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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."
And your point is? It's a common misconception that random events don't or can't look very neat and tidy. One of the common mistakes people make when faking random data is to make it look too random. Meaning they don't have enough places in the data which appear to be non-random.
The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down rather to one side or the other. The reason being that if it were to topple, as remote a possibility as that is, the building shouldn't be allowed to hit other buildings. Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
Let's just get this out of the way first. BULLSHIT!
The rest of the world knows something suspicious went on, but America has their head in the sand. 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 but oxidizing flame was enough to melt or buckle steel in the trade center? The sheer ignorance of the American populace astounds me.
How about if we get this out of the way:
A statement that one building somewhere at sometime didn't collapse under certain conditions is no grounds (in fact it's a logical fallacy) for saying a building couldn't collapse under the same conditions... and worse, it's also no grounds to subsequently stereotype an entire group of people and flame them.
Thank you and have a nice day.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Why are there so many similarities to the way the buildings fell to a controlled demolition? Because there are only so many ways a building basic physics allows a building collapse, controlled or not?
Both are afected by gravity, which exerts a downward force.
Another big reason large buildings tend to fall straight down is that is the direction gravity is pulling them. Anything much bigger than three or four stories is going to come apart very soon after leaving vertical, and the pieces come straight down.
Anarchists never rule
Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here.
What site is this, and what has it done with Slashdot
Well, for sure Digg is one of the places where this is happening, some idiots over there get +100 for the most ridiculous comments. What this has done to Slashdot? I hope they drew away some of the trolls from here...
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
How many skyscrapers have people seen collapse which are NOT controlled demolitions?
In other words, how many data points do you have on "What does a skyscraper collapsing on its own look like"?
In other other words, how do you know that "falling straight down" is an artifact of controlled demolition, and not an artifact of being a skyscraper?
It needn't be as subtle as seeing patterns where there are none, although we know that happens all the time.
In simple terms, things tend to fall down. Surely, if it were easier to get a building to topple over sideways, a team of terrorists isn't going to go through the trouble of averting what would surely be a larger and more spectacular catastrophe.
People whose experience with construction is limited to building models tend to imagine buildings are much lighter relative to the strength of materials in them then they are.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Shut the fuck up. For fuck's sake, please just shut the fuck up.
You're ignorant, you're dumb and you're uneducated. Most of all though, you are fucking annoying.
I don't listen to your trolling. I don't pay attention to your buzzwords like "sheeple". I didn't start on 9/11 and I'm not starting today.
One more time for good measure. Shut the fuck up.
Because gravity pulls straight down? Which way would you expect a building of that size to fall?
Yeah, building engineers don't ACTUALLY know how fire safety works.
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.
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Your explanation works for the Twin Towers, but not for WTC7, which is what vertinox was asking about. The jet fuel was probably burned off by the time the north tower collapsed, but debris ignited by it (directly or indirectly) did hit WTC7, starting the fires there.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Slashdot has always been about freedom albeit in the open source world, this has always included debates on what people read and think. 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 a fact that goes against the science given which has always fueled conspiry theorists and with good reason. We live in a society that is given the freedom to discuss and this forum has until today always given it's user's the right to says anything that is on their minds. Is slashdot changing it's stance?
History was not written only once, it was written and rewritten countless times over long periods of time and came to exist as we know it because discussions continue over time and corrections and rewrites and new information that was ignored or suppressed comes out.
But this only happens because people don't just stand there and accept blindly what is told to them especially when it goes against commen sense.
I hope the person who wrote this has the curtosy to remove the comment or correct it.
Do they mean to say that a fire can cause a building to collapse?
Name another steel skyscraper fire where the building collapsed.
There was certainly smoke coming out of the towers where the planes hit. I don't remember a lot of smoke around WTC7.
in how the government knew exactly who was responsible, the minute it happened, and flew them the hell out of the country.
