On the physics of high-rise building collapses
by Steve Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter
Reproduced with permission of the authors from Europhysics News
In August 2002, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched what would become a six-year investigation of the three building failures that occurred on September 11, 2001 (9/11):
- the well-known collapses of the World Trade Center (WTC) Twin Towers that morning and
- the lesser-known collapse late that afternoon of the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7, which was not struck by an airplane.
NIST conducted its investigation based on the stated premise that the
WTC Towers and WTC 7 [were] the only known cases of total structural collapse in high-rise buildings where fires played a significant role.”
Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally.
Although NIST finally concluded after several years of investigation that all three collapses on 9/11 were due primarily to fires, fifteen years after the event a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists are unconvinced by that explanation.
Preventing high-rise failures
Steel-framed high-rises have endured large fires without suffering total collapse for four main reasons:
- Fires typically are not hot enough and do not last long enough in any single area to generate enough energy to heat the large structural members to the point where they fail (the temperature at which structural steel loses enough strength to fail is dependent on the factor of safety used in the design. In the case of WTC 7, for example, the factor of safety was generally 3 or higher. Here, 67% of the strength would need to be lost for failure to ensue, which would require the steel to be heated to about 660°C);
- Most high-rises have fire suppression systems (water sprinklers), which further prevent a fire from releasing sufficient energy to heat the steel to a critical failure state;
- Structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent them from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; and
- Steel-framed high-rises are designed to be highly redundant structural systems. Thus, if a localized failure occurs, it does not result in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.
.FIG.1:WTC5 is an example of how steel- framed high-rises typically perform in large fires. It burned for over eight hours on September 11, 2001 (a), and did not suffer a total collapse (b) (Source: FEmA)
Throughout history, three steel-framed high-rises are known to have suffered partial collapses due to fires; none of those led to a total collapse. Countless other steel-framed high-rises have experienced large, long-lasting fires without suffering either partial or total collapse (see, for example, Fig. 1 a and b) [1].
In addition to resisting ever-present gravity loads and occasional fires, high-rises must be designed to resist loads generated during other extreme events — in particular, high winds and earthquakes. Designing for high-wind and seismic events mainly requires the ability of the structure to resist lateral loads, which generate both tensile and compressive stresses in the columns due to bending, the latter stresses then being combined with gravity-induced compressive stresses due to vertical loads.
FIG.2: WTC7fell symmetrically and at free-fall acceleration for a period of 2.25 seconds of its collapse (Source: NIST).
It was not until steel became widely manufactured that the ability to resist large lateral loads was achieved and the construction of high-rises became possible. Steel is both very strong and ductile, which allows it to withstand the tensile stresses generated by lateral loads, unlike brittle materials, such as concrete, that are weak in tension. Although concrete is used in some high-rises today, steel reinforcement is needed in virtually all cases.
To allow for the resistance of lateral loads, high-rises are often designed such that the percentage of their columns’ load capacity used for gravity loads is relatively low. The exterior columns of the Twin Towers, for example, used only about 20% of their capacity to withstand gravity loads, leaving a large margin for the additional lateral loads that occur during high-wind and seismic events [2].
Because the only loads present on 9/11 after the impact of the airplanes were gravity and fire (there were no high winds that day), many engineers were surprised that the Twin Towers completely collapsed. The towers, in fact, had been designed specifically to withstand the impact of a jetliner, as the head structural engineer, John Skilling, explained in an interview with the Seattle Times following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing:
Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,” he said. “The building structure would still be there.”
Skilling went on to say he didn’t think a single 200-pound [90-kg] car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to either of the Twin Towers.
“However,” he added, “I’m not saying that properly applied explosives—shaped explosives—of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage […] I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.”
In other words, Skilling believed the only mechanism that could bring down the Twin Towers was controlled demolition.
Techniques of controlled demolition
Controlled demolition is not a new practice. For years it was predominantly done with cranes swinging heavy iron balls to simply break buildings into small pieces. Occasionally, there were structures that could not be brought down this way. In 1935, the two 191-m-tall Sky Ride towers of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago were demolished with 680 kg of thermite and 58 kg of dynamite. Thermite is an incendiary containing a metal powder fuel (most commonly aluminum) and a metal oxide (most com- monly iron(III) oxide or “rust”).
Eventually, when there were enough large steel-framed buildings that needed to be brought down more efficiently and inexpensively, the use of shaped cutter charges became the norm. Because shaped charges have the ability to focus explosive energy, they can be placed so as to diagonally cut through steel columns quickly and reliably.
FIG. 3: The final frame of NIST’s WTC 7 computer model shows large deformations to the exterior not observed in the videos (Source: NIST)
In general, the technique used to demolish large buildings involves cutting the columns in a large enough area of the building to cause the intact portion above that area to fall and crush itself as well as crush whatever remains below it.
This technique can be done in an even more sophisticated way, by timing the charges to go off in a sequence so that the columns closest to the center are destroyed first. The failure of the interior columns creates an inward pull on the exterior and causes the majority of the building to be pulled inward and downward while materials are being crushed, thus keeping the crushed materials in a somewhat confined area — often within the building’s “footprint.” This method is often referred to as “implosion.”
The case of WTC 7
The total collapse of WTC 7 at 5:20 PM on 9/11, shown in Fig. 2, is remarkable because it exemplified all the signature features of an implosion:
- The building dropped in absolute free fall for the first 2.25 seconds of its descent over a distance of 32 meters or eight stories [3].
- Its transition from stasis to free fall was sudden, occurring in approximately one-half second.
- It fell symmetrically straight down.
- Its steel frame was almost entirely dismembered and deposited mostly inside the building’s footprint, while most of its concrete was pulverized into tiny particles.
- Finally, the collapse was rapid, occurring in less than seven seconds.
Given the nature of the collapse, any investigation adhering to the scientific method should have seriously considered the controlled demolition hypothesis, if not started with it. Instead, NIST (as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which conducted a preliminary study prior to the NIST investigation) began with the predetermined conclusion that the collapse was caused by fires.
FIG.4: The above graph[10]comparesDavid Chandler’s measurement[9] of the velocity of the roofline of WTC 1 with Bažant’s erroneous calculation [11] and with Szamboti and Johns’ calculation using corrected input values for mass, acceleration through the first story, conservation of momentum, and plastic moment (the maximum bending moment a structural section can withstand). The calculations show that—in the absence of explosives—the upper section of WTC 1 would have arrested after falling for two stories (Source: Ref. [10]).
Trying to prove this predetermined conclusion was apparently difficult. FEMA’s nine-month study concluded by saying, “The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence.”
NIST, meanwhile, had to postpone the release of its WTC 7 report from mid-2005 to November 2008. As late as March 2006, NIST’s lead investigator, Dr. Shyam Sunder, was quoted as saying,
Truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on building No. 7.
All the while, NIST was steadfast in ignoring evidence that conflicted with its predetermined conclusion. The most notable example was its attempt to deny that WTC 7 underwent free fall. When pressed about that matter during a technical briefing, Dr. Sunder dismissed it by saying,
[A] free-fall time would be an object that has no structural components below it.
But in the case of WTC 7, he claimed,
there was structural resistance that was provided.
