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NIST Releases Report On WTC 7 Collapse
photonic writes "After three years of study, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finally released its report on the collapse of World Trade Center building 7. The main conclusion is that the building came down due to fire, not due to debris damage or some conspiracy demolition team. The fire started pretty small after the collapse of WTC 1, but was left to burn several floors out completely. The important finding is that the collapse was triggered by thermal expansion of beams, which could detach asymmetrically loaded girders from the main columns. Some limited pancaking of floors then caused a lack of lateral support and buckling of a single column. This triggered the failure of the entire core of the building, which finally fell down as a single piece. Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here. All documents can be found at NIST's WTC page, which read like a porn magazine for finite element junkies. Simulation movies are also available. And yes, they used Beowulf clusters to do the simulations, some of which lasted for several months."
It didn't. The hundreds of tons of flaming debris ignited by hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel did.
The principles of demolitions are pretty similar - you destroy the supports of the building causing it to collapse down on top of itself. The WTC towers suffered a similar failure only the primary cause was a combination of damage, stress and weight of material from above that caused the supports to fail, rather than controlled explosions.
Not long after this shit, there was a building in Europe, where the fire was so intense, it burned everything off. The steel structure was still standing [...]
I'm pretty sure you're talking about the Windsor building in Madrid.
I've got news for you, buddy: It actually works against you.
First, the Windsor building had a concrete core and two concrete technical floors. A very different design from that of the Twin Towers.
Second, the steel portions of the building exposed to the fire did in fact get all melty and collapsey. The only reason the building is still standing is because of the features I mentioned above.
http://www.911myths.com/html/madrid_windsor_tower.html
http://www.debunking911.com/madrid.htm
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Let's see...hmm...full tanks of aviation grade fuel.
The 767-200ER, the UA plane which went into one of the towers, has a fuel capacity of 23,980. The flight was a few hundred miles from it origin at Logan International Airport in Boston.
Let's assume that the plan had only 15,000 gallons onboard.
The flash point of jet fuel is 100.4 ÂF (38 ÂC). Many surfaces - including the engines of the plane - would be well above this point.
In addition, there were numerous electrical connections which could have sparked causing the fuel to ignite.
Jet fuel has between 127,000 and 135,000 BTUs per gallon.
Therefore, at the point of impact we had between 1,905,000,000 and 2,025,000,000 BTUs of energy being released in a highly concentrated area (3-5 floors).
Even without the energy generated by the burning of other materials, this is sufficient to inflame the entire area and to cause the required heat damage to the tower.
Jordan
About 23,000 gal. of diesel fuel was stored in the bldg, mainly on the bottom floors but some as high as the 7th. "Several months after the WTC 7 collapse, a contractor recovered" the fuel from the tanks and, "unaccounted fuel totaled... somewhere between 0 and 2,000 gallons..." And "The worst-case scenarios associated with fires being fed by ruptured fuel lines-or from fuel stored in day tanks on the lower floors-could not have been sustained long enough, could not have generated sufficient heat to weaken critical interior columns, and/or would have produced large amounts of visible smoke from the lower floors, which were not observed."
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/wtc_qa_082108.html
Anyway, steel bends in fires, that's why it has to be insulated and why steel bldg's must have sprinkler systems. I doubt the fire dept. was able to respond effectively in time.
The fire in the North Tower was still burning and spreading when the tower collapsed. While it was obscured somewhat by dust and smoke during the fall, flaming debris did spread out over considerable distances, some of it striking WTC7, breaking through the windows and setting aflame material in the lower floors, which spread rapidly as the collapse of the Twin Towers had done considerable damage to the water systems in the area, and water pressure for the firefighting systems was very low.
The immediate evacuation of WTC7 (among others) as soon as the evacuation of the main towers was ordered saved a great many lives.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/BREAKING_NIST_%3CI%3Efinally%3CI%3E_poses_theory_on_0821.html
As federal agency declares 'new phenomenon' downed WTC 7, activists cry foul
According to a federal agency report released Thursday, a "new phenomenon" known as thermal expansion was directly responsible for the mysterious collapse of World Trade Center 7 on Sept. 11, 2001.
