Responce To Occrider
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
But that's not the explanation for the falling towers. Most structural engineers agree that the steel became structurally weakened, not melted. |
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but there have been other high rise buildings such as the First Interstate Bank Building in downtown LA, One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, and the Windsor Building in Madrid, Spain which burned way longer than WTC did. In addition, the original architects and engineers of the towers were shocked at the collapse of the towers because they specifically designed the towers to withstand multiple plane crashes and not just one. No building has ever collapsed due to a fire. Here is a letter from Underwriters Laboratories (the company that certified the steel componets used in the constuction of the World Trade Center towers) directly from the horse’s mouth who knows the properties of the steel used to built the towers. I don’t think I can get any more specific than this letter:
| quote: | quote
by Kevin Ryan
Underwriters Laboratories
Thursday, Nov 11, 2004
Dr. Gayle,
Having recently reviewed your team's report of 10/19/04, I felt the need to contact you directly.
As I'm sure you know, the company I work for certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings. In requesting information from both our CEO and Fire Protection business manager last year, I learned that they did not agree on the essential aspects of the story, except for one thing - that the samples we certified met all requirements. They suggested we all be patient and understand that UL was working with your team, and that tests would continue through this year. I'm aware of UL's attempts to help, including performing tests on models of the floor assemblies. But the results of these tests appear to indicate that the buildings should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning jet fuel.
There continues to be a number of "experts" making public claims about how the WTC buildings fell. One such person, Dr. Hyman Brown from the WTC construction crew, claims that the buildings collapsed due to fires at 2000F melting the steel (1). He states "What caused the building to collapse is the airplane fuel…burning at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The steel in that five-floor area melts." Additionally, the newspaper that quotes him says "Just-released preliminary findings from a National Institute of Standards and Technology study of the World Trade Center collapse support Brown’s theory."
We know that the steel components were certified to ASTM E119. The time temperature curves for this standard require the samples to be exposed to temperatures around 2000F for several hours. And as we all agree, the steel applied met those specifications. Additionally, I think we can all agree that even un-fireproofed steel will not melt until reaching red-hot temperatures of nearly 3000F (2). Why Dr. Brown would imply that 2000F would melt the high-grade steel used in those buildings makes no sense at all.
The results of your recently published metallurgical tests seem to clear things up (3), and support your team's August 2003 update as detailed by the Associated Press (4), in which you were ready to "rule out weak steel as a contributing factor in the collapse." The evaluation of paint deformation and spheroidization seem very straightforward, and you noted that the samples available were adequate for the investigation. Your comments suggest that the steel was probably exposed to temperatures of only about 500F (250C), which is what one might expect from a thermodynamic analysis of the situation.
However the summary of the new NIST report seems to ignore your findings, as it suggests that these low temperatures caused exposed bits of the building’s steel core to "soften and buckle." (5) Additionally this summary states that the perimeter columns softened, yet your findings make clear that "most perimeter panels (157 of 160) saw no temperature above 250C." To soften steel for the purposes of forging, normally temperatures need to be above1100C (6). However, this new summary report suggests that much lower temperatures were be able to not only soften the steel in a matter of minutes, but lead to rapid structural collapse.
This story just does not add up. If steel from those buildings did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to jet fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fires in those towers. That fact should be of great concern to all Americans. Alternatively, the contention that this steel did fail at temperatures around 250C suggests that the majority of deaths on 9/11 were due to a safety-related failure. That suggestion should be of great concern to my company.
There is no question that the events of 9/11 are the emotional driving force behind the War on Terror. And the issue of the WTC collapse is at the crux of the story of 9/11. My feeling is that your metallurgical tests are at the crux of the crux of the crux. Either you can make sense of what really happened to those buildings, and communicate this quickly, or we all face the same destruction and despair that come from global decisions based on disinformation and “chatter”.
Thanks for your efforts to determine what happened on that day. You may know that there are a number of other current and former government employees that have risked a great deal to help us to know the truth. I've copied one of these people on this message as a sign of respect and support. I believe your work could also be a nucleus of fact around which the truth, and thereby global peace and justice, can grow again. Please do what you can to quickly eliminate the confusion regarding the ability of jet fuel fires to soften or melt structural steel.
1. http://www.boulderweekly.com/archiv...coverstory.html
2. CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 61st edition, pg D-187
3. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/P3Mechani...ysisofSteel.pdf
4. http://www.voicesofsept11.org/archive/911ic/082703.php
5. http://wtc.nist.gov/media/NCSTACWTC...L101904WEB2.pdf (pg 11)
6. http://www.forging.org/FIERF/pdf/ffaaMacSleyne.pdf
Kevin Ryan
Site Manager Environmental Health Laboratories A Division of Underwriters Laboratories |
***Oh and regarding this quote you made:
| quote: | quote
“while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.” |
So the other burning office buildings I’ve mentioned did not have combustibles such as rugs, curtains, furniture and paper? Sorry, but the other buildings would have come down if this was the case. Besides “some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC collapse, Painful Questions, told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be “a smoky smoldering pile.”
Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit.The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements."
Kind of weird that the most of the heat after the collapse was in the lower basement columns rather than the oxygen rich surface rubble above, which further cements my suggestion that explosives had to be planted in the WTC.
| quote: | Originally posted by by occrider
I read the seismologist report. It says nothing of the sort. Have you read it? |
Yes and you’re right. I was wrong. The spikes in the seismic data remain unexplained. If you look at the graph below there are two pairs of waveforms:
The 2 small waveforms are the impacts of the 2 planes hitting the towers and then there are the 2 unusual spikes that occurred after the impacts. The spikes are the main debate. Do you remember the WTC 1993 bombing? A truck bomb blew up on the 2nd level basement of one of the towers, but the seismic data from that blast did not register on the Richter scale because the bomb was not coupled to the ground. These 2 spikes suggest that there was “something” coupled to the ground which caused the seismograph to record these sudden waves. I used this argument to back up my suggestion that explosives were that “something” which caused the towers’ collapse. Although since this is still being investigated I cannot comment further on the report until more solid evidence comes along.
| quote: | Originally posted by by occrider
I know friends personally who were driving on the highway and saw the plane itself before it hit the Pentagon. Are they all shills for the government? I'm not going to read through all the indymedia, whatreallyhappened websites because most reject arguments with some science and then they make their own baseless conjectures without backing any of them up. If you care to post one argument at a time and argue them personally I'll go ahead and debate it with you , but I'm not going to spend the time arguing with 50 million indy websites. |
I’ll probably give you this one if you can tell me what type of plane was it that your friends saw. Was it a Boeing passenger plane or a private jet which can only carry 15 people or so? I would be more willing to believe this if a private jet which caused the Pentagon hole. It’s just that the neatly punched hole and the lack of damage to the pentagon lawn did not convince me that it was a passenger plane. A classic physics example is a baseball hitting a window. It does a whole lot more damage than a bullet. The bullet only causes a bullet hole in the window. This is because the faster the particle, the more localized the damage. A plane would have done a lot more damage.
Regarding the latter statement you made, I've tried my best to present you with the facts "one argument at a time" and nothing baseless. I also can honestly tell you that I'm not a government shill and that my conclusions are in accordance with the research I gathered.
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