Only after being challenged by high school physics teacher David Chandler and by physics professor Steven Jones (one of the authors of this article), who had measured the fall on video, did NIST acknowledge a 2.25-second period of free fall in its final report. Yet NIST’s computer model shows no such period of free fall, nor did NIST attempt to explain how WTC 7 could have had “no structural components below it” for eight stories.
Instead, NIST’s final report provides an elaborate scenario involving an unprecedented failure mechanism: the thermal expansion of floor beams pushing an adjoining girder off its seat. The alleged walk-off of this girder then supposedly caused an eight-floor cascade of floor failures, which, combined with the failure of two other girder connections — also due to thermal expansion — left a key column unsupported over nine stories, causing it to buckle.
FIG. 5: High-velocity bursts of debris, or “squibs,” were ejected from point-like sources in WTC 1 and WTC 2, as many as 20 to 30 stories below the collapse front (Source: Noah K. murray).
This single column failure allegedly precipitated the collapse of the entire interior structure, leaving the exterior unsupported as a hollow shell. The exterior columns then allegedly buckled over a two-second period and the entire exterior fell simultaneously as a unit [3].
NIST was able to arrive at this scenario only by omitting or misrepresenting critical structural features in its computer modelling.[4] Correcting just one of these errors renders NIST’s collapse initiation indisputably impossible. Yet even with errors that were favorable to its predetermined conclusion, NIST’s computer model (see Fig. 3) fails to replicate the observed collapse, instead showing large deformations to the exterior that are not observed in the videos and showing no period of free fall. Also, the model terminates, without explanation, less than two seconds into the seven-second collapse.
Unfortunately, NIST’s computer modelling cannot be independently verified because NIST has refused to release a large portion of its modelling data on the basis that doing so “might jeopardize public safety.”
The case of the Twin Towers
Whereas NIST did attempt to analyze and model the collapse of WTC7, it did not do so in the case of the Twin Towers. In NIST’s own words,
The focus of the investigation was on the sequence of events from the instant of aircraft impact to the initiation of collapse for each tower….this sequence is referred to as the ‘probable collapse sequence,’ although it includes little analysis of the structural behaviour of the tower after the conditions for collapse initiation were reached and collapse became inevitable.”[5]
Thus, the definitive report on the collapse of the Twin Towers contains no analysis of why the lower sections failed to arrest or even slow the descent of the upper sections — which NIST acknowledges “came down essentially in free fall” [5-6]— nor does it explain the various other phenomena observed during the collapses.
When a group of petitioners filed a formal Request for Correction asking NIST to perform such analysis, NIST replied that it was
unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse
because
the computer models [were] not able to converge on a solution.
However, NIST did do one thing in an attempt to substantiate its assertion that the lower floors would not be able to arrest or slow the descent of the upper sections in a gravity-driven collapse. On page 323 of NCSTAR 1-6, NIST cited a paper by civil engineering professor Zdeněk Bažant and his graduate student, Yong Zhou, that was published in January 2002 [7] which, according to NIST, “addressed the question of why a total collapse occurred” (as if that question were naturally outside the scope of its own investigation).
FIG. 6: molten metal was seen pouring out of WTC 2 continuously for the seven minutes leading up to its collapse (Sources: WABC-Tv, NIST).
In their paper, Bažant and Zhou claimed there would have been a powerful jolt when the falling upper section impacted the lower section, causing an amplified load sufficient to initiate buckling in the columns. They also claimed that the gravitational energy would have been 8.4 times the energy dissipation capacity of the columns during buckling.
In the years since, researchers have measured the descent of WTC 1’s upper section and found that it never decelerated — i.e. there was no powerful jolt [8-9]. Researchers have also criticized Bažant’s use of free-fall acceleration through the first storey of the collapse, when measurements show it was actually roughly half of gravitational acceleration [2].After falling for one story, the measurements show a 6.1 m/s velocity instead of the 8.5 m/s velocity that would be the result of free fall. This difference in velocity effectively doubles the kinetic energy, because it is a function of the square of the velocity.
In addition, researchers have demonstrated that the 58 × 106 kg mass Bažant used for the upper section’s mass was the maximum design load—not the actual 33 × 106 kg service load [10]. Together, these two errors embellished the kinetic energy of the falling mass by 3.4 times. In addition, it has been shown that the column energy dissipation capacity used by Bažant was at least 3 times too low [2].
In January 2011 [11] Bažant and another graduate student of his, Jia-Liang Le, attempted to dismiss the lack-of-deceleration criticism by claiming there would be a velocity loss of only about 3%, which would be too small to be observed by the camera resolution. Le and Bažant also claimed conservation-of-momentum velocity loss would be only 1.1%. However, it appears that Le and Bažant erroneously used an upper section mass of 54.18 × 106 kg and an impacted floor mass of just 0.627 × 106 kg, which contradicted the floor mass of 3.87 × 106 kg Bažant had used in earlier papers.
The former floor mass is representative of the concrete floor slab only, whereas the latter floor mass includes all the other materials on the floor. Correcting this alone increases the conservation-of-momentum velocity loss by more than 6 times, to a value of 7.1%. Additionally, the column energy dissipation has been shown to be far more significant than Bažant claimed. Researchers have since provided calculations showing that a natural collapse over one storey would not only decelerate, but would actually arrest after one or two stories of fall (see Fig. 4) [2, 10].
Other evidence unexplained
The collapse mechanics discussed above are only a fraction of the available evidence indicating that the airplane impacts and ensuing fires did not cause the collapse of the Twin Towers. Videos show that the upper section of each tower disintegrated within the first four seconds of collapse. After that point, not a single video shows the upper sections that purportedly descended all the way to the ground before being crushed.
Videos and photographs also show numerous high-velocity bursts of debris being ejected from point-like sources (see Fig. 5). NIST refers to these as “puffs of smoke” but fails to properly analyze them [6]. NIST also provides no explanation for the midair pulverization of most of the towers’ concrete, the near-total dismemberment of their steel frames, or the ejection of those materials up to 150 meters in all directions.
NIST sidesteps the well-documented presence of molten metal throughout the debris field and asserts that the orange molten metal seen pouring out of WTC 2 for the seven minutes before its collapse was aluminum from the aircraft combined with organic materials (see Fig. 6) [6].
Yet experiments have shown that molten aluminum, even when mixed with organic materials, has a silvery appearance — thus suggesting that the orange molten metal was instead emanating from a thermite reaction being used to weaken the structure [12]. Meanwhile, unreacted nano-thermitic material has since been discovered in multiple independent WTC dust samples [13].
As for eyewitness accounts, some 156 witnesses, including 135 first responders, have been documented as saying that they saw, heard, and/or felt explosions prior to and/or during the collapses [14]. That the Twin Towers were brought down with explosives appears to have been the initial prevailing view among most first responders. “I thought it was exploding, actually,” said John Coyle, a fire marshal.“Everyone I think at that point still thought these things were blown up” [15].
Conclusion
It bears repeating that fires have never caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise before or since 9/11. Did we witness an unprecedented event three separate times on September 11, 2001? The NIST reports, which attempted to support that unlikely conclusion, fail to persuade a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists. Instead, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition. Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven Jones is a former full professor of physics at Brigham Young University. His major research interests have been in the areas of fusion, solar energy, and archaeometry. He has authored or co-authored a number of papers documenting evidence of extremely high temperatures during the WTC destruction and evidence of unreacted nano-thermitic material in the WTC dust.
