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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 yes, they used Beowulf clusters to do the simulations, some of which lasted for several months."
No! You stole my +5 funny!!
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
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Zombies obviously did it.
MABASPLOOM!
Crackpot theories can be discussed elsewhere; please limit the discussion to the science here.
You must be new here.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
Interesting. Then I am curious as to what temperature would be required to melt and/or buckle the structure of your aluminum foil hat?
"Yes, But did they run linux?" No, XP/Vista - that's whay it took 3 years to do the graphics.
It didn't. The hundreds of tons of flaming debris ignited by hundreds of gallons of aviation fuel did.
Do they mean to say that a fire can cause a building to collapse? Next they'll be telling us damage to structures following earthquakes isn't manmade.
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.
but you can still publish goatse links here.
Their they're doing there hair.
Everyone knows the CIA hired the mob and anti-Communist Cuban militants to bring it down.
As soon as it is Slashdotted, someone will come along with, "hey, they are blocking access to the report - what are they hiding?"
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
If someone left a crackpot burning, couldn't that have started the fire in the first place?
Ipso diabolico facto nonsensicalico.
These guys have resources. It could be quite damaging to be caught with a smoldering crackpot.
Ergo, they crash a plane into the building to cover it all up.
Sheeple, the answers are RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU, just light them up and breathe deeply.
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.
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.
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.
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
Because gravity pulls straight down? Which way would you expect a building of that size to fall?
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.
no, that was because the technician downloaded Smiley Central.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
First read as "NIST Releases Report On Windows 7 Collapse."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Asking Slashdot readers to stick to science, refrain from discussing conspiracies, AND taking the fun out of a beowulf cluster reference?
This submitter is a black belt troll and you all know it!
That's just one of many theories. Some say it was done with Pop Rocks and Soda. I happen to believe it was done with Mentos and Diet Coke.
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.
Which way would you expect a building of that size to fall?
Toward Osama bin Laden's massive ego.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"All documents can be found at NIST's WTC page, which read like a porn magazine for finite element junkies"
Guess we should try not to get the pages stuck together huh?
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.
And major network news reported it falling while it was still standing in plain sight behind them.
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
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.
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.
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.
Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
Speak for yourself...
"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.
--
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...
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.
Which is why efforts to keep the damage to a minimum would point to an "inside job" conspiracy rather than a "bunch of guys in some desert cave" conspiracy.
Duh.
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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
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
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.
I saw the video link, it might be helpful to you to be accurate and precise with what the owner said when you report. The owner said the firefighters had come to him and said they couldn't sustain the effort needed to control the fire and that they should pull "it". The "it" referred to the effort to control the fire, not pull the building down. The firefighters were admitting what they were doing was ineffective and they couldn't sustain the effort. They concluded there was nothing they could do so they told the owner they'd pull out the effort spent on the building.
The abutment of that clip with the building collapsing is misleading as is the whole clip. It is just someone's effort for 15 minutes of fame and nimrods like you help him...pathetic...
Gerry
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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 .
A NY radio station was told beforehand that the building was going to be demolished. The BBC reported the fall of the building 20 minutes before it actually fell.
Sorry, but the actual evidence is very, very compelling. YOU are the one who is rationalizing here.
You know what, Stuart, I like you. You're not like the other people here in this trailer park.
I would like to direct your attention towards Benford's law. The one about the frequency of the first digit in natural data. Not to be confused with Benford's law of controversy, although equally applicable to the situation.
Cynical Idealist
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Interesting. Then I am curious as to what temperature would be required to melt and/or buckle the structure of your aluminum foil hat?
You generally have to wait for the brai... fluids inside to boil off before the aluminum container will melt.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
Yeah, we've been so lucky to find Mohammed Atta's passport in pristine condition several blocks from Ground Zero one day after [...]
Also, this is just wrong. His passport was found on the street below; after the impact, but before the collapses.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
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.
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'
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.
Nobody wants a set of dominoes that large.
Wow, you've never met a human male, have you?
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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".
At the fire, the building had almost no spandrels at upper floors. The steel columns had almost no fire resistance covers at upper floors.
Too busy pointing out typos to check for truthiness?
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
I can safely say with 100% assurance that that is absolutely not true. I would kill to see a set of dominoes that size.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Another big reason large buildings tend to fall straight down is that is the direction gravity is pulling them."
Bullshit - Gravity is just a theory, just like Evolution.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Comment removed based on user account deletion
God I get sick of this. Same arguments again and again, 7 years now, 7 years and we are still faced with the same psuedo-scientific babble.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to summarise here. Steel does not need to be 'melted' to be weakened well beyond safety margins, and beyond its required design strength. At moderately high temperatures it is weakened significantly. Go look up a materials handbook or two. The buildings collapsed in an entirely ordinary and predictable manner, they did not 'free fall'. Structures such as that are designed to collapse pancake style, like a concertina, they do not ever topple over. Can you imagine the extreme dangers that a toppling building of say 110 stories would pose to say, half of the surrounding CBD? The bomber in the 40s was not a jumbo jet, not even remotely close, there weren't even planes that big built back then. Neither did the planes that existed in those days have the same high strength materials embedded in them as in this case. I believe the NIST report suggests that elements such as the titanium axles used in the engines caused significant structural damage to the building core in certain places.
You *are* peddling a conspiracy theory. Multiple investigations and simulations have drawn the conclusion that the buildings fell down as a result of the observed evidence: Two fucking giant jumbo jets flew into them. Occams razor my friend. And you are here jabbering on repeating the same debunked theories of a small group of complete crackpots in the face of it.
