Bombs in the Building: World Trade Center 'Conspiracy Theory' is a Conspiracy Fact

The fact that the fuel reached the basement and lobby areas in a fuel air explosion is important in that there are a number of accounts of these explosions on these levels.

Conspiracy theorists use these accounts to bolster their argument that there were explosives planted in the buildings even though it is clear (from the original accounts, not the excerpted ones on the conspiracy sites) that these explosions were the results of the aircraft impact and fuel spill and had nothing to do with the eventual collapse other than to illustrate the violence and destruction caused by the impacts.


I've always used the term "chase" to describe a horizontal enclosures or riser enclosures in small structures. In the core areas of larger buildings, the term "shaft" leaves no doubt as to what you are refering to.

Just wanted to update that I have found that the upper floors of the WTC were made with 1/4" wall thickness external support tubes. I had used 1/2". Also, I have way too much linear feet of steel allotted to the core support structure area. In another correction would be that the floors were 12 ft tall.

Originally posted by Valhall

Originally posted by billybob

... which is what happened if the reported time of 8.1 seconds for the north tower is accurate.

Okay, please direct me to where this number came from.

i already did. aren't you paying attention? go back a page or two and you'll find the link to the site that number came from.

rather than give you my argument to shoot down instantly, why don't you tell me how long it took? 8, 9, 10, 11, 12?

scientific american published a time of nine seconds.

some say ten.

too fast, at any rate.

Let’s look at the south tower to start. Let’s assume that the collapse started exactly at the 8oth floor, or 1013 feet above the plaza level. Lets also assume that the dust and debris that fell outside the building envelope fell unimpeded to the ground. I will assume that the effects of air resistance on the larger pieces of debris and dust will be trivial.

It will take 7.94 seconds for this debris to hit the ground. Now since the dust obscured the actual fall of the building behind it, it is not really practical to measure the exact moment that the building hit the ground. If you jumped off the top of the building, it would take you 9.2 seconds to hit the ground.

Thus assuming that you have a 25% error in determining how long the building took to fall, you still have a fairly comfortable envelope to work with.

Now lets just assume that we have a mass of 1 ton (907.18 kg).

Lets just say that that mass falls 12 feet, (3.65 meters) or 1 story.

That mass would have a kinetic energy of 32450 joules just before impact

If the floor below resisted the impact completely and only moved 1 cm, that would equal an impact of 324500 newtons, or 72,950 lbs, an increase of 36 times the original mass.

Now let’s say that there was some resistance from the floors. Let’s say just for the sake of discussion, that due to that resistance, the impact energy collapse of 20 floors was only equal to the free fall of the mass through 5 floors, or 25% of the potential energy. In this case, the impact force of that 1 ton weight would then be equal to 182.75 tons. At which point, I think that the resistance of the building to the impacts of the falling mass would become trivial and the building would essentially be in free fall.


Now you can get a little more sophisticated if you want, you can assume that the floor gives X cm before failure and that the failure point is at Y times the initial load, you could calculate how much energy the floor would absorb before failure, then add the excess energy to the impact on the floor below. You could model this and calculate the speed of the collapse for various values of X and Y. (The actual mass of the building wouldn’t matter that much if you base your resistance to collapse on a multiple of the initial value say a 3x safety factor in the loading before collapse.)

If you really wanted to try and prove this theory of yours, you could do this.

Now this is assuming that the upper portion of the building is a solid mass. Sinve it is likely that in fact the floors above and below the initial collapse failed simultaneously and you also have to take into account the fact that the top is falling as well as collapsing. This gets needlessly complicated.


The “back of the envelope” calculations above are good enough for me. I simply don’t see that the building would have offered any meaningful resistance to the collapse after the first floor or so.

Come on, Howard, even the explosives theory doesn't really account for this very-near free-fall timing
To my mind, neither the pancake theory nor the pulversisation of concrete, nor the vaporisation of human bodies or their fragmentisation into very small tissue samples is accounted for by either pancake or advanced explosive demolition charges, neither is the disintegration of the antenna on Building 1 or the pulverisation and flaking of computer equipment, lifts, furniture, filing cabinets, the whole office scenario
The people enveloped by the dust cloud undoubtedly breathed in plastics, humans, carpets, plastics, asbestos, metal,mercury and concrete
A pyrochlastic cloud known only previously from volcanoes and subterranean plate rubbing
Only Bali, to my mind, has more evidential bs about its causation and a simple rapid evidence removal consequence
You know all this and want to hide it

Originally posted by billybob
i already did. aren't you paying attention? go back a page or two and you'll find the link to the site that number came from.

rather than give you my argument to shoot down instantly, why don't you tell me how long it took? 8, 9, 10, 11, 12?

scientific american published a time of nine seconds.

some say ten.

too fast, at any rate.