Come on, now. It was plain to anyone who'd been studying the situation that Al Queda the culprit. It's not like that was their first time at bat. The question is whether or not you think the Saudi family/ies that were allowed to leave the country were actally Al Queda members or not, or had a hand in it. Do you REALLY think that if the government had hired the suicide attackers that... some other rich people from Saudi Arabia would have been somehow important to the plot, but that the people doing the "hiring" wouldn't have thought to maybe get them out of the way in advance? Please.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The claims about it being controlled demolition misses some points that are important. No controlled demolition has ever been done for a building even the size of WTC7, let alone the main towers. The tallest ever was done by CDI in 1998, when the 439-foot-tall JL Hudson Department Store was brought down. The original WTC7 was 610 feet tall, and of course the main towers were more than twice that. Trying to map that out without being fairly obvious would be difficult at best.
It seems to me, in a bit of a thought experiment, that it makes sense that a skyscraper should come straight down, more or less. They are built around structures that are designed to withstand significant loads due to wind, bending slightly but not that much overall. If structural member breaks, even if it breaks outward, there will likely still be some connectivity to the core, preventing it from moving outward. The additional stress added to local joints would cause them to fail, but in a less outward direction, as some of that energy has already been redirected downward. This continues around the building as the collapse continues. Some of the materials in other parts of the building will tend towards their own outward motion, but be pulled back in by the remaining connection to the core, canceling out some of the momentum in the other direction. Ultimately, everything comes straight down.
I think that makes some sense.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Controlled implosions on large buildings require months of preparation, miles of detonator wire, and literally tons of explosive charges placed at thousands of locations - sometimes requiring the demolition of interior walls. I've not yet heard a convincing explanation on how this process could be accomplished without anyone noticing.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I did not post as a troll. I am generally concerned about the use of language "crackpot theories."
Some people STILL consider "Global Warming" a "crackpot theory."
Some consider "Evolution" as a crackpot theory.
Insulting an idea with no logical argument is no less a logical fallacy than the ad hominem attack. You may not agree with people who claim that the buildings were brought down in a controlled demolition, but unless you can understand their argument and refute their points on merit, you are no different than the people who believe in intelligent design or that global warming is a myth.
I would submit, there are more facts and science supporting a controlled demolition of the word trade center buildings than there is evidence supporting Intelligent Design.
No, because I don't refuse to consider a controlled demolition as a "crackpot theory" my original post was ranked troll. This doesn't mean I believe it, but there are some serious irregularities in how the buildings came down.
The parent post is probably going to be moderated into oblivion, and I have no doubt my reply will too. However, I urge everyone to look at all the evidence in an unbiased way and come to their own conclusions. The official report on how a steel frame building collapsed due to fire (for the third time in history, the first two being WTC1 and WTC2) is not convincing. The visual evidence suggests controlled demolition. There is physical evidence that is consistent with this. There may indeed have been a "conspiracy" involved here. I am not comfortable with any of the theories that have been put forward, but I certainly do not buy the fantasy in this official report.
Another big reason large buildings tend to fall straight down is that is the direction gravity is pulling them. Anything much bigger than three or four stories is going to come apart very soon after leaving vertical, and the pieces come straight down.
Yeah, you really have to keep in mind just how big these structures are. With the two main towers, there were dozens of floors above the impact point. It's already a phenomenal engineering feat to hold up that amount of weight. Then consider once the frame becomes weakened. Once any point in the structure starts to give, all those floors above start to move, the weak point is going to buckle. Just think about the amount of kinetic energy all that building gains after accelerating only a few feet. There's no way the structure underneath can survive that even if was completely undamaged. Thus why it seemed as though the towers went into free-fall, the amount of downward force being exerted simply tore through everything like it was cray paper, which then itself fell adding to the mass.
The enemies of Democracy are
That's why firefighters had no fear whatsoever of going in there.
Citation needed.
I don't need any research to tell me that if you fly a large passenger airplane into a building then something really bad going to happen to it.
As far as WTC7, I've seen a whole neighborhood burned down in less than an hour because of one house catching on fire, I'm strangely led to believe that something on a much larger scale could have similar effects.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
The difference being that that building was reinforced concrete stack, which is essentially monolithic.
