Why Should the WTC Towers Suffer Complete Collapse?

Originally posted by gottago

I agree I don't see granulating steel, that's quite a jump, but what the heck is causing all that?

Well, let's just take the sheetrock on one floor. 209 x 209 sq ft, 60 ft to central core on 2 sides, 30 ft to central core on other 2 sides, 10 ft walls, and ceilings. This doesn't count any sheetrock around the central core or the inside of the central core.

That's 2145 cubic feet of sheetrock (assuming 5/8" thick) per floor.

I have a lot of questions about the collapse of the towers. A LOT. I've been open about that. But I don't think we need to resort to disintegrating steel (that we have visual evidence wasn't) in order to account for the debris cloud during collapse.

EDIT: Had a math error - had 2345, changed to 2145

[edit on 2-13-2008 by Valhall]

Originally posted by gottago
reply to post by Valhall

 

Val,

On that front, do you have any credible estimates on the actual amount of steel recovered? I've seen estimates all over the place.

I believe the official statements on the amount of steel would be based on what was in the buildings. Which means they were pretty close. But I don't think the criminals who carted it off and sold the evidence would report what the actual amount was. That means they would have to pay taxes on what they were paid per pound on it.

reply to post by Valhall


Ah, The sheetrock! Fond memories of the outset of this thread! Agreed, it was a major component of the clouds, but did you see this post on p.10 re: the USGS survey of the dust? A whole slew of exotic metals and 3-4% iron found in it, while the sheetrock tested only trace. Subtract the huge volume due to pulverized sheetrock and the concrete and you've got an enormous concentration of iron and other metals in the rest.

As for the steel, I was afraid that would be the case. Another inconvenient figure "overlooked."

Yes, yes, I did. As a matter of fact I spent a good bit reading it and then reading some of the documents concerning the EPA testing and the class action suit that is going on.

Do you realize that asbestos alone contains iron? According to which type it is (white, brown or blue) it can contain from 2% iron up to 20% iron. Also, the red primer pointed out in the picture of the wheat chex ... that red primer is pigmented with iron oxide. And did you know that 3 sides of every external column (the inside face and the two "sides" of the column) were covered with vermiculite plaster? Yet another friable iron-containing substance.

My point here being that there were 110 stories, each with over 30,000 sq ft of fillable office space in each building, and the "filling" provides enough friable material to create the debris cloud we see, and also contains enough sources (especially when you add in the friable materials on the steel) to account for 10% iron in dust samples around the area. Why do we have to go to extraordinary measures, for which there is no evidence, to account for dust, when we have over 3 million sq ft of office space containing friable content in each building? There is even one 911 truth-type video that has a rescue worker talking about that one of the things that struck him so hard is that there was NO identifiable contents in the debris. The largest thing he found was half of a phone key pad.

As was said before, just taking the office space and completely ignoring the central core outer walls, and the extremely thick firewall gypsum board in the stairwells and such on the inside of the core structure we have 2145 cu ft of compressed sheetrock. Now let's add in the concrete on the floors. 4 inches thick and just using the office space floor area we get 11,340 cu ft per floor of concrete. Add those two together and we get 13,485 cu ft of friable material per floor. That's the equivalent of a cube of compressed concrete and sheetrock that is 24 ft long, 24 ft wide and 24 ft tall for EACH FLOOR. And that's in the COMPRESSED state. That's 23.3 MILLION cubic inches of friable material per floor. That's enough dust to cover 93.2 million square inches of street, sidewalk and every other horizontal surface with a 1/4 inch of dust PER FLOOR. In other words, enough dust per floor to cover a 3 block x 3 block area with 1/4" dust based solely on the concrete and sheetrock content of a floor. And there were 220 floors like that.

Just trying to be a voice of reason here. If you have that much friable material (and we haven't even considered friable furnishings and other content) why in the world would you want to resort to nonsensical claims of "90% of the steel granulized" when every single frame of every single video of the collapses scream out that statement is dead wrong???

[edit on 2-14-2008 by Valhall]

reply to post by Valhall


Good perspective of the volume of friables. Asbestos remained in the first 40-odd floors of WTC 1 according to a Mt Sinai report on health risks, and an EPA analysis of the dust reported in the Boston Globe on 9/14/01 showed one sample of 4% asbestos content in the dust, the other three at "safe" levels (however they came to that determination) of less than 1%. So the steel primer is a more important source of iron than the relatively small amounts that asbestos could contribute, though even there I doubt you can reach the levels required.

The building contents contributed exotic metals and notably a large amount of copper. But right here you have to ask yourself the question of why did the dust clouds actually happen on the scale they did and contain the stuff they did? Yes, you can trace back to explain the source constituents, but should they be there at all? USGS cites pipes and wiring as a source for the copper. I find that exceeding strange.

Can all this seriously be contributed to gravity-driven collapse? Here I balk. The dense, roiled mass of dust, reported by the nearest survivors to have been like a hot wall of dense gas and gravel that literally swept them off their feet and carried them aloft for yards, and that several compared to a volcano: is that really what one should expect from a building collapse, even of one so large?

