted by HowlrunnerIV
Well, why can't the same principle be used on your 1,100 ton block?

Yes, the tree is a joke. Your axle needs to take what? Half the weight of the block? Remember, it is resting on sand that is slowly being removed, but resting nonetheless. What you actually do is build a hard edge on which it pivots. Your measurements and sums need to be really good.

Even this non-engineer knows that the more block-and-tackle pulleys you use, the less force you need. So, when were they invented? Did the Egyptians or Romans have them, or did they have to do it the hard way?

Anyway, many hands make light work, and enough rope and slaves and a few rollers and you can haul this thing up your ramp.

You're pulling it the last, little bit of the way upright, it's already at somewhere around 80 degrees angle, nearly perpendicular.

*unplonk* LOL

you seem reasonably intelligent, so i would enjoy debating with you if we(you) can avoid insulting each other's(my) intelligence.

of course, these are applications of modern principles, and naturally wouldn't have worked back then. too ancient and all, you know.

admit you were wrong. the principles which guide architects and engineers, are the same now as they were in the oldest days you can summon out of a history book. tension, torsion, elasticity, chemical properties, stress distribution, etc. ancient principles.

the same people that think we can build a pyramid of giza today(ignoring, of course, the PURPOSE(form follows function), and focusing merely on the physical building), are the same people who seem to have an inherent need to 'debunk' everything.

i just watched 'crop circles, a quest for truth'. very compelling stuff. it's a MYSTERY! yes, there is such a thing. 'modern' technology provides increasingly more speedy and accurate answers, but man fails to ask the right question far too often.

to me, what is more important than whether or not australian towers are susceptible to collapse, is WHY are these guys talking about it? did they buy the lame NIST report, or the lame FEMA report, or the lame divergent theories from myriads of guessing structural engineers?

it was the columns that failed. link
it was the floor joists that failed. ----NIST and the official story.
fires melted the columns. ----FEMA and myriad guessing engineers.

the assistant architect, aaron swirsky(of the wtc) said, (i LOVE THIS! just found it....)

HARRIS: Exactly. That's what I want to ask you about. Which was it that made the biggest difference? Was it the impact felt from the larger plane, or was it the heat generated by the burning and that much fuel. 

SWIRSKY: I imagine, when I saw the pictures of the implosion of the building, it looks like the fuel must have leaked right to the core of the building, and from there it was the massive explosion that caused the building to collapse. So it was something completely unforeseen, so far as the design criteria was concerned. 

HARRIS: Let me ask one final question, if I may. Considering what you know about the building -- you say it was constructed like a pipe, these two buildings -- and the manner in which we saw them collapse, does that give you any hope at all that the way it collapsed, there will be more packets inside, at the bottom, where survivors could be found? 

SWIRSKY: Well, I sure hope so. We pray that there will be survivors and that this won't happen again. It's a terrible, terrible, incredible tragedy. 

hmmmmmmmmmmmm? do you think the assistant architect would know? i guess because he's an AMERICAN architect, and not an AUSTRALIAN one, he knows that american physics require an EXPLOSION in THE CORE to cause an IMPLOSION.



edited for beer effects

[edit on 8-12-2005 by billybob]

Originally posted by billybob
admit you were wrong. the principles which guide architects and engineers, are the same now as they were in the oldest days you can summon out of a history book. tension, torsion, elasticity, chemical properties, stress distribution, etc. ancient principles.

Those principals, yes. But those are (Newtonian) physics.

I still maintain that there is a difference between architecture (in some aspects) and engineering. Anyway, the point I was trying to make originally was that materials have shifted building design and certain principles no longer apply, such as height=width. In that sense the principles have changed, or shifted sideways, I'm not sure if I'm explaining my thinking here, but while form=funciton, materials=form and the materials we use today mean that an ancient simply wouldn't understand the form.

And there are principles in materials=form as well that an ancient wouldn't understand.

Such as pre-stressed concrete.

Look, my uncle was a civil engineer and one of the projects he worked on was the REMM/Myers Building in Adelaide.

I remember him complaining about the architects and their architectural plans. He said the Engineers sent every single sheet they received back with corrections on it, he said the architect's visions couldn't be made to work. I'm sure I even remember him saying he'd never seen so much red ink being used before. They were haveing to add beams, remove open spaces...structural stuff the architect seemed to be ignoring.

That's why I say architecture is aesthetics and ergonomics/comfort and choice of materials (in houses for the last, anyway) and engineering is the sums you do to see if it's possible.

Howlrunner and all. I opologize for coming off so harsh. I got into a foul mood from another thread I'm involved in and it carried over to here. Again, my opologies.

Originally posted by HowardRoark


uninews.unimelb.edu.au...

actuall i thought that was a good article,
but my read does not put the 9 September 2002 article in a
hypothesis category....

i read it as more slanted toward a "Wake-Up Call" article.