This study, posed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- a federal scientific agency which promotes technical industrial standards -- marks the first 'official' government theory on the collapse.
The building's demise occurred some seven hours after the twin towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, and has been the source of numerous conspiracy theories key to the "9/11 Truth" movement, most of which argue that the symmetrical, seven-second collapse was brought about by a controlled demolition.
Dr. Shyam Sunder, director of Institute's building and fire research laboratory, oversaw the government's three-year research efforts. The report aims to disprove the controlled demolition argument.
However, Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and a member of the American Institute of Architects, doesn't believe a word of the theory.
His group, which has swelled to over 400 architectural and engineering professionals, immediately responded to the Institute's claim in a press conference.
"Tons of [molten metal] was found 21 days after the attack," said Gage in an interview with a Vancouver, Canada television station. "Steel doesn't begin to melt until 2,700 degrees, which is much hotter than what these fires could have caused."
"There are holes in this story that you can drive a truck through," Gage added during the press conference. His group asserts that thermite, a steel cutting agent, was used to bring the building down.
Dr. Sunder disagreed.
"We conducted the study without bias, without interference from anyone," said Dr. Sunder. "We have only one single-minded goal in this effort."
While the Institute said it considered the possibility of a controlled demolition taking place at WTC 7, the notion was dismissed due to the absence of any recordings of an explosion sound.
Thermite, however, does not make an explosion sound. And while this was raised to Dr. Sunder in the media's Q&A session, he dismissed it as impossible.
"FEMA found it," said Gage. "Dr. Steven Jones found it, in the dust that landed in the entire area of lower Manhattan. And he finds it in the chunks of previously molten metal [from the towers]."
Specifically, in Appendix C of its World Trade Center Building Performance Study, FEMA claimed:
Evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure. A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack on the steel... The severe corrosion and subsequent erosion of Samples 1 and 2 are a very unusual event. No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified.
Yet, no study of the mysterious sulfur or melted steel was included in the NIST report.
After New York City officials cut off the water main to the tower Sept. 11, 2001, the building's sprinkler system was unable to function, Dr. Sunder said. This allowed fires across 10 floors to burn uncontrolled for nearly seven hours.
The Institute asserts that due to the lack of water supply, an "extraordinary event" occurred, and for the first time ever, steel expanding due to heat from the flames caused columns to separate from structural concrete. Column 79 was the first to fail, according to the report, which brought about a quick succession of failures in adjoining columns.
"Thermal expansion of
This is pretty simple math; the weight increases with the cube of the scaling factor as you scale up a model, yet the strength of the materials used only increases with the square of the scaling factor since it depends on the area of the cross section of the member.
... BUT: if fire caused the building to collapse, why did the owner of the building himself say, on public television, that they brought the building down intentionally???
Larry Silverstein says they intentionally brought down building 7.
Kinda hard to argue with the owner of the building when he publicly says he did it on purpose! (Note: you might want to take some of the rest of the video with a grain of salt... but the Silverstein part is incontrovertible.)
And major network news reported it falling while it was still standing in plain sight behind them.
That still doesn't explain why the owner of the building himself said that they blew it up. Or why the BBC reported its fall 20 minutes before it actually fell.
It's in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country. WE KNOW THIS. Why doesn't anyone focus on it??
Total nonsense. The rest of bin Laden family had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks.
Also, the hijackers weren't using assumed names, they appeared on the flight manifests, and they were known. It doesn't take very long to add 2 and 2...
Also, bin Laden's relatives were allowed to leave the country after the national ground stop was lifted and not without being questioned. http://911myths.com/html/family_flights.html
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
In particular, why would it happen at nearly free-fall speed, as if every column in the structure failed simultaneously? That's the thing that gets me. I would expect a much slower, more incremental collapse. Guess I have to go read TFR.
Actually, NIST puts the collapse time at 40% slower than free-fall. The reason it seemed so sudden and quick is because we've only ever had video of one side of the building when it finally fell.