The discussion is about steel skeleton buildings, which have riveted/welded joints that create natural pivots and fulcrums when stresses become off-centered.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
As I write on my blog, there's a big group of - for lack of a better name - crackpots who go around claiming the Bush (Jr.) Administration had something to do with the 9/11 events or in the destruction of the two towers. Which is ridiculous for the simple reason I point out: "the (current) Bush Administration doesn't have people smart enough to pull a stunt like that. The current administration's staffing policies have been directed toward political cronyism and connections, even at the expense of even bare competence. From what I've seen, anyone working there that has any self respect or common sense has quit." It's pointless to argue that they have the kind of people smart enough to pull off this sort of thing and keep it secret. If they were that good, they'd have been able to cover up the whole fake "weapons of mass destruction" issue in order to make it look like they really were present in Iraq.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
What EXACTLY is so "normal" about a multi-hour, multi-floor fire started by burning debris and fed by fuel oil?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
After being methiodically stripped of all insulation before the fire and after burning for dozens hour hours.
Unlike this building, which had its insulation intact and which burned for only a few hours before collapsing.
Details, details.
I can't tell which building you're referring to, because neither the Windsor building nor WTC7 were "methiodically [sic] stripped of all insulation before the fire".
But I think your last paragraph may be referring to WTC7, in which case "a few hours" is quite wrong. The fires in WTC7 burned, unfought, for roughly 7 hours.
Fireproofing isn't the Holy Grail. It's only there to fend off the heat long enough to let whatever emergency response takes place do its thing before Really Bad Things happen.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Actually, "gravity" is ~9.8 m/s^2. That's an acceleration, not a flat rate, meaning that air resistance notwithstanding, the average rate at which something will accelerate when falling is 9.8 meters a second per second. It absolutely should have taken fewer than 23 seconds to fall.
You may wish to learn a little bit more about gravity here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_gravity .
Don't bother. If you agree, he's obviously right. If you disagree, you're obviously brainwashed and/or sent by the government.
Welcome to the wonderful world of self-confirming delusions, wherein you need never admit you're wrong.
There is no citation needed. Firefighters don't have too much fear of going into a multi-story building because the risk of collapse is not great. That's why firefighters, ummmm, you know, actually went in there as the fire raged. If there was a risk to them they wouldn't have gone in. That's based on years of experience.
No shit?
Yer, because, ummm, you know, the fires can actually spread because the buildings and the fires are at the same, ummm, level. This is clearly not the case here. The fires are several stories up, and the notion that a fire can spread from the top of a tall building to a much shorter building and completely demolish it is a huge, huge, huge stretch of logic.
I'm just asking the questions. Quite clearly, a lot of people really do not want to face trying to answer them logically.
For starters, the Madrid Tower is far shorter than the WTC buildings and is much more prone to a complete collapse, which is what we're talking about here.
What reason is there to believe this is true?
Collapses in taller buildings will tend to leave at least something intact because of pancaking.
Do you have examples of this? Keep in mind, they should be as similar to the Twin Towers as possible. Personally, I think you're going to have some serious problems finding comparable data points. Good luck...
Secondly, look at the huge intensity of that fire relative to the size of the building itself. It encompassed the entire building:
Right. The Windsor building had a much smaller floor area than the Twin Towers. No surprises here.
That didn't happen in the WTC collapses.
Why do you think it had to?
You can't melt all the steel in a very large building to induce a complete collapse [...]
Ah-ha! I have a question: why did you lie to me about not being a conspiracy theorist?
Only conspiracy theorists parrot this asinine claim that "all the steel" had to melt before the building could collapse. I mean, that statement of yours is ignorant on levels no man should ever reach.
Do you understand why?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Yes, you're right, holocaust deniers, intelligent design proponents, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists all feel like they've been denied the right to debate their theories.