Robert Korol is a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, as well as a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engi- neering and the Engineering Institute of Canada. His major research interests have been in the areas of structural mechanics and steel structures. More recently, he has undertaken experimen- tal research into the post-buckling resistance of H-shaped steel columns and into the energy absorption associated with pulverization of concrete floors
Anthony Szamboti is a mechanical design engineer with over 25 years of structural design experience in the aerospace and communications industries. Since 2006, he has authored or co-authored a number of technical papers on the WTC high-rise failures that are published in the Journal of 9/11 Studies and in the International Journal of Protective Structures.
Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for Architects & En- gineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth), a nonprofit organization that today represents more than 2,500 architects and engineers. In 2015, he authored AE-911Truth’s Beyond Misinformation: What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2, and 7. He holds a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
References
[1] NIST: Analysis of Needs and Existing Capabilities for Full-Scale Fire Resistance Testing (October 2008).
[2] G. Szuladziński and A. Szamboti and R. Johns, International Journal of Protective Structures 4, 117 (2013).
[3] NIST: Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster (November 20, 2008).
[4] R. Brookman, A Discussion of ‘Analysis of Structural Response of WTC 7 to Fire and Sequential Failures Leading to Collapse, Journal of 9/11 Studies (October 2012).
[5] NIST: Final Report of the National Construction Safety Team on the Collapses of the World Trade Center Towers (December 1, 2005).
[6] NIST: Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC Towers Investi- gation (Updated September 19, 2011).
[7] Z. Bažant, Y. Zhou, Yong, Journal of Engineering Mechanics 128, 2 (2002).
[8] A. Szamboti and G. MacQueen, The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refu- tation of the NIST-Bažant Collapse Hypothesis, Journal of 9/11 Studies (April 2009).
[9] D. Chandler, The Destruction of the World Trade Center North Tower and Fundamental Physics, Journal of 9/11 Studies (February 2010).
[10] A. Szamboti and R. Johns, ASCE Journals Refuse to Correct Fraudulent Paper Published on WTC Collapses, Journal of 9/11 Studies (September 2014).
[11] J.-L. Le and Z. Bažant, Journal of Engineering Mechanics 137, 82 (2011).
[12] S. Jones, Why Indeed Did the WTC Buildings Collapse Completely? Journal of 9/11 Studies (September 2006).
[13] N. Harrit et al., Open Chemical Physics Journal (April 2009).
[14] G. MacQueen, Eyewitness Evidence of Explosions in the Twin Towers, Chapter Eight, The 9/11 Toronto Report, Editor: James Gourley (November 2012).
[15] Fire Department of New York (FDNY): World Trade Center Task Force Interviews, The New York Times (October 2001 to January 2002).
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Let me get this right. Let’s start with WTC 1 and 2 as a first sanity check. According to the controlled demolition scenario, some time in advance, explosives were attached to the structural members of each of these buildings, underneath the fireproofing and office fitments, on just the floors into which an airplane would later be flown. This enormous construction project was somehow completely hidden, never leaving any clue. The timing system for controlled demolition was similarly hidden. Then somehow planes were hijacked and flown into exactly the floors on each building where the explosives were hidden (wath the videos – the collapse clearly starts exactly in the impact zone). The controlled demolition system and explosives was 100% intact after the impact and survived intense fires for a prolonged period. Them somebody triggered that intact demolition system and the building collapsed. Wow. That’s one heck of a robust yet completely… Read more »
explosives were attached to the structural members of each of these buildings, YES underneath the fireproofing and office fitments, THE CRITICAL MEMBERS WERE THE CENTRAL CORE WHERE THE ELEVATORS WERE. THIS CORE HELD UP THE BUILDING. THE OUTER MEMBERS , EVEN INTACT COULD NOT HOLD THE BUILDING UP ALTHOUGH THERE MAY HAVE BEEN OPPORTUNITY TO WIRE SOME OF THOSE MEMBERS ALSO. THERE WERE SEVERAL CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN THE TOWERS. on just the floors into which an airplane would later be flown. NO, DEMOLISHING ONLY THE PLANE IMPACT FLOORS COULD NOT WORK IN A CONTROLLED DEMO. ALMOST ALL FLOORS WOULD NEED CHARGES AS WELL AS SUB’BASEMENT LEVELS (WHICH ARE TYPICALLY CUT FIRST BEFORE THE BUILDING IS IMPLODED. This enormous construction project was somehow completely hidden, never leaving any clue. ACCESS TO THE ELEVATOR SHAFTS IS THE KEY. AN EXTENSIVE ELEVATOR PROJECT WAS UNDERTAKEN IN MONTHS PRECEDING 9/11. MANY CLUES WERE REMOVED… Read more »
The Main premise of this article is that never before or since has a fire cause the collapse of a High Rise Building. Setting aside the evidences that there were shortcuts made on this building that contributed to its collapse, the obvious actual question here is has there ever been another instance of the high speed collision of jet airplanes hitting a high rise building? That is a whole different situation than a typical fire in a high rise. The whole initial premise for this article is faulty.
1) Is there a source for the claim of shortcuts in the construction of the buildings?
2) Didn’t NIST rule out the airplane impact as a cause of the building collapse? And of course, WTC7 was NOT hit by a plane.
You don’t need an engineer to tell you that the hole in the Pentagon was half as wide as the wingspan of the plane which supposedly went through it (about 55 feet to 120 feet) – not to mention the gap between the aluminum light poles surrounding the building.
And what kind of pilot who was not trained to land a plane can come in without electronic guidance to the side of a building, on sloping ground, in a city – not a flat, level runway – and hit that building square on in the first two floors – not overshooting it and not bouncing off the ground?
The tide has shifted here and it’s the people who believe the government’s nonsense who are loony.
“You don’t need an engineer to tell you that the hole in the Pentagon was half as wide as the wingspan of the plane which supposedly went through it ”
Did you expect the plane to make a cartoon shaped hole in a wall like Wile E. Coyote?
I hate to say this CMB but you are wearing some shaded Glasses. Science is Science not some stupid gut feeling or emotional need to feel secure. Our history is full of mysteries were political and/or wealthy people have conspired to either hide facts or at least confuse them. Oliver North, an officer of the US Military sworn to uphold the constitution and the laws of this land, on live TV before congress admitted to witnessing the auctioning of TONs of Cocaine to Drug Dealers in Chicago off one of those military Cxx cargo planes. The man did nothing about but keep his lips closed. He destroyed documents to protect those higher up. Do you really think some Drug Dealer in LA figured out how to make crack when it was the CIA that was having trouble unloading the Cocaine they were selling to finance their agenda the congress would… Read more »
According to the official story the force of gravity pulled the top fifteen percent of the north tower through the bottom 85 percent !!! This violates two of Newton’s laws of mechanics which are taught in High School Physics classes all over the world….. Thos cannot be a gravitational collapse , there has to be other energy to disintegrate the thousands of tons of steel and concrete! Best source for further understanding : YouTube “ experts speak out”
1) Even if you successfully set off comprehensive demolition charges on only floors touched by the planes, the building could not collapse at free-fall either beneath the impacted floors or above. That is just basic Newtonian Physics. intact floors cannot accelerate through 80 other intact floors as though they were fresh air and experience no resistance. This happened with all 3 building although building 7 was a) accelerating the most rapidly and b) was hit by no planes. I cant help it if you have no grasp of the scientific principles but the way they collapsed is impossible according to the laws of the universe unless you can remove every floor before the floor above has a chance to reach it. The only known way to achieve this is by human controlled demolition.
