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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."
No one ever expected a fire to burn out of control for several hours. There was always an anticipation that fire units would be dispatched and undertake steps to control the fire.
Civilian structures are designed based on the expectation that emergency services will be available. They are not constructed as bunkers, for the most part, as the expenses are simply too high to do that. Nevertheless, NIST made a recommendation to evaluate those buildings that use similar construction methods and suggests several possible cost-effective ways of mitigating the risk of collapse under similar circumstances.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I'm guessing that they made a mistake in the confusion of not having very many facts in the wake of something huge happening. Unless you're suggesting that the entire BBC is in on a conspiracy?
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
"It looks like they want to wrap-up this investigation and blame [the collapse] on normal office fires," said Gage during counter-conference.
Normal office fires? What the fuck is that guy smoking? This was not "normal office fires"
Oh, I get it, he's got an /agenda/. It's a crackpot agenda though.
Crackpots are the most annoying of all, because not only are they wrong, but their untested gedankenexperiments are so wrong you don't know where to start pointing out the wrongness.
"No clear explanation for the source of the sulfur has been identified."
But then this is some reason for Gage to think that the sulfur was part of the mystical "thermite" which contains no sulfur in its composition.
And he calls himself an engineer.
I'll tell ya what the source was. The sulfur was in the steel when it was manufactured. Please go look up AISI steel grades.
http://www.answers.com/topic/aisi-steel-grades
OMG! STEEL HAS SULFUR IN IT! AND PHOSPHOROUS! AND MANGANESE! AND MOLYBDENUM! AND COBALT!
Fucking retards
Making steel is like making brownies. There are recipes for all the grades and they have different elements.
"400 architectural and engineering professionals"
Just because it says PE next to your name it doesn't mean you're smart. It means you passed a test. I know of one engineer that totally bought into the bullshit over on Stormfront.org. Seriously.
Richard Gage is to architects and engineers as Jack Thompson is to attorneys.
Someone should seriously look into taking away his stamp.
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BMO
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.
That is simply not true.
You people and your crackpot theories, pfff.
You can't take the sky from me...
Quite a few actually, they look like this
Making a building not fall sideways is a complicated task that requires a lot of training and preparation. The thought that you can get three out of three perfect collapses by splashing them with a bit of aviation fuel must have demolition companies shaking in their boots
Arguing with truthers is like arguing with creationists. They've already decided, it's a matter of faith. The weird thing is having looked at the structural collapse of the towers, if the official version was controlled demolition and the conspiracy theory was burning jet fuel, from a straight scientific standpoint I'd be inclined to believe the conspiracy. Physically, building catches fire, steel expands, breaks seals makes a lot more sense then Rutger Hauer and why not Whoopy spend a few days planting charges. However, like IDers, truthers decided they can make up various physical laws and ignore others as they go along all the while shouting "science!" (cue: T Dolby). And they get continuously pumped up by right wing trolls who figure quite accurately that they make the left look like a bunch of hairy clowns shouting 'JET FUEL BURNS AT 800 DEGREES MAN' at a fireman's funeral.
The real cover up is that the buildings weren't code to begin with, or rather David Rockefeller etc bent building codes to get them built. And Rudy had all the fuel stored in 7 against the advice of all the professionals. And that the Saucer People, in league with the Bush Administration, used a gravity ray to make the buildings fall faster then gravity and straight down.
Actually if you work some UFOs in I'll sign up. How cool would that be?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Do they mean to say that a fire can cause a [fireproofed steel-core] building to collapse?
It sure surprised the editor in chief of Fire Engineering magazine, but what does HE know, huh?
he warns that unless there is a full-blown investigation by an independent panel established solely for that purpose, "the World Trade Center fire and collapse will amount to paper- and computer-generated hypotheticals."
You can't take the sky from me...
Obviously you've never done forensics at a fire scene. I have; my father was on the governor's arson squad (State of California Division of Forestry) while I was a teenager, and they used me as a photographer since my grandfather had given me an excellent camera. You would be amazed at what odds and ends survive the most awful fires.
Insecure people need conspiracy theories, they need to make what happened more complicated and devious that it really was. Because if what happened really was this easy;
Prior to 9/11 several people from a third world countries entered the US legally and took flight lessons and then booked flights. Then on 9/11 they legally boarded the aircraft and once the aircraft were airborne took over aircraft, that basically fly themselves, and then pointed them at buildings.
They could never sleep at night and it would make people from the third world smarter that they are.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
It's a common misconception that random events don't or can't look very neat and tidy. [...] The way that a skyscraper is designed and built favors it falling more or less straight down [...]
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.
Dark smoke like the towers had is indication of lack of oxygen and therefore poor burning. It wasn't burning that well or as hot as possible and the kind of smoke proves the point.
WTC 7 could have had ideal burning conditions which would have minimized the amount of smoke.
I know experts in relevant fields too afraid to go on record with any commentary; the event had unique conditions never seen before and legitimately raises a great deal of questions and problems on that grounds alone-- but the political atmosphere IS limiting open critical analysis by experts (in addition to government not releasing useful information. This report isn't that useful if you are able to do the work yourself; especially if you don't want to get involved in the mess that even a picky correction would bring you.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The most difficult issue to deal with is what yourself said. Steel frame skyscrapers are hard to bring down. It is especially difficult to bring them down into their own footprint such that there are no residual steel columns left standing. With due respect to the authors of this official report and their three years of computer simulations, I do not believe for one moment that thermal expansion from the burning of paper, desks and plastic fittings (even over a period of many hours) is sufficient to explain this. I also do not think it can explain molten steel in the wreckage weeks after the event.
It is true that significant preparation for a controlled demolition would have been required. From what I have read, it is not true that tons of TNT would have been required, or that the columns would have needed drilling if thermite charges were used. I am not saying that this is definitely what happened. I am saying it fits the observed collapse and debris better than thermal expansion.
Forgive me if I ignore your strawmen.
Now, please, if you have really read everything available and have a good explanation, please lay it out for us.
Jet fuel burns at around 1400 degrees. While this is not hot enough to melt steel, it is hot enough to make it loose its structural integrity. It only takes 1100 degrees to cause the steel to lose about half of its structural strength from what I have read.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
If a structure doesn't have to be cost-effective or inhabitable, you can build almost anything with concrete. The most prominent example of this phenomenon is the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.
Not inhabitable, certainly not cost-effective, but it is over a thousand feet of concrete structure and interesting in a creepy way.
Cue the "In Communist North Korea, concrete builds you!" jokes.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Imagine you're in NYC before 9/11, and someone takes you to the WTC complex and says "Point out WTC 7." Unless you were intimately familiar with the complex, could you do it? Which building is WTC 3? WTC 5? Is the South Tower WTC 1, and the North WTC 2, or vice versa? Now imagine you're a reporter for the BBC who may have spent a total of a few weeks in the United States. WTC 3 was destroyed in the collapse of WTC 1 and 2, and WTC 5 suffered a partial collapse. Are you absolutely positive that in that position while reporting either the partial collapse of WTC 5 or the total collapse of WTC 3 you might not refer to one as WTC 7?
When talking about the so-called controlled demolition theory of 7 World Trade, it was only the conspiracy theorists who called it "W-T-C-7" when talking about it.
These buildings were known by a different name in colloquial speech:
The building in question was known as "7 World Trade." The others were "1 World Trade" and "2 World Trade" and the like. Never "South Tower" or "W-T-C-Anything."
All this internet-based conspiracism by non-locals has renamed them "WTCx" but they were never known as such to the 400+ men and women who died protecting them on 9/11.
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Kriston