[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
JustTheFacts wrote:
Madrid’s Burning Building Stands - World Trade Center Falls
The 32-story Windsor building in Madrid, Spain caught on fire on Saturday at about 11:20 p.m. and burned for two days. The building was completely engulfed in flames at one point.
Several top floors collapsed onto lower ones, yet the building is still standing.
http://freepress2005.blogspot.com/2005/02/madrids-burning-building-stands-world.html
bigflamer wrote:
Sorry JTF, but this has been disproven. The following is a good read. Although very long, it is at the same time very interesting. A panel of M.I.T. folks were involved in this.
No it hasn’t, any conclusions are strictly theory. Besides, the basic premise of one floor falling onto another is physically impossible at free fall speed. That’s why the whole story is ridiculous.
Free fall speed - that’s all that needs to be said. If the whole building fell at only .6/sec slower than free fall, you’d be saying even the FIRST failing floor impacting the next met NO resistance. We’re talking not even a full second.[/quote]
The main culprits in bringing the famously lofty buildings down, they concluded, were the two intensely hot infernos that erupted when tens of thousands of gallons of aviation fuel spilled from the doomed airliners. Once high temperatures weakened the towers’ supporting steel structures, it was only a matter of time until the mass of the stories above initiated a rapid-sequence “pancaking” phenomena in which floor after floor was instantly crushed and then sent into near free fall to the ground below.
Newspapers and TV newscasts reported that the twin towers had been designed to withstand a collision with a Boeing 707. The events of September 11th show that this was indeed the case. “However, the World Trade Center was never designed for the massive explosions nor the intense jet fuel fires that came next?a key design omission,” stated Eduardo Kausel, another M.I.T. professor of civil and environmental engineering and panel member. The towers collapsed only after the kerosene fuel fire compromised the integrity of their structural tubes: One WTC lasted for 105 minutes, whereas Two WTC remained standing for 47 minutes. “It was designed for the type of fire you’d expect in an office building?paper, desks, drapes,” McNamara said. The aviation fuel fires that broke out burned at a much hotter temperature than the typical contents of an office. “At about 800 degrees Fahrenheit structural steel starts to lose its strength; at 1,500 degrees F, all bets are off as steel members become significantly weakened,” he explained.
“It was an unusual system and very lightweight. If you lose the connection between them, however, you lose the ability to carry the floor loads and allow the floors to slide back and forth under stress. If a damaged floor system were to fall, it would break the end connections in the lower floors and down and down the floors would go.”
Eduardo Kausel proposed an alternative failure explanation that he acknowledged was independently developed by Zdenek Bazant, a professor at Northwestern University. “I believe that the intense heat softened or melted the structural elements?floor trusses and columns?so that they became like chewing gum, and that was enough to trigger the collapse,” he said. “The floor trusses are likely to have been the first to sag and fail. As soon as the upper floors became unsupported, debris from the failed floor systems rained down onto the floors below, which eventually gave way, starting an unstoppable sequence. The dynamic forces are so large that the downward motion becomes unstoppable.”
http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/wtc.shtml
It is possible that the blaze, started by jet fuel and then engulfing the contents of the offices, in a highly confined area, generated fire conditions significantly more severe than those anticipated in a typical office fire. These conditions may have overcome the building’s fire defences considerably faster than expected. It is likely that the water pipes that supplied the fire sprinklers were severed by the plane impact, and much of the fire protective material, designed to stop the steel from being heated and losing strength, was blown off by the blast at impact.
http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html
The World Trade Center was not defectively designed. No designer of the WTC anticipated, nor should have anticipated, a 90,000 L Molotov cocktail on one of the building floors. Skyscrapers are designed to support themselves for three hours in a fire even if the sprinkler system fails to operate. This time should be long enough to evacuate the occupants. The WTC towers lasted for one to two hours?less than the design life, but only because the fire fuel load was so large. No normal office fires would fill 4,000 square meters of floor space in the seconds in which the WTC fire developed. Usually, the fire would take up to an hour to spread so uniformly across the width and breadth of the building. This was a very large and rapidly progressing fire (very high heat but not unusually high temperature).