The thing is, they're lying to themselves. They have lots of debates. I've heard 9/11 conspiracy theories deconstructed and made out to be bullshit lots and lots of times. Holocaust deniers do have conventions (like the one in Iran last year). Intelligent design, which should be laughed out of any adult conversation, has managed to actually be taught in schools and considered in courts of law. All of these people already get way, way, way, way, way more attention than their theories deserve.
These people say the opposite of the truth, not only when spouting their absurd theories, but when explaining why other people won't listen to them. "Oh, they're just sheep, led astray by a huge conspiracy." No, actually, you're a petty fool with a reality deficit. We don't ignore you because we are dummies, we ignore you because we have better judgment than you do and can see thru what you say.
Yeah because we know that the impact of an airplane flying as fast as it was going had no effect on the structural integrity of the core. I especially loved how they compared two fires burning to that of the WTC, but failed to mention that neither was impacted by anything with the amount of force that the airliner that hit the WTC did. Sounds like it's more a case of the guy was fired for conducting piss poor experimentation with the intent of proving his own theory rather than finding the truth.
First, I need to say a few things to inoculate myself from being labeled one way or the other:
1. The concept of a "conspiracy theory" is flawed, and is simply a cop out. There is no such thing as a conspiracy theory. There are just good and bad theories. Labeling an idea a "conspiracy theory" is just a form of jingoism and does nothing to increase the flow of ideas. Labeling something a conspiracy theory is a brilliant tactic to bury an idea as it takes advantage of herd mentality. Judge an idea by its merit and not by its label. Here on Slashdot extremely brilliant and extremely stupid ideas are posited all the time, so why now are we disallowed to discus a certain set of ideas? I thought there was a strong freedom/libertarian mindset here...
2. If you examine history, conspiracies are actually the norm and not an aberration. Look at Rome, or the times of Shakespeare, or Nazi Germany, or the French revolution, etc etc. Look at the behavior of the current administration of the United States and say there haven't been conspiratory behaviors with a straight face. All a conspiracy means is that more than one person plans together to do something secretly. That happens ALL THE TIME, whether criminally or not.
3. As Slashdot readers many of you consider yourselves to be scientifically minded and aware of logical fallacies. Why does this mindset breakdown when it comes to politically charged events? You are labeling people nut cases and tinfoil hat wearers and conspiracy theorists the same way people were labeled communists during the McCarthy era. The ad hominem attacks are relentless.
4. In light of the awareness that several agencies in the US with billions of dollars in funding and specific programs for controlling the flow of information DO exist, wouldn't you think that Slashdot, a hub of meme flow on the internet, would be a specific target of operations? Opinions are manipulated on the net regularly. You only have to look at China with their "wangyou" (internet friends) that are paid 50 cents chinese for each message they post that supports a certain agenda. The manipulation in the US is much more subtle. Teams of PhDs and psychologists know what buttons to press to get a certain response out of a self-admittedly obsessive compulsive crowd of nerds.
5. Building 7 was never hit by an airplane. The owner of the building admitted to it being demolished, then reneged his statement. There are videos of reporters describing building 7's fall while it is still standing in the background. It took SEVEN years for investigators to come up with a reason for the building to fall the way it did. Is it possible that the SEVEN years were spent honing a story plausible enough to convince even the most skeptical people of it's truth?
6. Unless you've visited the site of the building and done your own scientific measurements, everything you know comes from suspect media sources. This relates to point 3 above. I freely admit I don't know the truth of what happened due to this single fact.
In summary: Don't buy into either side of the story. There are plausible explanations for it being due to fire, but there are equally plausible explanations to it being due to malicious intent. Don't follow the herd - a certain subset of humans are purely pragmatic and will do whatever it takes to gain money or power.
PLEASE PLEASE refer to the last 5000 years of history and don't make the mistake of thinking that somehow right now things are different and innocent.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Name another steel skyscraper fire that went completely uncontrolled for 7 hours.
Cynical Idealist
I have a simple, intuitive explanation for 9/11 that should satisfy everyone: some shit got fucked up.