Check out the videos on this page: http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/wtc_videos/wtc_videos.html
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
If the WTC 7 did come down because of a government conspiracy (and I'm not saying that it did or didn't!) then it would stand to reason that a federal agency like NIST would draw a conclusion of structural failure rather than deliberate demolition. No big surprises here.
That's called affirming the consequent. It's not insightful, informative, or valuable in any way; it's a fallacy.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Um, fires can pretty much bring down every building without some sort of suppression.
The sole exception is concrete, which can leave a hollow shell. Of course, no one on earth can build a 47 story concrete building.
Any building with steel as part of the support, on fire long enough, is eventually going to see that steel buckle, which will bring down the building. You can't just let tall buildings burn and then walk in the next day with new paint and furniture.
When they build steel buildings, they spray insulation on the steel to keep it intact during fires. For the WTC7, that was something called 'Monokote', which is rated for three hours for steel columns. (There is an entirely different 'Monokote' which is just a kind of plastic shrink wrap. Don't get confused.)
This would have been more than enough if the fire-suppression systems had been working, but they were not. It is also why the firefighters pulled out when they did...enough of the steel had started to buckle that the building was listing to the side.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
So, the implication is that a big conspiracy set up charges to bring down the towers and that this conspiracy is good enough to never be uncovered, but not good enough to make it look unlike a professional demolition?
Also, I was watching it. The only thing that made it look like a professional demo is that the building fell downward. Professional demos have a bunch of blasts in a visible pattern to take out the major supports; the Twin Towers didn't have any of that, it merely fell in the direction of gravity, which doesn't much surprise me.
Do you have ANY idea just how much effort is involved in demolition? Sure, it seems easy from the outside, if you know what you are doing, you can bring a house down with a sledgehammer, but it will be noticed. The same with controlled explosives, this is not a case of slapping a bit of TNT to a wall and walking out, if you do that, the explosion just goes outside and the building keeps standing. No, you got drill a hole into the structure. If it is still beam you got to apply a chaped charge that cuts it through. Buildings are constructed to be able to withstand the loss of a couple of support beams, so you need to cut them all. How the hell would you do that without anyone noticing? It would require truck loads of explosives and days of demolition to setup. No, the conspiracy theories fail NOT because it is impossible to consider the idea that someone might want to fake this but because the logisitics just don't work. I read one theory, that the cia was controlling the planes, the idea being that they were refuel planes because the planes had no windows. Right. Because the CIA, a organisation KNOWN to operate civilian aircraft finds it easier to aquire military planes of which there are only a few instead of buying just one of the countless 2nd hand civilian airliners. Look at the way that red department store in china collapsed, that is know to be an accident and it collapses just the way a controlled demolotion building collapses. You seem to have the idea that because you saw some demo docu's you now think that if a building collapses like that, it must have been done like that. It is as another poster said almost impossible to even start to explain how stupid your logic is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah, we've been so lucky to find Mohammed Atta's passport in pristine condition several blocks from Ground Zero one day after that hell-like firestorm brought down 1.2 million ton of material.
This... survived this...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
What evidence?
The BBC made a mistake, probably because of the huge amounts of confusion that was abound. As for your other claim about a 'NY radio station', that's not something I've heard before, and your lack of detail leads me to believe that you've just made it up.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Well, yes they can. Both sides can spout rhetoric and useless information, contributing nothing and inciting more useless posts. Sounds like a troll to me.
It's poetry with a beat behind it! And guns! They're like beatniks with automatic weapons.
Fire doesn't melt steel. If you did metallurgy in college, you would know that above a certain temperature the most stable crystalline structure of steel becomes one which is a lot weaker. If you really care, you can google to find phase diagrams of steel like this one that tell you exactly how steel behaves when you heat it up.
If you didn't do metallurgy in college, then you have no idea what you're talking about.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
The only video I see is one where someone repeatedly asserts the 'pulled' means 'demolished'.
There are plenty of manuals on controlled demolitions, and they don't get quoted. You know why? Because they do 'pull' buildings. That means to pull over a building using cables hooked to the supports.