'It is universally accepted that it is unreasonable to design buildings
to withstand an impact from a large jet
such as was experienced by the World Trade Centre,
but some extreme loads can be considered" he says.

[passenger jets, commandeered by zealots, ramming into landmarks was not a consideration back in 1968-1972 when WTC #1 & #2 were erected...
in spite of 1972 Munich Olympics massacre the official worldview remained naive.]

'The ultimate aim (of Tall Building Design) is to localise the damage
to the impact or blast site and prevent progressive collapse of the building,
or at least delay collapse long enough to allow evacuation of the building'

[i believe this idea follows the FireWall and Fire-Delay ratings & strategies used in the building industry, along with stand-pipes or sprinkler systems which are designed to aid in evacuation until the more formidable fire-fighting personnel & equipment is on hand.]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mendis & Ngo, then touch on the design concept of the central core model for Tall Buildings.
they maintain there is a inherent flaw with a central core- which then has a very large area of floorspace, essentially candilevered if ever the fragile and
non-substantial perimeter (exterior) walls (termed 'columns') were damaged or removed as supports.
They also question the strength and durability of HSC, high strength concrete, under extreme stress/heat/abnormal loads in combination.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The real sad & frightning part of the WTC 1&2, was that lots of people & businesses thought it was safe to stay in the building,
they trusted the building codes, the engineers, the whole enforcement & construction procedure authorities who led the common folk to believe that the WTC towers were veritable fortresses, able to withstand hurricane force winds or moderate to strong earthquakes and even had engineering design to be able to survive an accidental crash of a DC 707 into it.

And ThaT (i.e. the false sense of security) and trying to bury the idea
that the peoples faith in officialdom & the codified and accepted building standards, rules, laws, practices should be questioned...is the real conspiracy.
The WTC-7 incident was most likely an opportunistic rapid response thing,
which serendipitously helped in the controlled demolition myth of WTC 1+2

with the confusion & disparity of so many tangents and issues,
'Officialdom' keeps the status-quo on track & the force guiding our lives
...as we get bombarded with mo' BS !

HowlrunnerIV, have you ever heard the reason why the exterior columns of the WTC towers were so close together? It seems the architect was afraid of hieghts.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
HowlrunnerIV, have you ever heard the reason why the exterior columns of the WTC towers were so close together? It seems the architect was afraid of hieghts.

I read that. Actually, I work on building exteriors and roofs. I'm slightly afraid of heights myself.....it gets better each time I have to do it. Today, I was on a roof (why I wasn't on this morning) and was basically looking over the edge with little to no fear. Tangent I know.

(emphasis mine)

HowlrunnerIV
But one of the things I am is an accredited English teacher and language is my thing. If someone meant the principals of Newtonian physics, they should have said the principles of Newtonian physics.

Now let's not be so picky.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
HowlrunnerIV, have you ever heard the reason why the exterior columns of the WTC towers were so close together?

It seems the architect was afraid of hieghts.

before you cleared that up for us readers,
(i'm not intending any slurs...or whatever)

i was of the mind, that the designer/architect had some sort of idea
that a 'millipede' or 'centipede' style of architecture would serve a function

the idea being that many, many, many thin 'legs' will support a great weight
-the weight being the steel floor trusses & concrete slab of the floor above-

as massive columns around the perimeter would take up costly floorspace
he opted for the 'millipede' model where many spindly legs (columns) spaced closely together would be attractive, take less space, and serve the mechanical function of adequately supporting the floor above.....

unless/until there happens a sudden catostrophic & massive failure of the engineered Floor-Wall-Ceiling connections around each floors perimeter

Who suggested that, St. Udio? From everything that's available on the WTC, it looks more like they were set up as two tall, box-shaped towers with strong core structures holding them up with 60% of the weight load (according to NIST figures, anyway.. I wouldn't be surprised if it was actually higher), and trusses, etc. connecting those cores to the perimeter columns that held up the rest. And the columns were much stronger at the base, tapering off near the tops.

There was much redundancy in the building's design. An average of 75% of columns could've been knocked out on any given floor before that single floor would fail. On top of that, the core structure should've acted independently, as it was only connected to the "buckling" perimeter columns by much weaker columns. And within the core, about an 85% redundancy existed, if my memory serves, again according to NIST figures. The core structure was apparently also designed to take vertical and lateral loads from what MacMerdin's observed, and so it should've stood on its own even without the perimeter columns. Long story short, those buildings were tough.

Originally posted by bsbray11
Who suggested that, St. Udio?
[...]
Long story short, those buildings were tough.

believe & trust & accept the official line.

those buildings were death traps,
waiting for the accident to happen,
many 'corners-were-cut' to allow WTC 1&2 to be created,
just like 'creative' accountantsdo, the scientific 'numbers & models' can be presented to portray a Fortress-Type building when a expensive yet deficient product is the reality

It is much more efficient and profitable to cloud the whole (WTC) scenario
with fictions of covert demolitions and conspiracy theories than to admit that the towers were not built with safety or endurance/protection as a primary factor- - -but that the towers were constructed for personnal edification and monetary+status purposes ( by Rockefeller family) which went hand-in-glove with the controlling governments desire to create a localized revenue/employment generator & continuing flow of tax revenues. Also

besides, if anyone ferreted out and presented that type of alternative view,
the disinfo agents would make short shrift of that line of thought.

but i'm sure you have your own internal word-view, which your comfortable with....i won't abuse your sensibility with mine....good day.