Well, doesn't satisfy me - nobody got fired for their part of the shit.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I don't think you do.
Pancaking is what the controlled demolition people deliberately cause ('Implosion' is an incorrect media term) and a fairly common mode of failure during construction. It only takes one floor failing to take everything down below the original failure.
It's primary characteristics are complete destruction of the affected area and falling straight down.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It looks as though that building fell down because it either became detached from its foundation, or because the foundation wasn't firmly planted in the ground. The above-ground construction of the building doesn't seem to have been the primary cause of the collapse, as the whole thing seemed to remain largely intact before hitting the ground.
I'm not going to say that it's "Apples and Oranges," but that video seems to depict a pretty different scenario.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
This is WTC 7 that we are talking about, not towers 1 or 2. It wasn't struck by a plane and didn't have hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel in it. As colfer pointed out, it had some diesel fuel tanks in the basement, but these were found to have not contributed largely to the fire (which was on the upper stories).
The conclusion of the board is that a normal building/office fire starting by falling debris from WTC 1 is what brought the building down. If we are going to be building dense cities with skyscrapers then it is important that a normal fire merely gut the building, not compromise it's structural support. The building techniques used in WTC 7 were not sufficient, and shouldn't be used in the future.
The only 3 skyscrapers in the world to collapse from fire. WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7. Move along nothing to see here.
Because he accidentally used terminology that happens to also be used in the demolition business to refer to something else. And the BBC just fucked up.
Cynical Idealist
I think what he is trying to say by "normal office fires" is identifying the temperature and the fuel sources.
You can exclaim "fucking retards" but without thermite, there is nothing on the plane or in an office building that can burn hot enough to cause steel to melt. I believe this is the one factor that needs a plausible explanation. Any attempts to gain a plausible explanation for the steel melted in this way has been met with refusal to answers or denial of the question.
The materials and their state are a matter of historical documentation and it would be a little late to pull references to the liquified steel. It might seem "somewhat" plausible to hear about fatigued or weakened steel, but not this. And frankly, the perfect free-fall of both main towers and the complete lack of lateral motion during the collapse seems REALLY like a professional demolition and would require equally distributed damage across the floors of the building that collapsed. That simply didn't happen. The core columns failed right along with the floors of the buildings. It was nearly perfect. It wasn't quite perfect, though... about 50 stories of some of the second building's core columns remained for a short while before they collapsed... and they too fell perfectly vertically rather than off to the side as one might expect.
The collapse of the buildings were anything but random as one would expect from an unplanned tragedy such as this. In all the sky scraper fires that have ever occurred before or since has never resulted in this level of complete destruction. This is the first and only time in the history of man kind that a building has fallen like this after a crash or fire, and here we have multiple occurrences of the same phenomenon happening in rapid succession. I find it more than a little amazing.
Furthermore, there have been several historical cases of large aircraft slamming into a skyscraper without causing a uniform collapse as seen in not just one but two very large buildings. One account was in the 1940's where a bomber slammed into the Empire State building. There was fire, death, injury and some really big holes, but no collapse and this building wasn't nearly as well constructed as the twin towers.
I can't safely say that I believe anything I've heard or read, but I can safely say that I believe we aren't being allowed to know the truth and without fail there are just too many problems with just about every aspect of every part of the story being told not just about the WTC towers and nearby buildings, but about the Pentagon and the plane that was allegedly crashed by heroic passengers. The explanations being offered don't match the evidence that is publicly available. It's as if they aren't even trying to explain how things happened. And it's not particularly helpful for concerned people who want to understand what happened to be labelled crackpot or unpatriotic.
Finally, I think there's a huge difference between a "conspiracy theory" and "the evidence doesn't support the official claims." So far, I have yet to hear a complete theory of conspiracy outside of the assertion that these events were staged to allow the current administration to pull in more power to its office and to consolidate everything under the department of homeland security.
There's a LOT of missing information and the explanations being offered are a lot less plausible than 'crackpot discussions' we've all heard. And no report so far has even addressed the matter of molten steel. It just doesn't occur in fires and other unplanned building collapses. Not one other example exists outside of buildings demolished professionally.
