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

Originally posted by Valhall
3. If one single floor referenced in number 1, and affected by number 2, had collapsed (which calculations show would have happened) you would have (depending on which tower between WTC1 and WTC2) between a 10 to 30 story building dropping through approximately 12 feet as that floor collapsed.

Now - here's where I tend to lose my patience and leave it to Howard. If you are so deft to believe that a 30 story building could fall 12 feet, hit another damaged and weakened floor that is designed to carry a static load that its support members are already exceeding, and think that the dynamic loading of that 30 story building impacting wouldn't cause a progressive failure....
I leave you to your servitude.

Because it appears you are enslaved to your own obsession; your own dogma, and will not listen to reason.

and, in this scenario, the problem is a WHOLE FLOOR's worth of perimeter and core columns have to give at the same time, otherwise, the acceleration due to gravity cannot be calculated as anywhere near accurate for transfering potential energy into kinetic, as the resistance of the COMPLETELY INTACT structure would have a noticeable resistance, and in fact, the strength to retard the collapse completely.

rodriguez, the demo expert, stated that if he were going to destroy those buildings with explosives, he would only need to pick a few key points, and let gravity do the rest.
that's pretty much what it looks like, when you consider ALL the evidence.

and, tower seven, valhall?

sulphur?

molten steel?

squibs?

audio recordings?

blueprints? steel? actual evidence for the public to examine?

democracy?

actually adding the 'two' of PNAC and their corporate fascist agenda, with the 'two' of air resistance, motive, players, and what actually happened on 911, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, equals the 'four' of 'who's who?'.

my karma ran over your dogma. it is wrong to think we know very much at all.

Well, first off, billybob, wouldn't it make sense that the portion of the floor under question to give first would be the most damaged? And wouldn't it make sense that the floor below it would be most damaged in the same area?

Concerning WTC7 - i haven't looked into 7 much. But I have listened to the 911 tapes of the first reponders.

Have you? Because WTC 7 had major damage from debris from both the jet impacts as well as the collapses of WTC1 and 2...that's recorded in the words of the firemen trying to evacuate the occupants (not long after the initial impacts), real-time, on that day. And it was so severely damaged it tooks hours for them to get everybody out of that building.

I don't ever see any one arguing for some demolition-type collapse mentioning those tapes. I just see the twisting of what "pull it" means.

Originally posted by Valhall
Okay, let me be real clear, since I don't have the patience to stick with arguing like Howard does, that running the numbers myself, analyzing the damage photos myself, and using my own educated brain - without knowing what NIST claims - this is what this engineer believes:

1. there was enough substantial damage (completely missing support members) to the outer support structure of WTC1 and WTC2 to immediately cause a situation where the remaining intact support structures were reaching their capacity for the floors affected;

According to FEMA's report:

Between 31 and 36 of the 240 perimeter columns of WTC1 were severed in a local area.



Around 23 of the 240 WTC2 perimeter columns were severed in a local area.



That's 15% or less of the perimeter columns in either localized area.

According to a NIST presentation, the perimeter columns had a safety factor rating of 5. Sound like a dire situation, to lose 15% or less of these things? This is just what Demartini was pointing out when he said the buildings could withstand jet impacts - or even multiple jet impacts - and still stand: each impact would be like stabbing a pencil into screen netting, he said.

There is no hard data on the core columns, but it's safe to say that in the South Tower, the core columns were hardly damaged at all given the trajectory of the plane into the building, and they were also very redundant, though not quite so much as the perimeter columns if you are to go with NIST figures. And given that the North and South Towers fell the exact same way, it's safe to say that since the South Tower fell while its core had hardly been scraped, whether or not the cores were much damaged by the impacts was apparently irrelevant to the fall of the rest of the buildings. In fact, you'll see that the core of WTC1 was the last thing to go down if you watch the video from Hoboken.

But either way, FEMA (if I'm not mistaken) has suggested that maybe 2 or 3 core columns at most may have been severed by the impacts. This is considering that the engines both hit columns directly, and I threw in an extra for good measure. The body of the planes would've been raped, though, by the perimeter column impacts. It would also leave the total column damage for either set below 15% in the area.

The rest of the damage has to be pinned onto fires if you won't accept demolition, and frankly there is no evidence whatsoever that any of those fires much compromised the heat of the steel.