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
...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.
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.
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.
If you Buy Fraggle Rock, Season 2 on DVD and watch episode 36, titled "The Doozer Contest," you will find, about 3 and a half minutes in, Flange saying "Look the Fraggles are Destroying the North Tower" and then all of the Doozers Cheer. If you don't believe that this is proof positive that Jim Henson was behind the events of September 11th, then you are a disinformation agent and a muppet of the shadow government.
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.
You do realize that the support structure in the towers was entirely on the perimeter, right? Each floor was hung like a (rigid) hammock from the outer walls. When the crossbeams softened just enough (no linger rigid) to pull inward rather than down, the outer walls buckled at that point. How else would you immagine a hammock would fall if you cut its strings?
Once the mass of building above the weak point got moving, nothing below was strong enough to hold it up, so it was nearly freefall at that point. But look carefully at the video and you'll clearly see that the building above where the plane hit falls as an intact mass, taking out each floor below it in turn.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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)
Knock-knock
Who's there?
Nine-eleven.
Nine-eleven who?
YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER FORGET!
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.
That must be nice to have all the facts. Not like all those so-called experts, they don't know anything!
Why won't slashdot let me change my terrible username
Why did you lie about not being a conspiracy theorist?
Anyway, any structural engineer can tell you that you're full of shit. There's more than enough kinetic energy in a building like WTC7 to guarantee a complete collapse once the mass starts moving. The reason demolition teams normally get involved is simply because if you want a CONTROLLED demolition, you need to be careful about how you bring the building down. On the other hand, if you don't care about damaging half of Manhattan, you can just send in a midget with a sledgehammer.
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.
You presumably mean "engineering", not "math", and their collapse was investigated, determined, and documented about a year ago. There are a number of papers in engineering determining the reasons, even. (I should know; I've sat through a fair number of the colloquia.)
Like many, you seem to think that because nobody has shoved these analyses and models in your face, they must not exist.
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"
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A fool and his money are easily parted.
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
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.
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.
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.
Clearly, you have never flown a plane either.
I am not a licensed pilot, nor have I received any training to speak of, and yet I have flown a plane before. A roughly 30 second explanation of the stick and pedals was quite sufficient, and by the way I was about 10 years old at the time. Of course, I didn't take off or land the plane, but then neither did the 9/11 hijackers. I'm pretty certain I could have hit a building if I had wanted to, even given that the only buildings in the area were single family homes, much smaller than the WTC towers.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
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.
I don't know. You tell me. I'm not claiming that the WTC buildings were demolished because I have no evidence for that. I just want a credible explanation for the collapses
You believe the experts to be wrong. You are claiming that they did not collapse as per the official reports. You must have some reason to have that belief. An explanation was presented, and you state that you think it isn't credible. You give no standards as to credible. You are not listening to others and saying "thanks for the info, I'll consider that." You are saying "Sweetheart (in an obviously condescending tone), experts (unnamed ones that are apparently not the ones that wrote the reports) think that it is improbable that it would fall that way." That's not refuting anything. That's parroting a personal opinion like it's a relevant fact. The simple fact is that no one has ever destroyed a building that large. Extrapolation can be used to guess as to what might happen, but someone that takes an extrapolation over actual data must be insane. No really, not name calling, but a technical diagnosis. They must have a disconnect with reality in order to take what has been shown to happen and state it did not happen because it was called unlikely by some unnamed experts who have never done anything similar in their lives.
I subscribe to the Sherlock Holmes school of thought. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth. I can agree that it is unlikely that the events would have unfolded exactly as they did. However, every other possible explanation has been found to be impossible. That leaves only one explanation. If you have another, let us know. If you don't, then you are supporting my Sherlock Holmes theory that the unlikely has happened.
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Not at all. What you are describing is witnesses interpretating something to what they think it should mean, or other people interpreting the witness statements without sufficient data to support their assertions. Ponder this for a moment:
If I observe a hazy figure in the night, and conclude that it is a ghost, is my conclusion automatically right because I was there to observe it? Of course not. Just because I saw something doesn't mean that I picked the right explanation from a list of many possible explanations.
Like a creationist, you are now going to try to use the "it's self-evident" argument. "It should be self-evident that all this wonderful life on earth could arise without a creator." The argument is completely bogus, of course. Just because you interpret something in a certain way or think that something is self-evident doesn't mean that the actual evidence supports your position.
Then you are inevitably going to present me with yet another creationist, er, truther argument: "Yeah? But how about this", and then you pick another item from your laundry list of prepared truther arguments that I've heard a million times before, and it still doesn't convince me. Just like a creationist going "oh, but the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex, so Evolution could certainly not have created that!" fails to impress me, every single time.
I'm pretty sure that they are, actually.
Why did they comment on this the day after? Who ordered them removed? It doesn't really matter as far as this discussion is concerned. It's just another item on your creationist, er, I mean truther laundry list of "wow isn't that odd, so my position must be right even though all the actual evidence doesn't support my position!" But it would be interesting to know what you are referring to anyway. They ordered them removed? Why don't "they" order all 9/11 truther pages removed today?
Structures aren't blown up in one shot (just like life didn't just pop into existence from nowhere, which creationist claim to be the case). Controlled demolitions are series of explosives, timed carefully. Which is why it's extremely unlikely that this happened, because it would take a long time to set up this kind of thing, and they have to tear down parts of the building, and so on. I think people working there would notice :D