2) The twin towers were specifically over-built to withstand airliner collision at any level.
The Twin Towers had 116 levels counting the basements. With 100,000 tons of steel in each building does anyone believe every level had the same amount of steel? So how do experts spend 15 years not discussing the distributions of steel and concrete in relation to the collapse time?
I love how the beginning of the article says that the steel would need to be 660 degrees celsius or more to weaken the structure. Jet fuel burns at 815 plus wind increases that and the fire suppressant foam was knocked off in the impact.
The temp of the jet fuel would not be transferred directly to the steel though would it? With the thermal conductivity of steel you would need a fire a great deal hotter than that in order to transfer enough heat to the steel to reach 660deg and beyond. The fire would also need to be long lasting. The jet fuel would have burned off in minutes.
Came to know some unknown facts regarding the collapse of WTC. I found the demolition technique very useful. Also, I would like to know some tips to take care in the demolition of the 100 floor structure.
The reason this obvious conclusion and rebuttal of the nist report is so hard for a lot to accept is because some people find it extremely hard to achieve cognitive dissonance and open their eyes for the first ever time. I think that this is partly because of the embarrassment of accepting that you have been led down the garden path and gang raped by a group of 18 stone pro wrestlers a hard thing to realise. it probably is, but better accept it now and realise what has happened before the aids kills you. Gentlemen, it is basic physics and common sense, the hows, what’s, why’s and who’s are irrelevent prior to grasping the basic facts. It is not possible and completely improbable for fire to be the reason for collapse. In the realm of physics it is as absurd as beleiving you could fart your way to the… Read more »
the fires in the debris pile at Ground Zero burned for 90 days, hot enough to melt Steel. the only other Fire in a building to replicate this was Reactor No.4 at Chernobyl ; which was a Meltdown due to coolant failure in a Nuclear Reactor.
The Fires at Ground Zero were Self Fueled at 1580 degrees Centigrade plus for 3 months. Only an Atomic Fire fits the Physics.
@anthony hall – nothing atomic about it, otherwise New Yorkers would have been down with obvious radiation sickness. Also, no significant radiation levels found by various researchers.
“https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Third+Truth”
Anthony Hall, I think this would interest you if you have not already come across it.
This is a clearly set out response to the article quoted here.
http://blog.daimonie.com/2016/09/europhysics-truther-rebuke.html?m=1
From the concluding remarks:
@ john miller, September 21, 2016, (https://off-guardian.org/2016/09/07/on-the-physics-of-high-rise-building-collapses/comment-page-1/#comment-42444) Alaska University model by PROF.Hulsey has apparently shown that WTC7 could NOT have collapsed due to FIRE: Here are the credentials of an absolute duffer, unlike you Mr. John miller the engineer-cum-pilot: Leroy Hulsey Department Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor, Ph.D., P. E., S.E., Civil Engineering (907) 474-7816 Duckering 243B [email protected] http://cem.uaf.edu/cee/people/leroy-hulsey.aspx I mention Hulsey only because he corroborates everything that you glibly assert, Mr. john miller the engineer-cum-pilot, if what you assert is being asserted with your tongue through your cheek, eh: A) To save yourself some time, start @ 29 minutes and listen carefully, contra NIST: WTC 7 Evaluation Finds: Fire DID NOT Cause the Collapse of WTC 7 B) To save yourself some time, start @ 14 minutes and listen carefully, contra NIST: Attorneys Are Told: “Possibility of WTC 7 Collapsing Due to Fire is ZERO” C) To save… Read more »
Wise words.
I’ve never heard of a cum-pilot before, is that like a jizzom-monkey?
I’m not sure, Chris. But a bit of background for you: Mr. john miller seemed to think it was important, at first, to let us know he was a pilot when he discredited “Pilots for 9/11 Truth;” the that he was an Engineer when he discredited “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth:” and just in case that wasn’t enough unsubstantiated authority for all of us, he also threw in the “alleged” fact that he has a masters degree. Now whenever we see the name ‘john miller,’ our reaction is to fall into a cringing and intimidated silence. Now if I’m not mistaken, cum is the Latin word for “with” and is usually used to conjoin two nouns, showing that something serves two purposes. As the “thing” in question, i.e., Mr. john miller, seems to serve the two functions of, on the one hand, engineering and, on the other, flying a… Read more »
Phew. Sounds like he’s got his hands full.
Has Albury Smith shown up here yet?!😀
Discussed on the ISL forums here:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=311698&page=5
You should be more interested in Hulsey’s ability to prove a negative, Norman. Ground-breaking work in overturning the scientific method.
The article is based on speculation, no valid evidence for the claims implied or made. No Pulitzer, no newspaper will team with these clowns, they have no evidence, no proof. Even the magazine knows it is BS based on speculation; they are too polite to people who mislead and spread false claims.
“”This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.”” Very polite as they explain it is not science, it is speculation. 15 years of no evidence for nonsense like this.
One of the authors, Tony Szamboti, was recently answering technical questions regarding this issue on reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/911truth/comments/53cz63/ama_on_the_nist_wtc_reports_the_collapse_dynamics/
If you click on the link you have provided, Chris, you will now find this:
“Are you sure you want to view this community?
This community is quarantined
It may contain a high degree of misinformation. If you are seeking historic information about the September 11 attacks, please visit the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (https://www.9-11commission.gov/).”
Hilarious.
This article is a critique of the NIST report, and it shows it to be fraudulent and false.
Yes it pretty much demolishes the report – but no surprises there. The true cause of the collapse had been common knowledge for several years before the report even came out, plus we all saw the towers being blown up live on tv. It was an impressive operation, and then they followed up with the anthrax to make sure. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall during the initial pitch. It’ll make a great movie one day. I wonder who they’ll get to play Donald Rumsfeld.
“Yes it pretty much demolishes the report – but no surprises there.”
I have considerable doubt that you could back that assertion up. No surprises there.
“It was an impressive operation, and then they followed up with the anthrax to make sure.”
That appears to have been unrelated to Al Queda’s operation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021902369.html
Again, just to clarify, you are alleging 9/11 was completely unrelated to the anthrax attacks that began a few days later?
If Jerome isn’t going to answer, perhaps I can. After all, I would hate the official AMERITHRAX narrative to be left as a final word. It would be impossible to unravel these attacks from the engineered ‘official’ truth – particularily as the FBI were ‘told’ to blame al Qaeda; to link it to Saddam to justify the upcoming war; and “the anthrax letters pushed a terrified Congress into approving the Patriot Act without even reading it.” Yet it wasn’t al Qaeda or even Dr Bruce Ivins (its usually a lone nutter – but not this time) that were responsible. The weaponised anthrax more than likely didn’t even come from Ft Detrick – yet it had to come from another government facility, in Utah (Dugway) or Ohio (Batelle) are possibilities: it wasn’t made in a cave in Pakistan. This leads me to be able to say that persons unknown – with… Read more »
I can categorically assure you, that when “On the physics of high-rise building collapses” was published, demolishing the NIST report, it contained no surprises. On a side note, I think Clooney would be good as Rumsfeld. Obviously Jim Carey would play Bush. Cheney – I’ve still got an open mind.