The fires likely never went over 700 degrees Celsius at any given point in either building, and no investigations have found any samples of steel heated much beyond 200-some degrees Celsius. That shouldn't be surprising, because steel makes an excellent heat sink, not to mention all the heat that was being carried away from the fires in that black, soot-laden smoke, and exposure to cold air at the perimeter columns, and lack of air inside around the core columns, and other such factors that would've most certainly rendered the fires petty.

The plane damage was obviously not enough to bring the towers down. There was simply not enough structural damage. 15% isn't exactly a critical number, and I don't think I have to draw out any graphs or etc. to point that out.

Check out the NYC Building Code described on page 133 of this NIST paper. WCIP has summed it up nicely:

In simple terms, the above means that structural components and assemblies must be able to bear, without any visible damage for one whole week:

1. their own weight, plus
2. 150% of the maximum possible weight from people & furniture in the building and wind, plus
3. 150% of the weight of the building above that it is designed to support.

They must be able to bear without collapse or failure for one week:

1.their own weight, plus
2. 50% of their own weight again, plus
3. 250% of the maximum possible weight from people & furniture in the building and wind, plus
4. 250% of the weight of the building above that it is designed to support.

Buildings are designed this way specifically to avoid them collapsing in case of fire, damage, or stress and 'creep'. Buildings can sustain massive, massive damage without collapsing entirely.

In other words, it would be illegal for the WTC Towers to stand without the columns being able to withstand 250% of the weight of its design loads. From 15% or less column damage, likely considering both types, there would have to be a hell of a fire to bring the buildings down in total, wouldn't it? Trumpman figures from released NIST information that an average of 75% column failure would have to take place before a single floor's failure. And again, no evidence of any miraculously hot fire.

2. the heat generated by the burning fuel was sufficient to weaken the remaining steel support structures,

There's no evidence to support this. Again, no steel samples have been found to have been heated much more than a couple hundred degrees Celsius. Even if you heated every single column to that temperature, based upon the immense redundancy and strength of those buildings, I doubt a single floor would fall on its own.

Here's a diagram where the strength of steel is shown as a function of temperature:



Between 200 and 300 degrees Celsius, which covers the highest temperatures to which the WTC steel was heated as per physical evidence, as published by NIST itself if I'm not mistaken, you'll notice there's not much lose of strength, eh?

I did my own analysis on this that has been posted in a couple of threads now. It depends on no agency's data, and is extremely conservative toward avoiding failure. This weakening due to heat would have been affecting the remaining support structures which had already taken on added loading due to the missing support structures referenced in number 1;

Then I'm assuming that you're assuming either too much impact damage, or too high of fire temperatures. Based on what those buildings had to be able to withstand by law, having 15% or less of the columns severed, and then having the steel heated to a little over 200 degrees Celsius in the same local area, it would take quite a stretch of imagination to see inevitability for a global collapse that violently causes as few as 13 floors to crush as many as 97 more into nothing but powder and pieces of beams - somehow without losing momentum.

3. If one single floor referenced in number 1, and affected by number 2, had collapsed (which calculations show would have happened) you would have (depending on which tower between WTC1 and WTC2) between a 10 to 30 story building dropping through approximately 12 feet as that floor collapsed.

Suggesting those floors had enough energy to so thoroughly destroy all the floors below is just speculation, isn't it? I've been wanting the exact numbers on how much energy would be behind those caps, and how much each floor would take before 100% failure so as to (along with a lot of luck and contradiction to chaos theory) allow perfect symmetry the whole way down. The figures, so far as I know, can't be found until NIST releases some further info that would allow us to know how much energy each floor would take before total destruction.

But think about this logically. 13 floors crushed 97 more at WTC1. Where would the force come from? The caps themselves, the 13 floors, totally disintegrated during collapse. Busted up and fell right off the side in chunks. Look for them in photos of Ground Zero and you won't spot them anywhere. What's more - they blew up before the collapse was anywhere near complete, somewhere (roughly - obviously hard to say) around halfway.

Now, when the driving mass is gone, and 80% of the mass of debris is being hurled off to the sides the whole way down, what is left to destroy WTC1, Valhall? About 20% of the debris mass falling straight down, albeit busted up and in fragments and shards and dust, and that's it. Obviously the collapse didn't start that way, but about halfway into it, that's what you have allegedly destroying the towers.

Without the weight of the caps, or even much weight from busted-up, dissociated pieces of debris, what's providing all that massive energy to cause all those columns to blow out so violently? What would be causing bolts and this and that to fail?