It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives.
Or you could just thow some kerosene on it.
I never understood this weak attempt at a sarcastic rebuttal from you "truthers". It's like you just can't wrap your minds around the fact that one of the goals of a controlled demolition is to not cause billions of dollars in damage to surrounding buildings...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
So you're saying that examples of buildings falling over due to unintentional and intentional bottom floor support failure ((the Manila collapse video and the controlled demo photo) prove that internal fires across multiple floors don't make buildings collapse vertically? There's no point in arguing with logic like that.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Ok so you you got a smaller mass ( the higher collapsing flours) falling over a bigger mass (the lower floors - which were also supported by the ground under them). So now my common sense is suppose to accepts that that smaller mass is able to cause the bigger mass the be pulverized without any resistance?
It didn't pulverize the ENTIRE REMAINING BUILDING simultaneously, genius. The falling, growing, and accelerating mass destroyed the remaining building one floor at a time.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It could also be that anyone who has ever watched a Discovery Channel documentary on professional demolition of large buildings has been led to believe that safely and completely collapsing such a building requires weeks of planning and absolutely precise placement and detonation of lots of explosives.
Or you could just thow some kerosene on it.
You have a bizarre perception of the bounds of "safely". Also, the "controlled" appearance of the collapses is a illusion due to the enormity of the scale. The towers didn't fall over, but neither did they tumble straight down into two neat piles within the bounds of their own foundations. The debris field spread out of several blocks.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
because they always use live footage on green screens. Sigh.
Well, if NIST says so, it MUST be true.
You can see the building still standing in the background, even while the on-site reporter is telling you that it had collapsed!
This is a matter of public record, and EASY to find! Go look for yourself!
Oh... and the Silverstein comment is also on YouTube. It was on the frigging evening news!
When you call bullshit on somebody, you should be able to back it up! You lost this one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...there's not a (+1, Crackpot) Option?
Why couldn't this simply have been a mistake?
There was a lot going on that day, and we've seen how poorly news agencies tend to fact check things when they're trying to get a scoop.
[Citation needed]
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Well, in the first place your chronology is off. The first Enron trial began in 2004. As of 9/11/2001, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were still in charge, and in fact the first public questioning by analysts of Enron's valuation were only a few months old at that time. The SEC investigation didn't begin until October 2001, so if it all were an attempt to cover up Enron evidence, it would quite literally be prescient.
In any case, there are easier ways to get rid of evidence if you have this kind of power. It is hardly necessary to destroy seven buildings when a fire starting near a single room would do. Even a simple burglary is both easier and more likely to succeed. Add this the fact that the destruction of so many buildings and lives means there would be commission afterwards to investigate. This commission could, of course, be controlled, but if the power to do this certainly it could much more readily have squelched the original investigation.
This kind of "evidence" is typical of conspiracy theories, which have three hallmarks:
(1) Require remarkably smooth coordination between conspirators with no demonstrable ties and considerable reason to distrust each other.
(2) Require the conspirators to choose convoluted, uncertain, and risky means where more direct, more reliable and safer means would presumably be at their disposal.
(3) Concoction and defense of dramatic "facts" that are either can't substantiated or are even (as here) demonstrably impossible.
Now what work, exactly, could be (a) passed of as routine, (b) be so non-invasive that witnesses would fail to recall it later and (c) reliably bring the building down?
Remember, the whole reason or this theory is that the building could not have imploded without considerable preparation. If a few plastic explosive charges here or there could due the trick, why couldn't extensive structural damage followed by a raging fire?
Armchair it may be, but whereever it proceeds from it is well supported in evidence that conspiracy theories such as this do not explain the facts very well. It follows that since the "explanations" involved are not very convincing in terms of how they reconcile facts, they must be convincing for other reasons. The exact nature of those reasons are, admittedly, a topic of speculation. Who can know for certain? However, I think my explanation is both plausible, and more charitable than the more common assumption that conspiracy theorists are just bat-shit crazy.