You couldn't do that to WTC 7, and it wouldn't have gone down like.
The fun thing about the 9/11 Truthers is that their conspiracies make no sense. They have holographic missiles flying around, explosives in advance, news media with a scripted story that sometimes jump ahead.
Do you want to know how the US government would have actually done 9/11?
They would have installed non-overriddable autopilots on the airplane, either some sort of sleeping gas, or cellphone/radio jammers to keep the people from contacting anyone.
They would have tapped the phones of some of the passengers booked on United 93, recorded some of their voices, and forged phone calls from them. Hard to do in real time, but they were in a hostage situation on a plane, so if anyone you're talking to asks a question you can't answer, well, the call would get 'dropped' or the hijackers would take the phone away or something.
Then they would have flown the actual airplanes into the actual buildings and let whatever happened.
They would have not contacted any media in advance. They would not have replaced any airplanes. They would not have rigged the twin towers buildings to fall. They would not have used this opportunity to take down an unrelated building. They would not have put the planes they stole back into service under a different number. They would not use actual terrorists who can be found alive later. (They wouldn't have made them all Saudis instead of Iraqis.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
How can anyone on this web site stand there and demand to limit to science as if the fact that the only steel buildings in existence to ever fall from fire all did so on 9/11 (which includes WTC Building 7).
This is absolutely false. There are many examples of other steel buildings that collapsed due to fire before 9/11. One example off the top of my head would be the Sight and Sound Theater fire of 1997. http://www.firefightersonline.com/opsandtactics/tr-097/ Just google around for a few minutes if you want many more examples.
The way 9/11 conspiracy theorists mindlessly repeat these lies (like the lie that no other steel buildings have collapsed due to fire) without bothering to spend even five minutes googling around with terms like "steel building fire collapse" is a testimony to their extreme gullibility and intellectual laziness. It's not different than the oft-repeated claim that the fire wasn't hot enough to melt steel, which ignores the fact that steel loses much of its strength well before it actually melts.
The difference being that that building was reinforced concrete stack, which is essentially monolithic.
If you say so...
You can't take the sky from me...
Ugh, ok, I'm tired of this, so let me explain to you exactly how the building collapsed from my perspective, watching it across the Hudson a few miles away, and then seeing it up close on the news:
Pancaking, a term which you completely misunderstand, is the event which occurs when you cause the upper floors of a building to collapse suddenly. You question how the fire in the upper floors weakened the lower floors. The answer is that it didn't have to. When the upper floors gave way, they impacted the floors directly beneath them. The kinetic energy that is gained by those floors basically free falling 1 story down is immense, and this cause the floor beneath, also weakened by the fire, to collapse, and so on this process went until it reached low enough that the floor beneath the collapsing floors was undamaged by the impact or fire.
The problem though is two-fold: first of all, those collapsing upper floors sent a huge shockwave of compressing air down the elevator shafts and stairwells, blowing out the windows on the floors below and causing some very minor structural damage. No big deal, but it's what makes people think the lower floors were "blown out". The big thing is that by this point, the upper floors have gained such an incredible amount of momentum from their falling, which is only increasing with their mass, that the lower floors have no hope of "catching" them. I say "catching" because they're not supporting them, they have to stop them from a freefall, and stopping an object in motion, especially an object composed of tons of concrete and steel falling directly downward, requires more structural integrity than any skyscraper has.
This is why the Windsor building is a poor example. This event did not occur. It was the WTC's own height working against it, giving the collapsing segments more and more mass until it was enough energy to break through the structurally sound floors.
People who claim there should have been a core, or or more left of it are people who try to compare this to other events, and often lack an understanding of physics and engineering. ALL of the steel in the WTC towers did not have to melt or be weakened. Only a small portion, in a small area, had to be structurally weakened enough to give way. The rest is simply F=ma
You can say "FACT" all you want, but you still havn't said which radio station you're talking about, or acknowledged the possibility that the BBC made a simple mistake.