Likewise the streaming trails of structural members, most notably the perimeter sections--assuming this is caused by the vermiculite, what mechanism of pulverization caused this? Is a gravity-driven collapse going to make them stream "smoke" like that? And what caused the massive, dense waterfall of particulate streaming from the west face of the tower in the photo below? Why should a building turn what is essentially its entire contents, including its concrete, into dust as it falls?



The dust can be parsed and explained with enough uncertainty to give anyone enough play to CYA, once you take the staggeringly anomalous as a given, but why should we accept that premise?

[edit on 14-2-2008 by gottago]

Well, just to be clear, this is what I *DO* accept:

1. There was enough friable material to create the VOLUME of debris cloud seen in the collapses. I don't feel any need to disintegrate steel. I'd like to add some more logical argument against this silly business if you don't mind.

In order to "granulate steel" you would have to reach an energy level to undo the crystalline structure of steel. Okay, the energy required to do this is FAR GREATER than the energy required to:

pulverize sheetrock
pulverize concrete
do the exact same thing to aluminum
HVAC ducts
copper piping
etc....

SO - for every single chunk of bonded concrete, or intact aluminum cladding on a given floor, you have that piece of intact material as a data point that contradicts that steel on that same floor could "granulize". So, for every frame of every video that shows aluminum cladding intact and falling away from a given floor - you have that many pieces of evidence to prove "granulized steel" wrong.

2. The other questions you brought up are about the behavior of the debris cloud (i.e. spewing up, etc.) - that's an entirely different subject that I am in no way speaking to with my comments on this thread. While I share the awe you voice when I see the upward movement, I'm not sure it's not explainable...but I'm not saying it IS explainable either.

3. The solid pieces and their trajectories - TOTALLY different subject to what I'm commenting on. The more solid the debris, the more questions arise - and I firmly agree with that.

[edit on 2-14-2008 by Valhall]

I'd like to know more about the dust clouds consisting of 3% to 4% iron if anybody has any good links on that. That kind of blows my mind, honestly.

Originally posted by Valhall
In order to "granulate steel" you would have to reach an energy level to undo the crystalline structure of steel.

Exactly.

SO - for every single chunk of bonded concrete, or intact aluminum cladding on a given floor, you have that piece of intact material as a data point that contradicts that steel on that same floor could "granulize".

But if we're talking about (an) intentionally-set device(s) of some kind (which I think we may be), then what if, say, parts of the core were exposed to extreme amounts of energy, especially heat energy, but it was meant to stay within the core and so it wouldn't necessarily destroy the aluminum panels on the outside (for example), whether from being directed or just the heat dissipating by the volume of air it would have to expand through or etc.

Then we could have an idea data that matches what we know about steel being dissociated in at least *some* cases (because certainly not all of it or even most of it was dissociated), as well as all the all the other anomalies we could reference that involve steel and heat from the WTC. I would say this may be a clue as to the real destruction mechanism, and of course heat will definitely fail steel in such massive amounts. It also seems like it would be the most natural fit with the "official" explanation. FEMA reported melted steel, and I have seen metallurgists with FEMA's team inspecting bent columns to say that they must have been bent at extreme temperatures because of the lack of fractures along the steel as it bent over. A lot of heat is a very recurring theme with WTC issues anyway, from witness testimonies to photographic and video evidence, to just the fact that the debris pile smoldered for months and initially had surface temperatures of about 600 or 700 C in places.

reply to post by gottago



Careful!! you are not supposed to ask how huge sections of steel can possibly get hot enough from gravity to smoke all the way down. They cannot explain that. It cannot happen. Yet it did. That is the whoile key to the whole mess. ALL of the things that happened, could not happen..or at the very least should not.

There is NO resemblance to a collapse in the Towers destruction, none at all. We all know that a Tower that had weakened enough to fall would had gone to one side or another, no way that the upper section would choose the path of greatest resistance. Impossible. And the core would have twisted some and bent at places where the seperation took place, but to imagine total disintegration of the core and the rest from gravity is ludicrous.

I wonder sometimes what the really smart people are thinking: They KNOW the Towers were done by an inside job; only the naive could possible accept the official story now. How they can go along with the ruse is beyond me. It does not take a genius to see the elements of this: No explanation given officially has ever been proven valid. What I think is that the secret government that Clinton talked about, and had no control over, has taken over with the help of the Bush cabal and now the shadow government has merged into the official one: They are one and the same now!!

Why stay in the shadows when you can brazenly take the Towers down and give a phony story and have it swallowed hook line and sinker by the vast majority of Americans? The perps relied on this more than any other factor : Control of the media and the nature of the American public to trust official sources without question. Most Americans are more concerned with petty scandals in Hollywood than whjether or not they are marching into slavery. It sickens the sound mind to realize that they have gotten away with the 9-11 job because they have effectively managed to turn our nation into a place where no mater what they do, they can be assured of never being brought to justice.