I have read that WTC6 also fell down in a similar fashion to WTCs 1, 2 & 7 the same day without even a fire to account for it. Is this true?
Another point which I think is very “questionable” is the way the airplanes (presumably made of thin sheet aluminium and maybe some composite) sliced into the steel and concrete building without leaving anything outside and without slowing down and then burned up so that not even the jet engines (Which work at much higher temperatures than were postulated here) survived in recognizable form.
No, building 6 did not fall down in a similar fashion. It partially collapsed and remained mostly standing until demolished.
Everything is speculation until it is proved. That goes for the NIST report too. The third law of Newtonian physics about every action causing a reaction is dead and buried if we are to believe that all the floors below the fire-damaged floors would not have put up resistance to the few damaged floors above. Be careful when describing engineers and scientists as clowns or you might end up wearing a dunce’s hat with a bobble on the top!
Reblogged this on An Outsider's Sojourn II.
Here are a few questions posed because I don’t know the answers, not because I’m the whizkid genius: Were WTC1 + 2 built with materials containing any nano-thermitic materials? Did, in fact, nano-thermitic materials exist in the early 1970s during construction? Were the levels of nano-thermitic materials found in dust samples consistent with ‘trace amounts in construction materials’ or were levels indicative of much higher levels? In steel-structured buildings which have collapsed in demolitions not utilising nano-thermitic explosion protocols, do dust samples taken from the scene contain nano-thermitic materials? What magnitude of nano-thermitic explosive materials would global demolition experts use to bring down WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7? Is that amount a signifiant percentage of world sales of such materials in 2001? Do any organisations selling nano-thermite explosive materials have records of such amounts being purchased in the 24 months leading up to 9/11? If they do, would they indicate who… Read more »
Good questions. 1) You’d have to be some sort of raving lunatic or comic book Super Villain to even think about using thermitic material in a building. It’s only good for igniting things and blowing them up. Just watch the stuff in action (plenty of videos on Youtube). 2) You wouldn’t find trace amounts of thermite in construction materials. It just has no business being there. 3) I can’t think of how you would find evidence of thermite post-demolition unless there was thermite used in the demolition. It has a very unique signature and behavior. But not many civilian demolition firms would routinely use thermite, it’s much more commonly used by the military. 4) I can’t answer the amounts of thermite used in demolitions, maybe someone else can. 5) I don’t think anyone has pursued the last two questions. But it’s probably fairly safe to assume if thermite, or nanothermite… Read more »
“… But not many civilian demolition firms would routinely use thermite, it’s much more commonly used by the military …” So why would thermite have been used in the demolition of the WTC towers? This sounds like a case of overkill. It would be understandable though if there were something in the towers already whose presence had to be destroyed and any and all traces of it completely wiped out. Could the thermite have been placed to obliterate other explosives or materials and equipment placed in the towers , and any software or databases the equipment contained, that was of a sensitive nature? The other, more mundane possibility is that the building complex was slated for demolition but contained huge amounts of asbestos, and no civilian demolition company was willing to undertake demolition of such buildings in a densely built urban area. Could the thermite have been used to destroy… Read more »
‘…Were WTC1 + 2 built with materials containing any nano-thermitic materials? Did, in fact, nano-thermitic materials exist in the early 1970s during construction?…
These are the important points, and in both cases the answer is no. Nanothermite started being produced, I believe, in the early 1990’s; it was certainly not available in the 1970’s when the Towers were built.
Thermite, however, has been around for yonks; it used to be the way steel railroad tracks were welded together.
Q. Are nano thermite like materials used in building highrise buildings?.
A. No. Not as such, but the buildings in question had steel beams which, I have read, were clad with aluminium as a protection against corrosion. Since the buildings were turned largely to dust one might expect to find aluminium and iron oxide dust particles in the rubble and scattered around.
Have a look at this video. I have no idea how much weight to give to it but it is certainly intriguing!
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Third+Truth
It has a weight of both WTC1&2. It explains why there was no rubble of a 200 stories, concidering the last 15 to 20 stories and the rooftops were freefalling after the explosions like there was no construction beneath them. It explains the whole incident to the tiny detail. It also kicks out thermite theory.
Thermite tech was always here to move you from the truth. Except for the WTC7 which was obviously conventional demolition.
According to Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am sorry to say that this article doesn’t produce the extraordinary evidence that is needed for the extraordinary claim that planes did not bring down the WTC. Extraordinary evidence would mean: evidence from whistleblowers who admit that they detonated the bombs and/or placed them in the WTC. Or documents that show that this is a governmental conspiracy. That doesn’t mean that for that reason the official story is true of course. What it means is that we do not know who – and how the WTC buildings were brought down. 3 options 1) Occam’s razor, will lead you to nowhere. All the stories on 911 and the WTC have assumptions that do not make sense 2) Cui Bono. As explained by Chomsky*, the most powerful country always benefits most of terror attacks, even if it did not set up the… Read more »
Willem, which is the extraordinary claim: a) that planes brought down the towers even though no one making this claim has ever been able to provide a slightly credible explanation of how they did this; or b) that ample lines of evidence exist to indicate that controlled demolition is the most likely mechanism?
Calling Chomsky in aid of your argument doesn’t help. He has consistently refused to engage with the rather crucial questions of How and Who on 911 (maybe not unconnected with his career at a leading MIC research base, personally funded by several military research grants.) If you brush aside the How and Who questions, you can’t grasp just how powerfully 911 has shaped the world these fifteen years. Who cares? We should all care. The criminals are still in control.
Oh dear God Willem. 1)Three buildings fell down. Only two were hit by planes. 2)The official report does NOT claim planes brought any of them down. It claims the planes damaged WTC1 and WTC2 but that FIRE brought them down. It claims FIRE alone brought down WTC7. 3)No steel frame high-rise building ever before in the history of construction has EVER been brought down by fire. In this situation Willem, it’s painfully obvious the Extraordinary Claim is “fire brought down the buildings,” NOT “fire didn’t bring down the buildings.” Because the first claim defies known and observed physics while the second does not. The question is did NIST produce the Extraordinary Evidence to back up its Extraordinary Claim? Who cares? Who cares if it was really a bunch of terrorists or if some section of the US government conspired to murder thousands of its own citizens, firefighters, police, office workers… Read more »
Willem, where is the extraordinary evidence to support the US’s extraordinary claim that planes can implode quarter-mile high steel structures, dropping them through their vertical axes – path of greatest resistance – shredding all that cold hard steel in around 10 to 12 seconds?
If this was possible, demolition companies (as we know them) would be out of business.
No need for careful pre-assessment and wiring. You could just fly decommissioned Boeings at asymmetric angles into tall buildings and – despite the jet fuel burning off in the first few minutes – an hour later you would have a full, symmetric take-down.
Given the implosion of Building Seven, there is also evidence that demolition companies don’t even need to fly planes into structure: just see to a couple of random office furnishing fires on a small percentage of floors and a couple of hours later you’ll get a textbook demolition.
Why isn’t the claim that randomly dispersed kerosene could cause three steel structures to collapse neatly into their own footprint “extraordinary”??
And the rest of your post is a tautology masquerading as an “argument”:
Why does an inside job imply governmental participation? This could just be “ordinary” insurance fraud.