Yeah, I'm paying attention. I don't know where it was stated before in this thread, but I found where it was misused from. Apparently there was a seismic station that recorded an event at the time of the WTC1 collapse that had an 8.1 second duration.

Originally posted by Valhall

These arguments are getting more anal and more ridiculous by the minute!!! Hey Pythagoras...what's with all the calculations?????? Are those supposed to impress us? There are plumes of smoke billowing out of the building for crying out loud. Your picture is far from conclusive.

I think all of you just like to argue and be right at all costs, or you really are working for somebody. OK, you win!! This all went down like we were told by our government and the media. Go wallow in your victory/denial. God help us all.

Peace out

Originally posted by Dr Love

These arguments are getting more anal and more ridiculous by the minute!!! Hey Pythagoras...what's with all the calculations?????? Are those supposed to impress us?

Not impress, substantiate. That you would take that attitude toward the presentation of the science and math behind these issues tells a lot IMO. I know that backing a statement with data/evidence must be an extremely novel and scary idea for your ilk, but try it every once in a while. For one day try replacing "Well any one with half a brain would know (fill in the unsubstantiated speculation here)" with "Well, if you look at the data/physics/laws/equations (

you have taken a smoke-obscured edge and superimposed a straight edge over it. sorry. i just don't see what you see. it looks straight to me.

and, valhall, i think you really 'stretching' with your collapse time.
like i said before, the apologists' vaunted 'scientific american' reported a time of nine seconds. that is very different from your time, which is BY FAR the longest i have ever seen claimed.
well, you sure have cahones, if nothing else.

why not let witnesses tell the story........

www.gallerize.com...

the word 'explosions', and 'fireball' are used by MULTIPLE witnesses, including firemen who hear explosions and collapsing buildings more than regular people. why was this not in the official commission's report?

here's more good stuff. we get to see conspiracy theorists go after each other here, like dogs fighting over a scrap of meat, .....

www.911skeptics.blogspot.com...

who here is a member of PNAC or FEMA? these are your terroists. machevellian megalomaniacs from HELL!!!

Originally posted by billybob
you have taken a smoke-obscured edge and superimposed a straight edge over it. sorry. i just don't see what you see. it looks straight to me.

wtc.nist.gov...
See pages 45, through 54 for more photos and data

Originally posted by billybob
you have taken a smoke-obscured edge and superimposed a straight edge over it. sorry. i just don't see what you see. it looks straight to me.

Yes, but you obviously weren't using your stealthy super-magnifying glass:

From the top down you see:

1. redline
2. daylight
3. building edge

and, valhall, i think you really 'stretching' with your collapse time.
like i said before, the apologists' vaunted 'scientific american' reported a time of nine seconds. that is very different from your time, which is BY FAR the longest i have ever seen claimed.
well, you sure have cahones, if nothing else.

And to think the other dude asked why I was throwing up all the equations. Let's see, I gave you two video recordings from two different levels and locations that match up within 2 seconds of total collapse time, and I presented my equations and numbers.

If I had cajones they probably would be big...but I didn't even need them in this instance. I just presented the facts.

thats a big magnifying glass, but i still dont see it. if you mean that tiny sliver of light between your red line and the building, that could all be smoke as far as im concerned. either way, this argument is reaching. even if we were to take this as a fraction of evidence, there is far more evidence implicating quite the opposite; a secondary device.

cool - a lady with cajones . .

Holy Salted Nuts!

They're even bigger through my stealthy super-magnifying glass!

Originally posted by Valhall
If I had cajones they probably would be big...but I didn't even need them in this instance. I just presented the facts.

The problem is you're presenting engineering level fact and data to people who lack the background to understand axial loads, compressive and tensile stresses, and a multitude of other properties. All they see is that immediatly after the impact, the building remained standing so it must have been a sinister plot and explosives that brought them down later.