You're the government, you want to covertly bring down a building. Now, do you get ready press statements saying that the buildings have fallen over, or do you just blow them up and hope that someone notices? There is no universe in which the "BBC got a press release 20 minutes early" makes any kind of sense.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
Presuming, of course, that such efforts existed.
"Uncontrolled" collapses of very large buildings are exceedingly rare events, so nobody would really know a priori how the WTC collapses "ought" to have looked. After the fact, the way the floors pancaked doesn't seem at all improbable. As the force of the collapse propagates downward, it meets elements designed to spread a fraction of a single floor's weight onto vertical supports. Since the force of the collapse would be orders of magnitude greater than what these elements were designed to support, it seems probable that they would impede the progress of the collapse to about the same degree that a cloud of smoke would impede a lazily swung sledgehammer.
Of course, this is just after the fact rationalization, but the engineering analysis confirms it the intuition that no special measures would need to be taken in order for the collapse to proceed in a way that superficially resembles a controlled implosion.
This conspiracy theory has the usual problems of conspiracy theories, such as providing what mystery writers call "motive, means and opportunity". Motive is a particularly vexing issue, given that seven buildings were destroyed past recovery and numerous other ones damaged, it's hard to connect the end result to the purported motive. Another commonsense question would be whether a government that could not keep Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Echelon, or warrantless surveillance under wraps could have engaged in what must have been a substantial engineering effort on three busy Manhattan buildings without anybody noticing.
The real appeal of any conspiracy theory is this:it provides an illusion of control. Limited control, that is certain, but the seat of the pants risk evaluation is actually quite astute: if it were some cabal of government officials, you'd actually be less exposed than if twenty men, each armed with a tool costing $1, could kill nearly three thousand people and bring the country to a virtual standstill for weeks.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
People highly over rate what it means to have plans sitting around. I am pretty sure that somewhere we have a plan to invade Canada. I bet we also have some shitty legislation for fill in government agency here sitting around that no one wants to enact. The fact that the PATRIOT act was basically read to go with such short notice shouldn't be surprising. The spooks had a wish list that was tossed in a dusty folder somewhere. Shit hits the fans, politicians screams for someone to DO SOMETHING, and the PATRIOT act is dusted off and shoved into the politicians hands.
If 9/11 had any conspiracy to it, we should just throw in the towel and surrender to the shadow overlords now, because they are playing a game WAY the hell too deep for us. Just consider all the bungled conspiracies that have been leaked out over the life of the Bush administration (and earlier even). None of them even begin to scratch the surface level of conspiracy that attacking the US reaches. Every time the government does something that is simply too sketchy, it gets leaked. The idea that the government could pull off the largest and most devious conspiracy in the history of man kind and NO ONE felt a twinge of guilt and leaked is absurd.
The only possible explanations left are that:
1) There is no conspiracy and the government sucks basically as much as it appears to. It can't carry out a conspiracy on any real scale, and even stuff that should be pretty basic, like a few warrantless wire taps is well outside of their abilities to keep a lid on.
2) The government is playing a vastly deeper game than you realize. All the bungled conspiracies were intentionally bungled to make you think that the government is incompetent and incapable of carrying out even the most basic morally dubious conspiracy. There is a small army of perfectly loyal conspirators with absolutely no sense of guilt that can commit horrible acts and keep them a secret. We are basically fucked and don't even realize it. The best we can hope for is that our evil shadowy overlords have good intentions.
Personally, I have a feeling that the truth is that people suck and are stupid, and that option #1 is what we are dealing with.
>Insecure people need conspiracy theories,...
Yeah, Stupid architects and engineers, what would they know about buildings?