Now, I want to go on record that I do think Enron's senior executives were evil, and that I believe the Bush administration is both evil and wildly incompetent at pursuing its nefarious aims. However, I don't think it is within their scope of competence (or incompetence) to execute this putative conspiracy, nor is there any evidence requiring explanations of this sort.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ah, yes, the favorite canard of the conspiracy idiot. Too bad the rest of the report then goes on to outline in detail the exact opposite strategy of what followed after 9/11.
That passage of the PNAC report is a good litmus test for the honesty of conspiracy theorists. If you quote it as evidence of conspiracy, it becomes obvious that you haven't actually read the PNAC report, nor have you bothered to look at any evidence which contradicts your theories. It's handy in that it allows me to immediately ascertain that you're an idiot, and move on to debating people who may actually care about the truth.
What part of delusions implies you admit anything anyway?
ilovegeorgebush
That's called affirming the consequent. It's not insightful, informative, or valuable in any way; it's a fallacy.
I think your parent's reasoning is that regardless of whether the government is guilty or not, no government agency would say the government is guilty. Therefore, a government agency now saying the government is not guilty carries no information about the guilt of the government.
More specifically, let G be "The government is guilty." and let A be "The investigating government agency says the government is guilty.". We assume that ~G=>~A, i.e., the agency will not blame the government if the government is innocent. We also assume that G=>~A, i.e., if the government is guilty, they will force the agency to cover it up. Under these assumptions, both G and ~G lead to ~A, so the fact that we observe ~A should be obvious and does not say anything about G.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
This kind of "evidence" is typical of conspiracy theories, which have three hallmarks:
(1) Require remarkably smooth coordination between conspirators with no demonstrable ties and considerable reason to distrust each other.
Like, for instance, a random group of guys from the middle east..
(2) Require the conspirators to choose convoluted, uncertain, and risky means where more direct, more reliable and safer means would presumably be at their disposal.
Like for instance living in America for several years, taking flying lessons, and then hopefully taking control of an airliner full of hundreds of people with a KNIFE, and then, never having flown a plane, mind you, fly the gigantic airliner into a huge city of skyscrapers and successfully impact the plane into a cross section of several hundred feet, TWICE?
(3) Concoction and defense of dramatic "facts" that are either can't substantiated or are even (as here) demonstrably impossible.
Such as finding a perfect, unscathed copy of the attacker's passport in the wreckage?
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Simulations are not as effective: given three years and a beowulf cluster one can model improbable events, and an improbable event verified three out of three times in the case of the WTC buildings won't satisfy conspiracy theorists.
Nothing satisfies conspiracy theorists...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Demolition companies are just as concerned with preventing debris from ejecting sideways from the building as it collapses as they are with preventing the building as a whole from falling sideways.
However, to my knowledge, no building as large as the WTC towers have ever been demolished under controlled conditions, and few (if any) buildings with the same internal design (the steel tube core). The steel core of the WTC towers may have very well lent itself to a vertical collapse under any conditions.
Again, not saying anything conclusive, but merely because three buildings happened to fall more or less straight down when they collapsed is no proof that something secret went on. It could also be argued that since WTC 1 and 2 were more or less identical in structure, they should have been expected to collapse the same way given the similar conditions (of being impacted by jet planes), therefore it's only "two" perfect collapses. (Other problem: define "perfect collapse", the WTC 1/2 debris impacted other buildings, that's hardly perfect.)
It could *also* be argued that if you're going to demolish giant skyscrapers and kill thousands of people, you're also not going to care about collateral damage, so why not make them topple sideways so that it looks more accidental? Basically, it's bogus to assume that a straight-down collapse implies shenanigans in the first place.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Which it did - 40% as per the report.
Neither the videos nor the seismic record show any such thing. If you truly believe that, you've been hoodwinked by the conspiracy idiots.