Someone heard a big boom during the collapse which had to be a bomb and could not have possibly been the huge steel structue buckling, a severed eletrical panal feed igniting left over fuel, or a boiler exploding. People see a solid structure and not a composition of material and numerous systems for power and climate control. They do not understand that once several columns were severed, the building was in a constant state of trying to redistribute those loads to the footing. They will never accept that once the floors above the impact site collapsed onto the floors below, the force was far and away made greater by gravity that if that weight was static.

so the architect who specifically designed the towers to be capable of taking not 1 but 2 planes each couldnt comprehend all the different variables?

-the master planner counldnt do all that math, but elite members of conspiracy forums retain the expertise to promote a lie? go on, rationalize the biggest crime ever committed.

Originally posted by lost
but i still dont see it. if you mean that tiny sliver of light between your red line and the building, that could all be smoke as far as im concerned. either way, this argument is reaching. even if we were to take this as a fraction of evidence, there is far more evidence implicating quite the opposite; a secondary device.

May I suggest that you take a look at this also?

wtc.nist.gov...
See pages 45, through 54 for more photos and data

Originally posted by lost
so the architect who specifically designed the towers to be capable of taking not 1 but 2 planes each couldnt comprehend all the different variables?

-the master planner counldnt do all that math, but elite members of conspiracy forums retain the expertise to promote a lie? go on, rationalize the biggest crime ever committed.

*sarcasm on* C'mon lost, you know he only designed those buildings to withstand the impact of an airliner carrying no fuel. The guy entirely forgot to account for the burning jet fuel. Wait, but he did account for the burning jet fuel but he forgot to account for the steel fireproofing that had deteriorated over time. It's all because of that damn fireproofing! One of the greatest crimes in history could have been averted with more fireproofing. Oh well, hindsight's 20/20.*sarcasm off*

The story O.J. Simpson fabricated was more believable than this.

Originally posted by Howard Roark
May I suggest that you take a look at this also?

Howard, it seems you're trying to bait someone in to saying that those media briefings and government reports you keep referring to are BS so that the person will look even more delusional. It's obvious you think that those documents tell the real story. Well that's cool! Keep referring to them. They're about as non-fiction as Harry Potter.

Why don't you brainiacs go put your calculations to good use and go calculate me a cup of coffee.

Peace

Originally posted by lost
so the architect who specifically designed the towers to be capable of taking not 1 but 2 planes each couldnt comprehend all the different variables?

-the master planner counldnt do all that math, but elite members of conspiracy forums retain the expertise to promote a lie? go on, rationalize the biggest crime ever committed.

I’m sorry, Lost, but those statements are not only wrong, but they demonstrate that you don’t understand the realities of how buildings get constructed and who is responsible for what (i.e. architecs vrs engineers)


May I recommend that you read the Glanz and Lipton series of articles for the New York Times, titled “Height of Ambition”

(a link to the whole series can be found here, toward the bottom pf the page)

In particular, Part 4 has some interesting information on those so called calculations

But Robertson still had one more set of structural calculations to perform. Lawrence Wien, who was continuing his fight against the towers, had begun to remind New Yorkers publicly of a Saturday morning in July 1945, when a B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, barreled into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Most of the 14 people who died were incinerated by a fireball created when the plane's fuel ignited, even though the fire was quickly contained. The following year, another plane crashed into the 72-story skyscraper at 40 Wall Street, and yet another one narrowly missed the Empire State Building, terrifying sightseers on the observation deck. Wien and his committee charged that the twin towers, with their broader and higher tops, would represent an even greater risk of midair collision.

They ran a nearly full-page ad in The Times with an artist's rendition of a commercial airliner about to ram one of the towers. ''Unfortunately, we rarely recognize how serious these problems are until it's too late to do anything,'' the caption said.