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth
http://www.ae911truth.org/
You obviously need to consider what you're talking about because so far you've given us jack shit yourself. Here, let me put it in perspective for you: If you have a human pyramid of 6 people(3 on bottom, 2 in the middle, 1 on top) and you knock over the top person one of the people below it might also "collapse" with them, 2 possibly but probably not if everyone is semi-fit; if you knocked down the middle row they might all fall but since it'd only be a total of 3 people falling and 3 people left supporting, there's still a great chance that there would not be a complete collapse. Now build a human pyramid consisting of 55 people(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10) and make the row 3rd from the top collapse. There you have 6 people(1+2+3) falling on 4 people, there will likely be a collapse of the 4 people which will then be 10 people falling on the row of 5, that will likely then collapse making 15 people collapse on a row of 6 and so on until all 55 people are on the ground. Now that is what happens if it's a pyramid, so if it were a straight vertical tower of people, if the 3rd row of people fell, then the 2 rows above them will also fall making the 4th row have to withstand far more momentum.
If you know anything about the people who break bricks in martial arts by putting a little space between each brick so that the momentum of the bricks above them will help break the ones below them, well this is the same concept only the space between the "bricks" was 10+ feet instead of 1/4 inch and a brick(or two) about a third from the top broke before the rest causing the chain reaction without the need for the "hand" to break the ones above it. Sorry bro, I know you want to believe but this was just pure physics and there were no explosions HEARD when it happened. If you can show me an explosive that doesn't make a sound but can bring down buildings like the WTC, I'll be very interested in researching it, otherwise you can go back to your basic physics class and learn because explosions like that can be heard clearly for a few miles.
...since at the Pentagon they cannot find:
The wings Any of the seats The tail ...
Who says? Your idiot tr00fer friends? Planes don't make a cartoon like plane-shaped hole when they hit a reinforced concrete building. Delicate structures like the wings and tail planes practically disintegrate. Hell, most of an aircraft is aluminum, and betrwwen fire and impact, not much remains intact. You wanna see the wreckage of AA flt 77? See here. It's right there, in the pentagon, in small, torn up, fire damaged pieces.
Idiot.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"If you say so..."
The building you're showing has about 10 floors. WTC 1 and 2 had 10 times that and weighed exponentially more, in spite of being made with substantially similar materials. What would be strong enough to act as a pivot point for a 10 story building would buckle like a house of cards under a 100 story building, long before leaning over enough to "topple over" properly.
I did the sum in reply. I think your response is more satisfying; at least I got a smile out of it instead of...oh, horror at people's ability to quote technical from a basis of complete ignorance.
As it happens, a lot of this sort of stuff is answered quite gently in the NIST's FAQ
But that would require reading
Down with categorical imperatives
I actually read the report, which is quite interesting. This is the first time ever that a major high-rise building has totally collapsed from fire alone.
First, the biggest problem was that the fire sprinklers for the lower floors lost their water supply after the WTC1 collapse, which took out the city water main. The upper floor sprinklers were fed from tanks high in the building, and they were able to contain the fires on upper floors. The firefighters had to abandon the building because they didn't have a water supply.
The building had surprisingly little structural redundancy. The loss of one key interior column was enough to trigger a progressive collapse. The beams between columns were too long and not heavy enough to provide structural redundancy.
Fuel storage wasn't a factor. Paper storage and the use of open-plan bullpens was a much bigger issue. With more interior walls, the fire would have spread more slowly.
The building was built on top of a sizable power substation, but that didn't affect the fire. Nor did the basement-level fuel tanks for emergency generators. Only the small "day tanks" on higher floors fed the fire, and they weren't that big.
The recommendations in the report are surprisingly weak. They're not recommending any building code changes that would have prevented the WTC7 collapse. They're not recommending backup water supplies for sprinklers, for example. If there'd been some emergency arrangement through which the fire pumps could have drawn water from the nearby Hudson River, the building would have survived.
Emergency water supply in fires is a huge issue. In the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, the fire-fighting water supply for parts of the city was lost, despite a system that was supposed to be triply redundant. SF has a main water supply, an emergency system with a mountaintop tank, and cisterns under some key intersections. The main system was knocked out by the quake. The emergency system failed because some mains broke, and there was nobody on duty at the valve house at the tank to turn the valves to cut off the broken mains, so the tank drained out. (Due to a budget cut, that job was unstaffed. For seventy years, there'd been people at the tank on standby, with nothing to do until the next quake.) The cistern system had never been extended to the Marina district, so that backup was unavailable. However, there was yet another backup - SF fire trucks have suction hoses and pumps for use with those cisterns, and a few trucks were able to get to the edge of the Bay and suck in salt water. By stringing enough hoses together, they were able to deliver water to the fires.