And why aren’t the testimonials of firefighters who heard explosions in the building “extraordinary”? Only an insider confession is “extraordinary”?
And why aren’t photographs of explosions ejecting pieces of the building BELOW the collapsing structure “extraordinary”?
Bravo Off-Guardian! I first came across this paper via Zerohedge this morning, but the comments and discussion here (even the exchanges with the tiresome fellow) have been outstanding. (Though not hard to do better than ZH in that respect.) One rather plausible theory about the timing of WTC7’s collapse that I came across somewhere involves the downing of the 3rd plane in Pennsylvania: it had been planned to fly that plane into WTC7 once the Twin Towers were down; but the loss of the plane necessitated a new game plan. Eventually the players just decided to “pull it” (WTC7) anyway, surmising (correctly) that the day’s confusion would make a cover up rather easy. They were right, given that most people, thanks to a media blackout, don’t know / have forgotten about the third tower. Here’s a question for the tiresome fellow: If fires alone brought down these three buildings, why… Read more »
Louis Proyect is a prolific troll. As his remark on Counterpunch’s recent Syrian article-an apology for NATO- suggests he is a member of the curious pseudo-marxist ISO, which is rapidly becoming a cult, rather like the Iranian emigre group MEK .
Best not to feed this troll.
“Canadian civil engineering researchers disprove official explanation of Building WTC 7s destruction”
“Dr. Robert Korol, professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering, has led a team of academic researchers in preparing two peer-reviewed scientific papers on the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7.
Both papers were published in the Challenge Journal of Structural Mechanics — the first one in July 2015, the second in February 2016…. ” /
article continues here http://www.ae911truth.org/news/275-news-media-events-canadian-civil-engineering-researchers-disprove-official-explanation-of-wtc-7-s-destruction.html
@ Louis Something and anyone else who, unable to imagine how the WTC buildings could have been mined and prepped for demolition, conclude on nothing but the utterly irrelevant basis of the “evidence” of their obvious lack of imagination that the demolition could not possibly have happened, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, a bit of help to get the slow and ponderous machinery of your “imaginations” creaking in at least a plausible, as yet purely speculative, albeit decently “informed” direction: A) Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part One – Tenants by KEVIN RYAN August 9, 2009 http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_p1.html B) Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two – Security by KEVIN RYAN August 22, 2009 http://911review.com/articles/ryan/demolition_access_p2.html Disclaimer: You will have to read. You might even have to think about what your are reading. I cannot think for you. For this I apologize. If I could, I would. But… Read more »
Thanks Norman Pilon, for those links.
People like LP “can’t imagine” how the WTC buildings could have been prepped for demolition.
Chemist Kevin Ryan and others found that powerful nano-engineered incendiaries come in a sol-gel form – easily painted on to steel beams.
This sol-gel could have been painted inside lift shafts where there are no cameras – and elsewhere.
Small teams of painters let in over weekend as ‘maintenance teams’ wouldn’t have raised eyebrows.
Wireless demolition by means of remote control means no one needs screeds of obvious wiring.
The articles linked to above miss the point. In controlled demolitions, explosives are placed in the wall of a high rise, not the floor. If you put explosives in the floor, they would demolish the floor–not cause the building to collapse. You need to have worked in a Wall St. high rise as I did for 15 years on and off. There is no place to put explosives in the perimeter walls of an office. In fact the whole idea is absurd.
“…explosives are placed in the wall of a high rise, not the floor.” Oh, finally I think I understand: a) explosives can only and only ever be placed in the wall of a high rise and never ever anywhere else. Like the phenomenon of “gravity,” you can take this as an established and incontrovertible law of nature. b) any “speculative” effort at placing explosives anywhere but in the walls of a high rise reduces the speculative effort to the absurdity of an internal contradiction and is therefore by that fact completely unrelated to anything in reality, except as evidence as what did happen sometime somewhere. c) therefore, because Kevin Ryan’s “speculation” violates the long established “universal and natural law” of explosives in high rises, the demolition of the WTC buildings by explosives never happened. Quod erat demonstrandum! Bravo, Something Proyect! A fine example of the law of epistemological parsimony in… Read more »
Minor edit:
that would be “. . . although perhaps taken a tad too far in that using your brain . . .”
I think Louis Something is under the impression that when the author of the article refers to “floor numberX” and talks about “modifications to this floor” he is talking – literally – about the floor, as in the portion that is being walked on.
His comprehension skills are not well-honed. Good luck trying to make him understand what is actually meant by “floor” in this context.
Well, to be fair, there is some unavoidable ambiguity in language. But that’s where the use of your brain should enter into your attempt to understand what another has otherwise clearly intended in print.
For example, is it Fryer or Fyer? True, you can’t do one without the other, and it may well be that the “r” is silent. And then there is the letter “y.” What are we to make of that?
But I will grant you that we do need a “New Proyect for a More Intelligent 21st Century,” and indeed, we will need a huge amount of luck to achieve our objective.
@LouisSomething. You will be amazed to learn that even all your years pontificating about Marx and class war to people who just want you to shut up, and even – yes even – your extensive experience of sitting at a desk inside a tall building is not helping you understand the physics of demolition. Let me explain: If you want to bring a building (any building ) down safely in its own footprint you need to progressively and in exactly the right order demolish its support structure so that first it sags inward and then it implodes – neatly. You do NOT do this by packing “the walls” with TNT. I know, who knew, right. What you do is place shaped charges on key elements of the supporting structure, which in the case of WTC 1 and 2 would be the inner “tube”, the hat truss, the perimeter columns and… Read more »
In Greg Felton’s book titled ‘The Host and the Parasite’ he writes about a total power-down of both buildings that happened on Sept. 8-9th. The Port Authority was performing a cabling upgrade, says Scott Forbes who worked for Fiduciary Trust on the 97th floor. So basically WTC2 was left utterly vulnerable with no security cameras or security door locks functioning. What’s more, on Thurs Sept 6th bomb sniffing dogs were also removed. Forbes says many anonymous technicians came in and out of the tower that day. Forbes also says he kept hearing construction sounds from the floor above his–even though it had been empty for a month.
After being posted on scores of websites for over a year, this story has failed to elicit any corroborating reports, even about the identity of ‘Scott Forbes’. Aside from the fact that the sourcing of the story doesn’t meet the most basic journalistic standards, its content is thoroughly implausible. It makes no sense that the perpetrators would do something so obvious as powering down half of a tower so shortly before the attack. This would create a profound disruption of business for dozens of companies, and would be noticed by thousands of people. Thousands of e-mails would have been broadcast and a great deal of work would have been done by scores of employees to prepare for the outage. It makes less sense that they would take such a drastic action but only for one half of one tower. Why was the disruption only necessary for the upper floors of… Read more »
If the research that claims to have found evidence of explosives in the WTC dust is valid then there WERE explosives in the WTC prior to collapse. Finding out how they got there is as relevant as finding out where the knife that’s covered in a murder-victim’s blood was bought. Viz – it’s possibly valuable additional info but it’s not needed to prove someone got stabbed.
@ Louis Something – so with your usual grasp of common sense you’re arguing we should ignore the evidence for explosives in the debris dust of 9/11, because your humungous brain can’t figure out how they got there?
You’re good comic relief son, I’ll give you that.
My comment was not about explosives but the dubious testimony of Scott Forbes.