[quote]
But maybe you need a firefighter’s perspective:
SELLING OUT THE INVESTIGATION
BY BILL MANNING
FIRE ENGINEERING
For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car.
Such destruction of evidence shows the astounding ignorance of government officials to the value of a thorough, scientific investigation of the largest fire-induced collapse in world history. I have combed through our national standard for fire investigation, NFPA 921, but nowhere in it does one find an exemption allowing the destruction of evidence for buildings over 10 stories tall.
Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the “official investigation” blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure… [/quote]
So they didn’t follow investigative procedures on what he himself admits was the greatest fire induced building collapse in our nations history. I agree, procedures should have been followed closer, so that in the future we can build a better building.
I don’t know JTF, M.I.T. folks usually know what they are talking about. And as a firefighter, I can personally attest to structural steel buckling, warping, and generally failing at around 1000 degrees. But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the engineers at M.I.T.
As a state certified fire instructor, who just finished preparing for and teaching a class on building construction/collapse. Lightweight steel trusses WILL fail at around 800 degrees. And I’m sure the truss systems used in the WTC were not designed to handle a collapse load vs an engineered load. I’m just a dumb fireman, however it seams to me that all the theories behind your conspiracies are just that, theories.
http://fe.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineArticles&SubSection=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=25&ARTICLE_ID=131225
However, respected members of the fire protection engineering community are beginning to raise red flags, and a resonating theory has emerged: The structural damage from the planes and the explosive ignition of jet fuel in themselves were not enough to bring down the towers. Rather, theory has it, the subsequent contents fires attacking the questionably fireproofed lightweight trusses and load-bearing columns directly caused the collapses in an alarmingly short time. Of course, in light of there being no real evidence thus far produced, this could remain just unexplored theory.
[quote]
WTC Construction Manager: Towers Were Designed to Take Numerous Plane Crashes
Comparing it to poking a pencil through mosquito netting.[/quote]
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/141104designedtotake.htm
They sucessfully withstood the impact, it was all the factors that followed that brought it down.
http://architecture.about.com/library/weekly/aawtc-collapse.htm
How did the Twin Towers fall?
1. Impact from the Terrorist Planes
When Boeing jets piloted by terrorists struck the Twin Towers, some 10,000 gallons (38 kiloliters) of jet fuel fed an enormous fireball. But, the impact of the planes and the burst of flames did not make the Towers collapse right away. Like most buildings, the Twin Towers had redundant design. The term redundant design means that when one system fails, another carries the load. Each of the Twin Towers had 244 columns around a central core that housed the elevators, stairwells, mechanical systems, and utilities. When some columns were damaged, others could still support the building.
2. Heat from the Fires
The sprinkler system was damaged by the impact of the planes. But even if the sprinklers had been working, they could not have maintained enough pressure to stop the fire. Fed by the remaining jet fuel, the heat became intense. Most fires don’t get hotter than 900 to 1,100 degrees F. The World Trade Center fire may have reached 1,300 or 1,400 degrees F. Structural steel does not easily melt, but it will lose about half its strength at 1,200 degrees F. The steel structure of the Twin Towers was weakened by the extreme heat. The steel also became distorted because the heat was not a uniform temperature.
3. Collapsing Floors
Most fires start in one area and then spread. The fire from the terrorist planes covered the area of an entire floor almost instantly. As the weakened floors began to collapse, they crashed into the floors below. With the weight of the plunging floors accelerating, the exterior walls buckled.
Why did the collapsed towers look so flat?
Before the terrorist attack, the Twin Towers were 110 stories tall. Constructed of lightweight steel around a central core, they were about 95% air. After they collapsed, the hollow core was gone. The remaining rubble was only a few stories high.
I’ll give you this however, both sides of the argument seem to rely heavily on theory. I just put a lot of faith in the folks at M.I.T.