Exactly - it's the same principle which allows a martial-artist to smash through 10 stacked concrete slabs. If you stacked the slabs directly on top of each other he'd smash his fist into goo before doing any damage to them, but if you leave a gap - even just a quarter of an inch - it creates enough space for the slabs to break individually instead of as a combined mass.
I think you are creating a false dichotomy here. Obviously the neocons are on the whole a very stupid bunch, as the execution of the Iraq strategy indicates. I believe that they were firmly convinced that they would be welcomed in Iraq, and that the miraculous hand of the free market would unleash the hidden potential of the Iraqi economy. I believe they were genuinely surprised with the collapse of the Iraqi situation, or else they would likely have sent more troops.
That said, it actually doesn't take that much intelligence to (a) write the Patriot Act to be enacted in case of a serious incident and to plan a grand military campaign to remake the Middle East as indicated here and (b) to deliberately ignore intelligence indicating an impending terrorist attack that would enable the enactment of their planned strategy. Read some of the documents linked to above. Then put yourself in the place of a leader who wants to implement those far reaching policies. It would be very easy to "allow" an attack on US soil, in order to make the enactment of your grand strategy possible.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I am posting anonymously because I believe the moderating in this forum is unreasonably biased against those who question the official explanation of the WTC collapses, myself among them. I fully support having a new, independent investigation of the WTC collapses, rather than the federal investigations we've had to date. I thought I would include the following quotes directly from the NIST Report which I find interesting and relevant to some of the discussions here.
This was the first known instance of the total collapse of a tall building primarily due to fires. (p. xxxi)
WTC 7 was unlike the WTC towers in many respects. It was a more typical tall building in the design of its structural system. It was not struck by an airplane. The fires in WTC 7 were quite different from those in the towers. Since WTC 7 was not doused with thousands of gallons of jet fuel, large areas of any floor were not ignited simultaneously. Instead, the fires in WTC 7 were similar to those that have occurred in several tall buildings where the automatic sprinklers did not function or were not present. These other buildings did not collapse, while WTC 7 succumbed to its fires. (p. xxxi)
The reader should keep in mind that the building and the records kept within it were destroyed, and the remains of all the WTC buildings were disposed of before congressional action and funding was available for this Investigation to begin. (p. 13)
The initiating local failure that began the probable WTC 7 collapse sequence was the buckling of Column 79. This buckling arose from a process that occurred at temperatures at or below approximately 400 deg. C (750 deg. F), which are well below the temperatures considered in current practice for determining fire resistance ratings associated with significant loss of steel strength. (p. 19)
Note Figure 3-14. Buckling of the lower exterior columns... (p. 38)
Once simulation of the global collapse of WTC 7 was underway, there was a great increase in the uncertainty in the progression of the collapse sequence, due to the random nature of the interaction, break up, disintegration, and falling of the debris... The details of the progression of the horizontal failure and final global collapse were increasingly less precise. Thus, while the two predictions of the time of descent of the west penthouse also straddled the observed time, the mechanisms of building collapse were quite different... The kink and rotation of the northeast facade occurred 2 to 3 s after the exterior facade had begun to move downward, as a result of the global collapse. The simulations do show the formation of the kink, but any subsequent movement of the building is beyond the reliability of the physics in the model. (p. 40)
Yet, in the summary at the end of the report:
Computer simulations of the fires, the thermal heating of the structure, the thermally induced damage to the structure, and the structural collapse can be used to predict a complex degradation and collapse of a building. The overall features and timing of the prediction were consistent with the videographic evidence. (p. 51)
You mean "small pieces" like these?
http://www.debunking911.com/cstripped.jpg
http://www.debunking911.com/columnd.jpg
Apparently you're unaware that deliberately demolished buildings are largely destroyed by their own weight, after their structural integrity is broken with explosives?
