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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
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
What evidence?
The BBC made a mistake, probably because of the huge amounts of confusion that was abound. As for your other claim about a 'NY radio station', that's not something I've heard before, and your lack of detail leads me to believe that you've just made it up.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Knock-knock
Who's there?
Nine-eleven.
Nine-eleven who?
YOU SAID YOU WOULD NEVER FORGET!
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
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
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
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.
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.
Even if this were true, the World Trade Center Towers were also the first buildings to be hit by a large passenger jet loaded with jet fuel (enough to fly from Boston to California) at over 500 mph. The B-25 that collided with the Empire State Building had a maximum takeoff weight of 41,800 lb and a 230 mph cruising speed. The 757 has a maximum takeoff weight of 255,000 lb and 530 mph cruising speed. Yeah--six times more weight and over double the velocity. If you count kinetic energy alone (1/2mv^2) then that's twelve times more energy. You'd also have to take into account the extra chemical energy carried by all the jet fuel on board the 757.
Also, WTC1 and 2 were built with the weight-bearing structure on the outside, and this was severely defeated by the airplanes striking and penetrating the building. Regular skyscrapers have the skeleton built into it. The fire-extinguishing systems were also compromised when they were severed by the jet.
So, yeah, saying that the WTC towers were the only ones to collapse due to fire is not saying much. Getting hit by a huge passenger jet loaded with fuel at high speeds is kind of a big distinction that explains the difference neatly.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/