An even bigger and more obvious problem is that despite the significant loss of mass above the collapse, the loss of a driving force, the collapse doesn't lose momentum and slow down. You can witness video taken from below the collapse, such as this one, and see the collapse coming down at the very same rate, still perfectly symmetrically.

In physics, when an object that is allegedly crushing another object suddenly disappears and is replaced by much less mass, and there is no change in the momentum, it's safe to say that there is a third source of energy within the problem. There's no two ways about that: the momentum from the caps could not possibly have been infinite. This is the kind of thing Jones has been calling the official story on. It has nothing to do with structural engineering, either, you'll notice. Like I said, the structural engineering side is nothing but speculation and totally draws attention away from the major problems. This is an issue for someone who specializes specifically with physics issues in general.

Now - here's where I tend to lose my patience and leave it to Howard. If you are so deft to believe that a 30 story building could fall 12 feet,

12 feet is a rather misleading number, isn't it? It's as if you're assuming a 12-foot section of the building was just pulled instantly and uniformly from the whole structure. 12 feet was the full height of a full and yet the perimeter and core columns were not set up floor by floor, but independently of the floors. The core structure even had its own floor system. I seriously doubt there was a full 12-foot drop, and I know for a fact that it did not occur uniformly across a whole floor at once. Notice the South Tower's initial angular momentum. It was leaning - like one would expect. But then of course that momentum magically disappeared as the vertical, floor-by-floor, perfectly symmetrical collapse initiated. You see absolutely nothing odd in the total vanishings of forces that should've been conserved?

hit another damaged and weakened floor

Actually, most floors were not damaged or weakened in the slightest, as most floors were below the impacted and fire-exposed regions. Most floors were at full strength.

that is designed to carry a static load that its support members are already exceeding,

Only the impacted floors. Everything downwards, again, in perfect shape. And even on the impacted floors, again, no critical number of columns were severed by the impacts, and there is no evidence of intense fire ("intense fire" meaning any fire that could do more than something petty to the steel).

and think that the dynamic loading of that 30 story building impacting wouldn't cause a progressive failure....

Don't you think progressive collapses are funny things, Valhall? I mean it's kind of funny that such perfect symmetry can emerge from the collapses of 110-story skyscrapers, with so many unpredictable, chaotic factors that could so easily lead to lopsiding (especially when the buildings started off tilting in certain directions anyway!), and yet nothing simpler can be modeled to reproduce such symmetry on a smaller level using the same principles, in proportion. Not even computer models can do it. Totally unreproducible. Not very good "science," methinks. I like reproducibility, and even accurate applications of information, and facts, believe it or not.

I leave you to your servitude.

Because it appears you are enslaved to your own obsession; your own dogma, and will not listen to reason.

Valhall, I know you're a really sweet gal, but these are the kinds of comments that promote the kinds of obnoxious attitudes around here for which you've picked on me. Maybe it's because you think Howard is right and therefore sympathize with his cause, but he's presented a bit more than his share of mocking 'tudes from time to time himself, just as I have, and Jedi_Master, even WCIP, among others from time to time. And I think if anyone came to the 9/11 section here without any bias whatsoever they could easily pick up hostility and condescension here and there in varying degrees from a number of posters. They might even pick up a little from the above-quoted remark of yours, where you state rather condescendingly that I just won't "listen to reason." I'm not trying to justify me being an ass, 'cause I was and can be an ass, no argument, but maybe you could see where I might be coming from if I were to say that statement might've made you a bit of a hypocrit for getting onto me about being obnoxious, you know? Hopefully nothing personal between us, though.

Originally posted by Valhall
Well, first off, billybob, wouldn't it make sense that the portion of the floor under question to give first would be the most damaged? And wouldn't it make sense that the floor below it would be most damaged in the same area?

It sounds like you're talking about the floor trusses rather than the support columns. What BillyBob was pointing out is that your assumption of 12 feet assumes a clean cut-out of the actual support columns across a whole floor evenly and instantly, not just the trusses.

Have you? Because WTC 7 had major damage from debris from both the jet impacts as well as the collapses of WTC1 and 2

I don't mean to be too picky, but even though WTC7 received damage from the collapses, there are no reports of any plane parts hitting WTC7. They hit a lot of other buildings - but not 7.

And even the the damage that was sustained was far from uniform, and didn't at all make the building look as if it were about to do this:



It looks exactly like it was pulled.