That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.
That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so thereâ(TM)s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!
That Jonathan Bushâ(TM)s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.
That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.
That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osamaâ(TM)s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.
That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.
That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history's little aberrations.
The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.
That one of George Bush's first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda's Afghanistan camps, even as the group's guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.
That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a "new Pearl Harbo
...Its simple physics....
that also mandates that the speed of the collapse was WAY too fast if the official domino collapse of the towers were true. The inertia of the large mass of the buildings below the crash sites should have slowed the rate of collapse significantly. The videos of collapse instead show that it took place in the same amount of time that a free falling object tossed from the roof buildings would have taken.
Speaking of simple physics: The first rule is to measure. You can do that to +/- .5 seconds at: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/videos/ntc_frames.html
The second rule is to do math. From these frames, it started at second 3, and ended on second 16, totalling 13 seconds with .5 seconds of error. If it were free fall, the start point is 830m above ground, which is 190m higher than the world's tallest building. An object tossed from the top of the tower would take 10 seconds to hit the ground.
The third rule is to know what you measure. I measured from where the dust cloud started to grow rapidly until no further downward movement is visible, which is valid but different from a definition of collapse where any debris touches the ground. I also measured with two significant digits.
Now, what have you done to make your claim?
The only way any large building can collapse in such a short amount of time, is if it's ENTIRE support structures is instantaneously removed.
And the only way to have the entire support structure vanish instantaneously is to have hundreds of professionals working on placing explosives along the entire support structure. These explosives are set of using utterly standard wiring, in the case of something as large as the WTC, hundreds of miles worth of wiring. Finally, the explosives would have to be placed with extreme accuracy all around the building by drilling holes in the support infrastructure.
Now, what do you think is more likely, either the government has access to:
or, they have access to the MIB Neuralizer and they have bee able to Neuralize all the witnesses
Here's idea: The premise for you conspiracy theory is incorrect. The building never dropped as if all it's support structure was instantaneously removed.
Ok... trying again:
Interstate bank of LA three hours fire, five floors:
One Meridien Plaza, scorched for 18 hours.
That 56-story steel framed building in Venezuela burned for over 16 hours.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
You can scale the dimensions and strengths of your model to account for the differing stiffness -to- weight-per-unit-length and weight-per-unit-area of the models materials. That would allow you to model loadings like (for example) if the top of the two towers were linked by a cable, and the cable tensioned, how much would the towers pull together (not that that could ever have happened (by the way, the film is very good, if you like talking with people with the "thousand yard stare")).
Unfortunately, for modelling the fires, and the spread of fire, you have a number of additional things which you've got to scale correctly and simultaneously - the thermal responses of the materials, the heat-release-per-unit-volume-per-unit-time, and probably most difficultly, the changes in viscosity and density of the air with temperature.
A broadly comparable disaster that I'm familiar with used physical 1:4 modelling to understand the destruction of the gas compression module on the Piper Alpha. But they didn't try modelling the spread of the fire similarly, nor the step-wise collapse by heat-buckling of the platform structure. Which is probably because the experiment would have been very expensive and wouldn't have yielded much new information ("Don't set fire to oil rigs with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of hydrocarbons on board" was a well known lesson before 1998-07-06.). It's a lot faster (particularly when you take into account construction time) to do a stimulation than to build a model. And you can always burn your simulation down again tomorrow. And again. And again.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It's like this: It's steel and concrete. Each floor is 200 feet square. That's about one acre. Picture a poured concrete pad of one acre suspended by a (really strong) rope. Cut the rope, it goes straight down. Now try to push it sideways. The inertia of the mass of the concrete resists that force. Gravity wants to pull it straight down. So it wants (cause this is smart concrete and has a choice)to go down. (Insert your own lewd thought here) A pancaking building is doing just that. The weakened steel joints cannot bear the force of the weight above it and snaps. Once you set that mass in motion, and the momentum builds up, it is inevitable that it come straight down. Remember, the building was 110 stories of an acre of concrete each. Such an enormous mass needs an enormous force to do anything but come straight down.