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Leaked FEMA/ASCE Draft Report On WTC Collapse
securitas writes "The New York Times obtained a copy of the World Trade Center draft report by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers about the engineering failures that caused the towers to collapse. Among the findings: 'Fireproofing, sprinkler systems and the water supply for hoses were all disabled and the fires generated heat equivalent to the energy output of a nuclear power plant' reports the NYT (Yahoo link). Amazingly, if it wasn't for the fire (or another secondary catastrophic force), the towers would have remained standing."
I recently watched a well known (in the UK) documentary series called "Horizon" on the WTC disaster. It basically stated in no uncertain terms that the disaster was caused by the use of drywall for all the fireproof walling. The theory was that the explosions caused by the planes basically blew away the drywalling and so the heat from the flames which would have otherwise been slowed down by the drywall, would have been dramatically slowed down.
I wasn't sure whether to entirely believe the program or not, but it seemed fairly plausible. However I came away asking only one question: "So what would have been better?"
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
However, now that a 'proof of concept' attack has been performed, it will be interesting to see what engineering tricks can be used to keep a tower standing when a barely sub-nuclear blaze is allowed to burn inside it for an hour or two.
It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
SkyScrapers.com
On this site there was an Interview done with an engineer who had some knowledge on the World Trade Center. He stated that the airplanes could have not brought them down seeing that buildings of a lesser, equal, or greater size get the same sort of impact daily with the force of winds.
It is said that the airplanes caused an impact of equal or lesser force than what it would experience from day-to-day wind.
I think the 'disabled' part meant that the sprinklers couldn't work after the impact, not that someone deliberately disabled the sprinkler system manually. That was just my reading of it. "Disabled" gives the impression that there was explicit intervention to turn something off. Frankly, I would have been surprised if the whole plumbing system could have withstood a blast like that to allow the sprinklers to work on upper floors.
creation science book
They ran an hour long program where they interviewed two key people ... the mechanical engineer who built the towers and a forensic mechanical engineer who was looking at the wreckage.
Each had unique viewpoints. The designing mechanical engineer is haunted to the core over this. Most of his sentances trailed off as he was reliving what happened.
The forensic scientist identified the fact that the fireproofing material was blown off from the original impact. This hastened the collapse. He also commented that the support structures for the floors were the first things to fail.
My question is did anyone really think they were going to fall? Remembering back to the day no one in the media raised the question. None of my friends or family I was talking to that day even thought of it as a remote possibility.
This raises a very interesting question about our expectations vs. reality. After the shuttle disaster I think this stands as one of the most shocking slaps in the face to us concerning technology.
Of course the buildings weren't going to survive, but our faith in technology made us think that day that the buildings collapsing wasn't a possibility.
For that reason entirely, the towers actually did have water tanks up on the 100th floor for putting out fires. Witnesses describe water rushing down the stairways. So in some way, they were prepared for this sort of thing
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
Didn't stop Cameron making up details (and lots of them) for "Titanic"; how long does something have to be in the past before no one cares I wonder. Probably a question Yassir Arafat is asking himself about now...
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
...the report more or less concludes that the buildings collapsed because of the way they were designed, but withstood the damage for as long as they did before collapsing because of the way they were designed. Talk about, "Damned if you do, damned it you don't."
The worst-case disaster scenario for those towers was a 707 accidentally blundering into one, not a bunch of crazy religious-zealot, martyr-wannabe motherfuckers purposely plowing a much larger, fully-fueled aircraft into it at full speed.
If anyone who lost someone in the collapse even thinks of trying to sue anyone involved in the design or construction of the twin towers, they ought to be drawn and quartered. Sure, they could build a building that could stand up to worse than the WTC got, but proofing it against everything would cost a mint and leave a few phone booths' worth of usable space per floor. Don't forget that there wouldn't be any windows. The rent would be so expensive that nobody would be able to afford to put an office in it.
IMHO, when you step back and look at the big picture, you simply cannot fault the design of the buildings for the fact that they catastrophically failed in the face of an unprecedented, unimagined, deliberate action that was well beyond the scope of their design.
~Philly
That's an impressive PDF.
One note- it is copyrighted by the professor with a year of 2000. Does this UIUC professor speak with a foreign accent?
(see here and
here. )
It seems insurance companies will need to charge higher premiums for buildings that house CIA, US Secret Service, IRS and Securities & Exchange Commission files, now that they have a propensity for spontaneous collapse.
(see here and
here. )
In the History Channel's WTC documentary, they showed large backup generators whose purpose was to briefly power the entire complex in an outage. There were also large tanks of diesel fuel to supply the generators. I'd say it's likely that setup was in 7 WTC or one of the other ancillary buildings.
And now a quick Google search reveals this: Engineers Suspect Diesel Fuel in Collapse of 7 World Trade Center.
~Philly
I was rather impressed that the design let the towers collapse coherently (almost as tidy as a commercial demolition), rather than keeling over sideways in any which direction and taking out the entire neighbourhood.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And that "arrogance" displayed by europeans (and arabs) is the normal "arrogance" displayed when one comes from a country with virtually no history (at least, when compared to the thousands of years of history one finds in Europe and the middle-east), totally clueless, and begins criticizing everything in sight. I wonder how a Berlin suburbanite whining about everybody carrying guns on a rack in the back-windows of their pickup trucks in (put your favorite hickstate here) would be catalogued ("arrogant" would surely be a choice pick).
The first time I went to Europe, I was totally aghast at the sight of an older woman, in an airport, who was ready to die because there was no coca-cola available at 10 in the morning...
Let's bet that future design guidelines, if not advocating such a design, will definitely promote a wider distribution of emergency gear throughout the building.
* * *
When one looks at the structural design of the Twin Towers (one could build an argument about them NOT being a skyscraper by the mere fact that the outer walls were load-bearing - a definition of a skyscraper is that the walls are not load-bearing), with it's thick walls and a center core (no intermediate columns), one wonder why the express elevator (that whisked people to the two "sky lobbies") could not have been situated, say, on each corner (or in the middle of the outer-wall, to preserve the sacrosanct "corner offices"), for a panoramic view when going up, à la Hyatt-Regency/Bonaventure hotels.
Such a configuration would definitely have withstood the blaze much better than the central-core-with-all-the-vitals; for it is certain that designers would have ran the standpipes along the exterior elevator shafts, if only because of the blazingly obvious reduntancy it offered.
It would have taken more than one direct aircraft hit to sever all standpipe systems.