Originally posted by Valhall
Well, first off, billybob, wouldn't it make sense that the portion of the floor under question to give first would be the most damaged? And wouldn't it make sense that the floor below it would be most damaged in the same area?

what would make sense is different portions sagging at different rates depending on well cooled and fueled they were. what else would happen is load would be transferred to healthier parts of the frame. as a fire moved around a floor consuming fuel ahed of it, these sections would become weakened, but the areas behind them would now be COOLING and would be REGAINING strength.

nist says most of the total fuel for an area of office space is consumed within the first half hour, and the HOTTEST part of that reaction is during the first fifteen minutes.

there is no part of the building that experiences the extreme temperatures(the actual physical evidence, not GIGO computer sims), for more than fifteen minutes, and most of the physical evidence showed very modest temperatures indeed(modest for steel, not people. hot enough to make death by plummeting to concrete seem nice in comparison).

these 'extreme' temperatures were not everywhere at once.(650ºC, measured from ONE piece of steel)

mostly, they weren't even 'extreme' with regards to structural steel's strength(250ºC, measured)

there is all kinds of unscientific 'lumping in' that goes 'round and 'round this endless stairway(howard's house, i like to call it).

apologists say, 'it was really hot, people jumped. therefore, it was hot enough to fall down', i say, 'nice logical skills showing great attention to detail'.
they say, 'falling buildings sound like explosions, and that's why people who were there and know what explosions sound like all reported hearing explosions.' i say, 'scintillating wit!'
they say, 'well, don't you think that if you dropped the whole top piece on the whole bottom piece that it would be heavy enough, and have enough momentum to crush the whole thing like a cheap aluminum pop can, at around the same rate as if it was freefalling?' i say, 'maybe, but HOW the hell could that happen? everything was welded an bolted together? steel is elastic, and only 'snaps' when struck at high velocity. usually it bends, and redistributes it's loads accordingly.
a whole floors worth of structural support can't just simultaneously DISAPPEAR.
floor sections that have become disconnected cannot 'pull' on exterior columns. they instead, would represent an added live load to the floors below them. the core and perimeter's ability to hold vertical load would be unimpaired by a missing 18ft. by 24ft floor slab, but i hardly think a few of these 'pancakes' are going to demolish a building at near free fall rates.
this building was described as a 'mosquito net' that could redistibute load through MULTITUDINOUS pathways. the one guy from the wtc project who said that it could take MULTIPLE PLANE CRASHES because of it's 'mosquito net' design(on mainstream t.v., january 2001), disappeared on nine one one.

Concerning WTC7 - i haven't looked into 7 much. But I have listened to the 911 tapes of the first reponders.

Have you? Because WTC 7 had major damage from debris from both the jet impacts as well as the collapses of WTC1 and 2...that's recorded in the words of the firemen trying to evacuate the occupants (not long after the initial impacts), real-time, on that day. And it was so severely damaged it tooks hours for them to get everybody out of that building.

I don't ever see any one arguing for some demolition-type collapse mentioning those tapes. I just see the twisting of what "pull it" means.

well, you should look into it. it's really the most obvious evidence that the entire government and media propganda wings are outright lying to us.

because, as shown in the 911eyewitness video, the building fell at the rate of free fall in a vacuum. you can see the near perfect symmetry of the collapse in that animated gif. what you don't see is that it fell with ZERO AIR RESISTANCE. never mind a whole buildings worth of steel connections just deciding to give up the ghost at the exact same moment, but even the AIR didn't want tower seven to stay up.

the only way i know of to remove air on that scale is explosives. of course, the lucky side affect is that the building also falls as fast as gravity can push it down.

that would explain the reported shockwave, too.

yes, i have looked into it.

Wow, just came across this video of a demolition that failed halfway, with only the ground level charges detonating. The whole building (except for the lower floors, of course) falls approximately 2 stories, impacts the ground - and comes to a rest, otherwise intact.

Dakota Demolition

And I was waiting for it to bury itself all the way down...

Originally posted by Lumos
And I was waiting for it to bury itself all the way down...

The video that www.911research found there is not really a comparison in any way, unless of course they're suggesting that the top sections of the WTC should have come to rest on the building below - I'm sure they designed it to withstand such a thing.
The is more than a slight difference between a building impacting the ground and the top of a building collapsing on the rest of it below. I can't believe someone of your caliber would even make such a comparison.