For WTC1 and 2 this is easy to demonstrate - simply observe the speed of the cloud of debris falling on the outside of the building as opposed to the main mass. You'll notice a massive difference between the two. As for WTC7, it's a lot harder to tell from the video, but there are seismic records which show it took upwards of 20 seconds from collapse initiation to final impact. No matter what the actual numbers, though, there's certainly no evidence to suggest that any of the three buildings collapsed at unusually high speeds.
I see. Which engineering/construction company did you say you work for?
Dude, Occam is rolling in his grave.
Planes flown by anti-American hijackers crashed into the buildings, and they fell down, causing massive damage. That is what was witnessed. Pretty simple...crash, burn, fall. Damn them.
OR
Most incredibly efficient and amazingly treasonous government conspiracy ever still hasn't leaked in 7 years. The complexity of things to make this true is mind-boggling.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
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.
More handwaving bullshit. You have no idea that anything you have stated is true apart from the fact you pulled it out of your own stinking arse.
Debian FTW
Yeah, and the thought that you can have a demolition crew in place in two of the most crowded work-places in the world for weeks ahead of Sept 11, and nobody notices them is a lot less of a weird thought.
If more than 3 people share a secret it is no longer a secret. No government brought down the WTC, no space ships have ever landed on earth (in human history anyway) and no, Santa Claus does not exist.
Buildings are NOT designed to suffer complete destruction after an accident. Where did you get the idea that in the event of an accident, a building should come down completely offering no chance for survivors in a highly occupied building. If this were true and the public were made aware of it, I think there would be a tremendous hesitation to ever work in a skyscraper. A fire breaks out and the entire building comes down? What the hell kind of design is that?
Please go find some references on the assertion that buildings are designed to fail like this under ALL assertions. This notion could never fly in any world but the one you live in.
And I am waiting to see what I have stated has been debunked. And really, what I state are two things:
1. There were unexplained puddles of molten steel on the site. This is very unusual and has yet to have any official explanation.
2. That the perfect pancake collapse was something other than an accident.
This building, that stood a very long time, lost some of its upper floors to a chain reaction of falling floors above it. You're asserting that it collapsed under its own weight? WTC1, WTC2, and WTC7 are the only skyscrapers in history ever to collapse after a fire. And I have search high and low only to find image after image of buildings gutted after being completely consumed by flame. This is the first and only time this has ever happened in history and you accept this as possible? You probably believe in other crack-pot ideas that defy the laws of physics as we know it as well.
The fact of the matter is that there are more examples of failed building collapses after professional demolition attempts than there are of accidental complete destruction. If anything like this had ever happened before, I might be inclined to believe the official account. It has simply never happened like that before and never since. And the whole series of events is amazingly full of problems. The initial images of the Pentagon attack were missing a lot of things that should have been there like wheels, massive parts of jet engines and damage to the surrounding lawn.
I wouldn't begin to know or imagine what really happened. But the basic facts and evidence don't fit with the official account.
But please, if you actually believe what you are asserting is true, that buildings like these are designed to fall this way, cite some references. I actually work with architects and engineers every day -- professionals in the field who know better -- building safety includes considerations of things like survivability estimations. I find it ridiculously hard to imagine that a building catching fire could lead to a complete collapse by design. I really don't believe you will find any such reference information, but if you find it, link it or post it -- I'd really like to be wrong. In my view, most people who are defending the official accounts are denying a lot of public knowledge and have yet to see any experts in the field without direct involvements in the reports themselves agree with the official accounts.
Actually, it isn't that it's a conspiracy theory that's the problem.
In fact, that al-Qaida, an international network of terrorists that want to launch jihad against the western world, is responsible for the 9-11 attacks is a conspiracy theory.
The difference is that with the above they don't have to accuse people of being brainwashed in order to get people to accept the theory.
That's a typical creationist tactic right there. "There is not enough evidence of Evolution. Show me the evidence!" And when you do, he will say "that isn't evidence" or "that isn't good enough". You have just been presented with a thorough report on the WTC7 collapse. The evidence is right there. Like creationists, however, you simply choose to ignore it.2