The original question on this thread was: WHY should the Towers collapse? here is the only answewr: They should NOT have, under any circumstances whatsoever. Pulverization and dustification and scorched cars blocks away flipped upside down and showing signs of damage explainable only one way: DEW. And that comes only from within, from the shadow government that has marched boldly into the light. The anthrax that caused the Patriot Act was a message to the liberal Senators: Go with the flow or end up dead. That is why we see no one in congress ever take a moment to notice the elephant in the room, even when it defacates: They plug their noses and go right on with the coverup.

Does anyone here really believe that Henry Waxman and Ted Kennedy and the other liberals ( so called ) believe the official story? What a joke!! They just know that if they make a wrong move they will end up like all the others who die or disappear; the black ops and shadow players have taken over the executive branch, intimidated the congress thru coercion and fear of murder, and placed lackeys on the Supreme Court to finish off the three branches.

We were taken over, from within, just like old Kruschev said in the 60's, but not by the terribel old commie's, no Sir; we have been taken by the Neocon/Israeli/military-industrial complex/corporate amalgam that now has reduced America to a place where a dumbed down and complacent people swallow everything told them and not ask questions. It is over, I am sad to say.

If we the people could not get exposed for all the world to see, the OBVIOUS inside job of 9-11 and expose the perps ( which we have done ) and get justice for that horrible crime, then all is lost. They can do it again and again and nothing willl change, because they control the flow of info and tell the drones who is a nut and who is right, and they never question the face on TV. God help us all; I think we are nearing the end. All that patriot blood spilled for cenbturies, all those soldiers who died for the Constitution so a failed drunk and cokehead named Bush could call it' nothing but a Goddamned piece of paper ' and show his contempt not only for them, but for us all.

It would take a miracle, a real miracle, to reverse this mess. Anyone see one on the horizon lately?

Originally posted by bsbray11
I'd like to know more about the dust clouds consisting of 3% to 4% iron if anybody has any good links on that. That kind of blows my mind, honestly.

bsbray,

See these posts on this thread p.10 , which examines and links to the USGS analysis of the dust, and p. 15, which examines the DELTA group's (UC Davis) study of the toxic plume given off for months after the collapses. Both posts have links to the relevant source studies.

But if we're talking about (an) intentionally-set device(s) of some kind (which I think we may be), then what if, say, parts of the core were exposed to extreme amounts of energy, especially heat energy, but it was meant to stay within the core and so it wouldn't necessarily destroy the aluminum panels on the outside (for example), whether from being directed or just the heat dissipating by the volume of air it would have to expand through or etc.

Then we could have an idea data that matches what we know about steel being dissociated in at least *some* cases (because certainly not all of it or even most of it was dissociated), as well as all the all the other anomalies we could reference that involve steel and heat from the WTC. I would say this may be a clue as to the real destruction mechanism..

Exactly. You're seeing evidence of these effects in the dust & plume data and you're finding it on some steel, as in Griff's melted steel thread. It's not the wild fantasy of 90% of the steel vaporized as claimed by the dearly departed ( ) and like ilk, but it is there nonetheless, and it slips under the radar by--in the case of the dust analysis, for example--being diluted by wallboard and concrete. Subtract that out and the relative concentrations of heavy metals (particularly iron, and to a lesser extent copper) go off the charts.

Edit to add: and don't forget those missing floor pans, thin sheet steel, which held the concrete, which turned to dust. 2+2=?

[edit on 14-2-2008 by gottago]

reply to post by Valhall


Val, your sig is the Duchess; you remain at the lip of the rabbit hole by choice, I know, but doesn't the accumulated weight all that you know so well tip you down and in?

I believe this works on the macro and the micro level, and one should avoid that which falls between--the generalizations which ablate the anomalies and make us lose sight of the bigger picture.

For example, you can dilute the iron in the dust with asbestos and primer, but take out the wallboard and even the concrete--which shouldn't be there in the first place--and the percentages jump off the charts. Then go to the macro: why should we even be thinking this unparalleled destruction is something we should be seeing? If they were to fall, why didn't those towers just topple and fall painfully, progressively, normally?

Likewise, those huge streamers: yes, they are another element of the discussion, but they should not be factored out here. They require huge forces to propel them, and to set them streaming those plumes. Likewise the cascade of dust pouring out of the building in that photo. This is all intertwined.

I totaly agree: no, 90% of the steel was not "granulated," and yes, basic calculations and a glance at the debris field show this to be true, but those are generalizations that serve to sweep the anomalies of melted steel, metals in dust, and surviving structural steel members exhibiting just such effects under the rug.

Bring the macro and the micro together, ponder the volumes those photos tell us, comprehend how those towers should have collapsed, and that rabbit hole begins to look quite the refuge of the sane.

[edit on 14-2-2008 by gottago]

Anyone find it strange that both the towers fell in the same way?There really wasnt much difference between them when the dust had cleared.Also the WTC building 7 was iddenticle to other buildings that are destroyed in controlled demos.