Yeah, and that's exactly what should have happened to the 13 floors of WTC1 falling upon the lower 97. Might've taken a couple floors, but they would've stopped. They wouldn't present much more of a weight load - even with velocity - than the floors were designed to carry. The floors were designed to carry an average of at least 250% their own weight anyway, without any problems. We know this because it was the law that the buildings be able to do that; NYC Building Code. That means it wouldn't taken a lot of those 13 floors' energy to destroy another floor, and that energy certainly wasn't unlimited. And after one floor, the same resistance would apply the rest of the way down.

Nonetheless, expect people to call foul. To hell with the physics. The building was concrete! Nevermind that it likely wasn't even near as strong as the WTC.

Ah, AgentSmith, you and I have cross-posted.

[edit on 3-1-2006 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by bsbray11
Nonetheless, expect a lot of people to call foul. To hell with the physics. The building was concrete! Nevermind that it likely wasn't even near as strong as the WTC.

I didn't even bother to try that path mate, I don't know anything about the structure! LOL
But surely the effective weight (or whatever the term is) of the cap caused by it's velocity would amplify it greatly? Has anyone done the calculation to work out what it would actually equate to?
I look at it like the comparison between hanging a weight on a wire, and then lifting the weight slightly and letting it drop - snapping the wire. Is it not fundamentally the same principle?

[edit on 3-1-2006 by AgentSmith]

AgentSmith

The video [...] is not really a comparison in any way

The [sic] is more than a slight difference between a building impacting the ground and the top of a building collapsing on the rest of it below. I can't believe someone of your caliber would even make such a comparison.

Expectable.

If you see such a huge problem with that comparison, why don't you tell us your reasons instead of calling on my "caliber" to retract it (out of embarassment )? As I see it, the momentum acquired from falling about 2-3 floors wasn't sufficient to destroy (or even significantly deform) the structure. Think of this case as the intact part of the WTC being impacted by the cap, which would have inflicted less damage due to the flexible nature of the collision as opposed to the inflexible ground here.

Building accelerates by falling 2-3 floors, upon impact the accumulated momentum is basically reflected upon it, yet it doesn't crumble nor significantly deform. Period. Again, tell me how that is no valid comparison when it's even a favorable comparison for apologists.

Originally posted by Lumos
Building accelerates by falling 2-3 floors, upon impact the accumulated momentum is basically reflected upon it, yet it doesn't crumble nor significantly deform. Period. Again, tell me how that is no valid comparison when it's even a favorable comparison for apologists.

Well you can't use the video as an example of what should or shouldn't happen to the building being impacted below, when it is impacting the ground can you?
That would be like comparing a plane flying into a reinforced concrete wall with a plane flying into a log cabin.

EDIT:

I just wanted to point out that is just for a rough example, I don't want you getting all excited and saying that it's proportionally wrong or something and I'm just trying to cover things up.

[edit on 3-1-2006 by AgentSmith]

Apparently you just don't understand my point.

The Dakota building serves as both the cap and the impacted building, divided in its role by the time of impact. Before, it acts just like the falling cap would have, but then, upon impact, it itself has to absorb the kinetic energy provided by its fall into its structure. Pretty simple.

[edit]

Effective weight? you can experience factored weight upon acceleration, but assigning something similar to an object in motion is absurd. An object in motion has momentum and kinetic energy, no "effective weight". You can calculate the force it would deliver on impact, which depends on the actual deceleration going on, by Newton's second law of motion f=ma. I think it's gross that someone not knowing principles this fundamental would think he has it all figured out concerning 9/11. I know that might sound rude, but it's grotesque in all honesty.

[edit on 3-1-2006 by Lumos]

Originally posted by AgentSmith
But surely the effective weight (or whatever the term is) of the cap caused by it's velocity would amplify it greatly?

Yeah, but so what? The amount of weight each floor could withstand without trouble was much greater than the normal loads.

Has anyone done the calculation to work out what it would actually equate to?

Yes, I have, in at least one thread, using two weights: one given by Eager, and one by Trumpman, though they ultimately didn't matter.

Problem: We don't know how much force a floor could absorb, and withstand, before collapse. We need more information.

However, a little common sense is really all one should need to realize how ridiculous it would be for 13 floors to crush the rest so utterly and symmetrically, without reducing speed, even as though 13 floors themselves are destroyed and some 80% of the mass of the debris goes flying outward.