The Port Authority was already trying to line up the thousands of tenants it would need to fill the acres of office space in the towers. Such a frightful vision could not be left unchallenged. Robertson says that he never saw the ad and was ignorant of the political battle behind it. Still, he recalls that he addressed the question of an airplane collision, if only to satisfy his engineer's curiosity. For whatever reason, Robertson took the time to calculate how well his towers would handle the impact from a Boeing 707, the largest jetliner in service at the time. He says that his calculations assumed a plane lost in a fog while searching for an airport at relatively low speed, like the B-25 bomber. He concluded that the towers would remain standing despite the force of the impact and the hole it would punch out. The new technologies he had installed after the motion experiments and wind-tunnel work had created a structure more than strong enough to withstand such a blow. Exactly how Robertson performed these calculations is apparently lost -- he says he cannot find a copy of the report. Several engineers who worked with him at the time, including the director of his computer department, say they have no recollection of ever seeing the study. But the Port Authority, eager to mount a counterattack against Wien, seized on the results -- and may in fact have exaggerated them. One architect working for the Port Authority issued a statement to the press, covered in a prominent article in The Times, explaining that Robertson's study proved that the towers could withstand the impact of a jetliner moving at 600 miles an hour. That was perhaps three times the speed that Robertson had considered. If Robertson saw the article in the paper, he never spoke up about the discrepancy. No one else issued a correction, and the question was answered in many people's minds: the towers were as safe as could be expected, even in the most cataclysmic of circumstances. There were only two problems. The first, of course, was that no study of the impact of a 600-mile-an-hour plane ever existed. ''That's got nothing to do with the reality of what we did,'' Robertson snapped when shown the Port Authority architect's statement more than three decades later. The second problem was that no one thought to take into account the fires that would inevitably break out when the jetliner's fuel exploded, exactly as the B-25's had. And if Wien was the trade center's Cassandra, fire protection would become its Achilles' heel.

The ad with its eerily prophetic message:



[edit on 9-6-2005 by HowardRoark]

Originally posted by Dr Love
*sarcasm on* C'mon lost, you know he only designed those buildings to withstand the impact of an airliner carrying no fuel. The guy entirely forgot to account for the burning jet fuel. Wait, but he did account for the burning jet fuel but he forgot to account for the steel fireproofing that had deteriorated over time. It's all because of that damn fireproofing! One of the greatest crimes in history could have been averted with more fireproofing. Oh well, hindsight's 20/20.*sarcasm off*

:

Dr. Love, You also strike me as someone with limited experience in hoe buildings are put together and what fireproofing actually is and does. from that same series of articles:

Back when Robertson did his plane study, he overlooked the towers' resistance to fire. And now that construction was under way, the
fireproofing that the Port Authority was using to protect the thin steel components only heightened the towers' vulnerability to fire. Instead of the heavy masonry that protects the steel of structures like the Empire State Building, the authority chose a newly invented lightweight, low-cost product called mineral wool, which is sprayed as a kind of slurry onto steel, where it dries and forms an insulating coating. The idea of fireproofing is to protect a building's steel from becoming too hot and buckling if a fire breaks out. But even during construction, the spray-on material had problems staying attached to the steel of the World Trade Center. Rain would often wash the fireproofing off. When it was attached to steel that was rusty, it would flake off even without rain. The Port Authority still insists that its inspections caught the problems and that whenever fireproofing fell off, it was reapplied. But doubts about the product, which was just then coming into widespread use, never went away. It didn't help matters when it became known that the contractor charged with applying the fireproofing, Mario & DiBono Plastering, was connected to the Mafia.

and

A midnight blaze in February 1975, which should have been merely a nuisance, turned into a debacle. The fire, set by a custodian turned arsonist, started on the 11th floor of the north tower and over three hours spread up and down into six other floors.

The blaze exposed two major weaknesses in the center's fire-protection systems: there were no sprinklers in the building to extinguish the fire -- as was true in most high-rises of the day -- and critical fireproofing was missing, allowing burning utility wires to spread the fire between the floors. What's more, the tower's core acted like a chimney, sending great plumes of smoke upward. There was no threat that the building would
collapse, but it was an early warning sign of just how unpredictable a fire in the sky could be. If it hadn't occurred in the middle of the night, Fire Commissioner John T. O'Hagan later wrote, ''the rescue problem would have been tremendous.''

So, yes, fireproofing was an important factor in the collapse.

The building could withstand either event separately, the impact or the fire. It could not withstand both together.

Why is that so hard for you to accept?

Originally posted by Dr Love
Howard, it seems you're trying to bait someone in to saying that those media briefings and government reports you keep referring to are BS so that the person will look even more delusional.

Well, since thousands of architects, engineers and designers around the world will look at this data and the findings and use it in how they design and build buildings in the future, I hope that they realize that it is B.S. also. I would hate to think that they are wasting money over designing their buildings.

I’ll tell you what, the official report comes out in a couple of weeks for public comment, Why don’t you get a copy of it then and make your comment. Be sure to include the math and science that proves it is B.S.

What’s that? You don’t believe in all that math and stuff?

Too bad.