You discussed SF but only as part of your larger point that planting explosives in the WTC was per se impossible/improbable.
You are doing better, Proyect. You addressed one claim with a logically relevant counterclaim, and provided the source for the quote that is your comment in its entirety.
How reliable the source of your quote might be is something that I have yet to determine to my satisfaction. But this is definitely an amelioration in your style of argumentation. I may or may not do my due diligence as pertains your source. But if I do and find it wanting, I’ll be sure to return to it in this string of comments. . .
Scott Forbes discusses the WTC power down.
Wow! Kudos to Norman Pilan for finding this interview! Mr. Forbes certainly comes across as very lucid, cogent, and factually accurate. He even goes out of his way to point out he is not a ‘conspiracy theorist’; rather that he wants his facts acknowledged by the Port Authority and the 9-11 commission (they weren’t). But troll ‘louisproyect’ doesn’t think Mr. Forbes even exists! 😀 ….god what a loser you are ‘louisproyect’.
Power Down before WTC Demolition and Marvin Bush was director of security
Everything you said in your post is pure rubbish. Greg Felton’s book is thoroughly researched and footnoted. It more than meets ‘basic journalistic standards’. In fact, the footnote source for Scott Forbes’ quotes in Felton’s book are from an interview Felton did with Forbes on Sept. 23, 2004. Not only that, a quick google search shows numerous websites quoting Forbes. So Scott Forbes is a real person who did in fact work in the WTC2 with Fiduciary. Forbes reported facts of what he saw in the days leading up to the attacks. Facts are not “implausible”–except for you in your little subjective world. God what a troll you are. Epic fail dude.
@Louis Something : Can you maybe tell your Facebook Friend (who seems as clueless of science and the NIST report as you do) that the official explanation for the collapse of WTC7 is NOT that parts of WTC 1 and 2 fell on it.
Oh and can you remind him (and yourself) that personal belief systems about plausibility are NOT a refutation of hard evidence. Eg – if you have video and DNA and eyewitness evidence that Santa Claus is alive and well in the North Pole, I can’t use my conviction Santa isn’t real as a rebuttal. His and your discursive whimsies on the perceived absurdities of wiring buildings for demolition undetected might pass the time for you but it’s just not relevant.
The NIST explanation is, in fact, that damage and fires were caused by the WTC 1 collapse. That collapse also crippled the water supply to the building, preventing the sprinklers from operating effectively.
https://www.nist.gov/node/424566
Since fire alone has never brought a steel-frame high-rise down before or since – even when said fires blazed out of control for days and reduced the building to a shell – the fact the water supply was cut off doesn’t explain anything at all.
Fires, even uncontrolled fires, don’t bring down steel-frame high-rises.
The sprinklers are a red-herring.
So, what was unique about these three buildings on this on day that allowed relatively minor fires to induce total, symmetrical collapse at free-fall?
The towers did not collapse symetrically, nor at free-fall speed. You can easily check this yourself by watching video footage — large sections of wall fell outward from the buildings and fell faster than the collapse propagated: those sections were in free-fall.
This is absolutely basic stuff. If you have been mislead by the selective video edits used by ‘truthers’ then seek out better sources.
WTC 7 was extensively damaged and set ablaze by the tower collapse nearby. Most of one face was essentially destroyed from ground level up to around seven or eight stories up. Again, easily verified by looking for video and photographs of the event.
No commercial building is designed to withstand such worst-case scenarios.
Are we just gonna keep going round and round Jerome?
1) NIST has acknowledged WTC7 fell at free-fall.
2) Symmetrical collapse doesn’t mean stuff doesn’t fall off ffs. It means the entire structure implodes simultaneously and completely.
3) Asymmetrical damage – even if sufficient to compromise structure (which is highly debatable) would NOT produce a symmetrical collapse that is indistinguishable from controlled demolition even for experts in the field.
4) WTC7 was never “ablaze”. But even if it was , let’s say it again – FIRE HAS NEVER BROUGHT DOWN A STEEL-FRAME HIGH-RISE BEFORE OR SINCE 9/11 EVEN WHEN THE BUILDING BURNED TO A SHELL.
5) Don’t try and and pass off stupid claims even NIST hasn’t made, that kind of hand-waving only works to convince under-informed bystanders.
Just out of curiosity, can you post up the vid which shows most of one face having been essentially destroyed from ground level up to around seven or eight storeys up?
Laughable post. You have a childlike understanding of the basics of the tower construction, steel beams, burning jet fuel temp, and that the architect of the towers designed them to specifically withstand the impact of a jetliner. Goo-goo ga-ga.
Everyone here seems to agree that the WTC7 collapse was impossible to explain and that this is the crux of the problem. The impending collapse of WTC7 was announced on the news way before it happened (I even remember that from having watched the whole event at the time). How is this possible, and how could have anyone known that building was coming down when WTC7 wasn’t hit by anything and just had a few offices (not from jet fuel) on the third floor (the cause of which is never explained)? NIST doesn’t go there before there is no plausible explanation for it. So, given the fact that the third building did a free fall collapse, obvious to anyone as being a controlled demolition, puts the whole story in doubt. Because to have organized this event, so closely coupled with the other two towers collapsing, had to have been planned… Read more »
William Savory > “it is difficult for me to imagine that any human being could be so heartless as to kill 3000 or more of their own country’s citizens” Perhaps the perpetrators had no particular loyalty to the country or its citizens? Perhaps the perpetrators were dual-passport holders, loyal also to other countries which stood to benefit? Perhaps the perpetrators were very disciplined, top secret teams who had been “out-sourced” the work and told “to do a job” – in which case emotions are set aside? See “Minimised Fatalities” http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/analysis/bodycount.html here’s a quote: “The death toll of the September 11th mass murder was large by historical standards of massacres. Yet it would have been much larger if not for a number of characteristics of the attacks which appear planned to minimize the death toll while still carrying out the unprecedented terror of flying jetliners into two of the largest buildings… Read more »
It is true that it is very hard to accept. However remember that even before 9/11 and all the wars that followed, the US-led sanctions on Iraq were known to have caused the death of 500,000 children. How much more important are US citizens in the eyes of Western leaders than foreign children? 20x? 50x? 100x?
Be that as it may, I think the crux of the article is that the NIST report on the building collapses is flawed and inaccurate. The first step is to have a truly impartial and scientific new investigation into the building collapses. We cannot just sweep everything under the rug because of fear of where a true investigation may lead us.
USS Maine (ACR-1), 1898.
Reblogged this on Worldtruth.