Again, I ask, from where came the energy to continue destruction at the same velocity without a driving mass? From where came the weight to continue sheering bolts or what have you, in the same miraculous, perfectly symmetrical fashion, across one entire floor at a time? Here's a thought: maybe there wasn't any such weight. Plain and simple. And really, there wasn't.

I look at it like the comparison between hanging a weight on a wire, and then lifting the weight slightly and letting it drop - snapping the wire. Is it not fundamentally the same principle?

No, it isn't.

Think, dude. Crushing one floor does not automatically win 0 resistance from the rest of the building. The columns weren't even set up by floor!

The wires would have to be over 7.5 times heavier than the actual weight being droped (97/13 - highest floors were by far the lightest). And the whole dropping part is totally wrong as well. The only way a floor would be able to drop unresisted is if the floor below was already destroyed by explosives. Can't have it both ways.

Edited for quote code problems. I must edit nearly all of my posts for this kind of minute crap. I must just suck at life. ;(

[edit on 3-1-2006 by bsbray11]

Dude, the Dakota building isn’t even a real building, it’s a reinforced concrete structure that was built as a feed mill. Those things were built like missile silos. (and probably by the same guys ).

There is simply no comparison between the structures.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
Dude, the Dakota building isn’t even a real building, it’s a reinforced concrete structure that was built as a feed mill. Those things were built like missile silos. (and probably by the same guys

).

There is simply no comparison between the structures.

if it wasn't a building, howard, what was it?

is reinforced concrete stronger than steel? i don't know, cause i've spent more than a few hours with a jackhammer, and the jackhammer never shattered first.

Yes, there's never a comparison, unless it somehow reinforces your theories.

Reinforced concrete is much more prone to breaking and crumbling than steelframes, steel doesn't just crumble, it deforms.

And provide some sources for the specs of the dakota building, or I'll just claim it was a smaller WTC painted in concrete-grey.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
Dude, the Dakota building isn’t even a real building, it’s a reinforced concrete structure that was built as a feed mill. Those things were built like missile silos. (and probably by the same guys

).

There is simply no comparison between the structures.

Hey,

Originally posted by bsbray11
Nonetheless, expect people to call foul. To hell with the physics. The building was concrete! Nevermind that it likely wasn't even near as strong as the WTC.

Who called it? Who called it? I did.

Originally posted by Lumos
Effective weight? you can experience factored weight upon acceleration, but assigning something similar to an object in motion is absurd. An object in motion has momentum and kinetic energy, no "effective weight". You can calculate the force it would deliver on impact, which depends on the actual deceleration going on, by Newton's second law of motion f=ma. I think it's gross that someone not knowing principles this fundamental would think he has it all figured out concerning 9/11. I know that might sound rude, but it's grotesque in all honesty.

Never said I knew everything or I have all the answers, acting it maybe - but that's different.
I can't remember all the terms for things, it doesn't stop me from understanding things though. Jeez, I was talking to one of the guys on here that's more pro-demo, who is a structural engineer, and even he basically said he needs to check things up because it was so long ago he learnt. I don't sit there with a damn book looking everything up all the time to make sure everything is correct to the T, this is a discussion board - not a scientific paper. If I had to do my Ham Radio exam today I'd probably fail, so what? None of these subjects have any bearing on my day to day life other than on here, so it's not like I live it and breath it.
I conveyed what I wanted to get across which is what matters
Besides, after a few glasses of the old wine and a couple of scotchs, most people's memories and reasoning fail slightly

Originally posted by bsbray11
Nevermind that it likely wasn't even near as strong as the WTC.

Is that your final answer?

An industrial building built to withstand the forces from the weight and vibration of the operating machinery of a feed mill was somehow not as strong as an office building?



The laugh’s on you.

Steel and concrete have different strengths and weaknesses.

Steel works best under tension, yet is can be used under compression if the structure is braced accordingly.

Concrete works best under compression. Reinforcing rods are added to steel to improve it’s strength under tension.

Also, the contractor was trying to tip the building over, not cause it to pancake. If you look at the building, you can see that it is nothing like an office building.



While looking for info on this building, I found this totally bizarre rant
www.firesigntheatre.com...

Anyway, here is a photo gallery of the mill with some photos showing the construction of this industrial building.


The structure was build to house and handle tons of cattle feed.

As you can see by the photos, the strucutre was quite masive compared to its overall diminsions.

If that industrial building were built to the same scale as the WTC towers, the columns would be 10 feet across.

Also, the contractor that handled that particular job has had some other failures




[edit on 4-1-2006 by HowardRoark]