Originally posted by St Udio
believe & trust & accept the official line.

those buildings were death traps...
just like 'creative' accountantsdo, the scientific 'numbers & models' can be presented to portray a Fortress-Type building when a expensive yet deficient product is the reality

Ohhhhhhhhh, ok. Believe and trust and accept the official line, eh? But yet all the figures we have from the official line must be wrong, because the buildings were really much weaker than they're telling us. But trust them. I suppose I was just seeing things in all of those videos with disappearing angular momentums and unlimited linear momentums and squibs, too.

Thanks for clearing that up for me!

Originally posted by bsbray11
(emphasis mine)

HowlrunnerIV
But one of the things I am is an accredited English teacher and language is my thing. If someone meant the principals of Newtonian physics, they should have said the principles of Newtonian physics.

Now let's not be so picky.

Ok, a small apology and a little air-clearing.

I wasn't being that nit-picky or pedantic. The two different spellings there are my fault, my typo, it should have read principles in both entries. I was referring to the choice of language and words, not the spelling.

So much for English being my thing

I only get that pedantic over spelling if I'm deliberately being pedantic as a counter to some other foolishness. Or it's Quiz night and I think the scores might be uncomfortably close! Got to be competitive when free beer is in the offing.

Yeah, don't take that post too seriously. I'm constantly editing my posts for spelling and grammar, so I don't wanna be a hypocrit.

But back to the topic... uhh... Aussies are cool.

..except for the ones that mob Muslims... but that's off-topic again...

Aussies are cool except for the ones that mob Muslims.. and I guess the ones that are silly enough to believe in progressive collapses.

There! Now we're back on topic.

I'm still willing to believe in the concept of progressive collapse. What is an avalanche, except a progressive collapse? Avalanches slow down and speed up, they gain momentum as they go, adding the weight of the snow to the fall. So why not a building?

So why not a building?

In the case of the WTC?

Most of the materials was being ejected outwards, as evidence by where most of it landed (outside of the footprints - one huge chunk even ejected around 600 feet away - with the center of gravity within the footprints).

And, a smashed up, destroyed floor, cannot be expected to provide the same momentum an intact floor had. Just basic physics. Busted up materials don't coordinate their combined energy into any singular spots. They just bounce off here and there and would hit individually columns, applying minimal energy where an intact floor or set of floors would be the maximum. After so long into collapse, especially visible in WTC1, the intact floors didn't even exist anymore. Just rubble and dust and shards everywhere, and the building still collapsed all the way down without any change in speed. Seems a bit fishy to me.

I said a building, not that building.

And avalanches (of snow in particular) don't maintain integrity, banks give way and then break up.

But, admittedly, they are not resting on columns of ice which are pre-formed to take the weight.

All I'm saying is that I'm still willing to subscribe to the possibility of buildings being brought down, by whatever trigger, by "progressive collapse". If the conditions were right.

caveat, if, but, maybe...

Well, in that case, I wonder that, myself. I think that they would be extremely hard to produce by gravity alone, with chances along the lines of, say, 1 + 1 equaling 3 through some freak astronomical quantum occurences.

Chaos theory would hold that things would get unbalanced very quickly, and the symmetry would be compromised, resulting in lopsiding, etc. This is evidence by the fact that no progresive collapses have ever been physically reproduced in labs, etc. in full. That is to say, no one has ever been able to physically reproduce a progressive collapse, with any materials. There are just too many variables that can off-set the results. Demolition engineers know this well, and have to blow out any and all columns that would provide resistance that would send the collapse into an unintended direction.

The only progressive collapses of all of history, as I'm aware, were the collapses of WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7. I think this is a little suspicious, to say the least. The Murrah Building was of course partially collapsed from the bomb that hit there, which was blamed upon progressive collapse, when unexploded bombs were even removed from within the building. So the only known historical accounts stink of foul play. And still no one has been able to reproduce such an event as a full progressive collapse, out of any materials, let alone with all the conditions of the WTC collapses (ejection forces, speed, loss of angular momentum, lack of loss of linear momentum, etc.).

I started a thread here a while ago, titled The Progressive Collapse Challenge - but, two problems with it. The first problem is that it's geared around a progressive collapse of a building with similar conditions of the WTC Tower collapses. The second problem is that the thread turned into a lot of the standard arguments/bickering and not a lot was produced in the way of actually offering insight into the nature of progressive collapses. But nonetheless, there you have a 13-page thread that was created on this topic.