Thanks for this. I watched the first video of the purported collapse by Lear Jet images of 9/11 and knew something didn’t make sense and I put it down to shock and awe. One day it suddenly dawned on me what was wrong. Fred Dibnah!!! Fred Dibnah was a Lancashire chap who amongst other things, as well as repairing chimneys, also demolished them. He could set the percussion charges and light ’em up and the chimneys would implode under gravity after the jolt of the charges and he would do this standing only yards away from the collapsing entity. It was called “controlled demolition”. The difference is, of course, that no structures built the way the Towers were, could perform in this same way no matter how much heat was applied (and high octane fuel would have instantly dissipated in the oxygen rich environment of the glass expanse of the… Read more »
Having mastered his trade repairing chimneys, Dibnah became aware of the demand for a cost-effective method of demolishing them. He offered to remove them without using explosives, by cutting an ingress at the base of the chimney—supporting the brickwork with wooden props—and then burning away the props so that the chimney fell, hopefully in the intended direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah#Chimney_felling
I despair of the science illiteracy of the average US-UK educated liberal arts grad. Umpteen years reading Foucault or Marx and don’t know how the water gets in their faucet or how to wire a wall plug. Here’s one. Louis Something. Don’t know anything about him. He’s probably a nice guy, but what a silly little no-nothing smugly smirking Lord Fol-de-Rol he is. Look at what he says about how WTC 1,2 and 7 came down: The science was rather obvious. It is called gravity and can be verified in any number of ways. Hoooo boy. That’s a doozy. Just appreciate it for a moment. Walk round this humongous pile of steaming hubris a few times and get to see how it looks from all sides. Gravity. Louis thinks the fifteen year debate between NIST and its proponents on one side and some 2,000 sceptical engineers and scientists on the… Read more »
The nice thing about science is that it is the evidence that counts.
Well worth a read:
“Building a Better Mirage: NIST’s 3-Year $20,000,000 Cover-Up of the Crime of the Century”
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/nist/
How eminently logical that this website would traffic in Truther nonsense. If Alexander Cockburn were still alive he would have made the connection immediately between your lashing out at CounterPunch for a single article attacking Assad out of one thousand praising him, and now this nonsense. In this passage he sums up the mindset of Off-Guardian, one in which class is trumped by conspiracy theories whether about 9/11 or how the CIA instigated a rebellion in Syria against a benign and democratically elected government: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/02/the-911-conspiracists-vindicated-after-all-these-years/ 9/11 conspiracism, perhaps at last somewhat on the wane, penetrated deep into the American left. It has also been widespread on the libertarian and populist right, but that is scarcely surprising, since the American populist right instinctively mistrusts government to a far greater degree than the left, and matches conspiracies to its demon of preference, whether the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,… Read more »
Critique the science offered here or don’t comment.
The science was rather obvious. It is called gravity and can be verified in any number of ways. While there are any number of interpretations of the effect of the fires that took place on the floor where the plane landed, ultimately what became obvious was the weight of the upper floors dropping down on that floor leading to a house of cards effect. Occam’s Razor works best in such situations. If you don’t think the impact of the plane was a factor but instead “controlled detonation”, you need to believe that a building as tightly guarded as the WTC (I know because I used to work two blocks from it and was there 3 or 4 times a week) allowed a small army of demolitions experts to come in unimpeded and deploy a huge amount of TNT. Additionally, you need to believe that the Pentagon was also the victim… Read more »
I should add that the demolitions experts would have needed access to the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment firm on the floor where the plane hit in WTC 1. This is a firm that had people working all through the night on bond sales, etc. So what do you do with them? March them out at gunpoint so the work can proceed? Such scenarios are a hundred times more unlikely than any others based on stresses to the WTC that engineers and architects had not anticipated.
A) “gravity” is not “science.” It is, in Newtonian Mechanics, a concept that presumes an interaction between two or more masses at a distance. It is, in fact, a hypothesis, and furthermore, that it is a “pull” and not a “push,” which many physicists in fact imagine may be the case. B) “what became obvious” depends on the set of assumptions — explicit or not in consciousness, informed or not by both an adequate theoretical framework and reliable information — held by the person to whom the “what” became “obvious.” As people hold to different sets of assumptions, some untutored and simplistic, others the fruit of a thousand years of meticulous experimentation and theorizing, there are different perceptions about “what” “obviously” happened on 9/11. C) one building came down in free fall: WTC7. That could not have happened unless explosives were used. So it doesn’t matter that ‘we’ don’t understand… Read more »
Norman, you haven’t answered my point. How would an enormously ambitious project of controlled demolition take place with nobody calling the cops? To gain access to the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald requires admittance by a security guard or by having a key in advance. This is the issue for me, not at what temperature steel melts. This is not like a Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise sneaks in by scaling down the side of a building, after all.
You don’t answer a scientific question by invoking subjective probabilities of human behaviour. Science is science. IF and I say if) the only scientific explanation for the collapse of the towers is controlled demolition then it doesn’t matter a two dime damn whether you or I or anyone finds it improbable.
IF that is the only scientific explanation that fits all observed facts then it must be the truth.
We shape our understanding around the facts not the facts around our belief systems.
So your question is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is the science.
Well, look, here is the applied science involved in controlled demolitions. It is excluded that anything like this would have been possible at the WTC buildings: http://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/building-implosion1.htm In the last section, we saw how blasters plan out a building implosion. Once they have a clear idea of how the structure should fall, it’s time to prepare the building. The first step in preparation, which often begins before the blasters have actually surveyed the site, is to clear any debris out of the building. Next, construction crews, or, more accurately, destruction crews, begin taking out non-load-bearing walls within the building. This makes for a cleaner break at each floor: If these walls were left intact, they would stiffen the building, hindering its collapse. Destruction crews may also weaken the supporting columns with sledge hammers or steel-cutters, so that they give way more easily. Next, blasters can start loading the columns with… Read more »
I should add that the controlled demolition has to be synchronized to detonate at the exact moment the jet hits the WTC. This would be very difficult to synchronize for any number of reasons, even in the unlikely event that the CIA or some other top secret cabal was working with al Qaeda in a conspiracy to bring down two office buildings in NYC and the Pentagon. Try as hard as I can to imagine this, it still is impossible even after reading my fair share of spy novels on summer beaches.
I don’t think it’s ever been suggested a controlled demolition had to be synchronized to detonate at the exact moment the jets hit the WTC. On the contrary, as I understand it the demolition is alleged by those who support it to have taken place over a period of hours between the impact and the final collapse, with charges being fired off at intervals throughout that time. I’m sure someone will correct me if this is inaccurate.
I have directly and pointedly answered your point: the conclusive “fact” of “free fall” proves the use of “explosives.” That I have no detailed scenario of how “they” orchestrated the demolition does not disprove that the demolition happened.
And as you would expect, which is consistent with the indisputably observed “free fall,” Neils Harrit et al. have established, beyond all reasonable doubt, that thermetic or incendiary residue abounds in the dust from the 9/11 disaster, along with elemental iron, which can only be present if the use of explosives had been made.
Obiously: “Free fall” + “thermetic material” = intentional demolition of a building in the style of a “controlled demolition.”
What don’t you understand?
Couldn’t they just get a spare key off Silverstein?
I mean of all the huge logistical hurdles 9/11 poses it seems a bit odd you’re stuck on “how would they open that office door?”
From a FB friend; I was just reading some of your comments on the Off-Guardian 9/11 articles. Very few people seem to grasp how involved a real-life controlled demolition is. Truthers do seem to believe its like an action movie where a group of five guys sneak into a building and slap some C-4 to a few columns and book. The example I always refer to is the J.L. Hudson Building This building was the tallest skyscraper ever taken down in a controlled demolition: 16 stories smaller than just the WTC-7, its demolition required three months planning and twenty-four days of prepping for implosion. J.L. Hudson’s 33 floors was openly prepped for demolition and it took that much time. Truthers allege that the 267 floors of WTC 1, WTC 2, WTC 7 were quietly prepped for demolition without disrupting the regular operation of three large office buildings in busy Lower… Read more »
Actually, Proyect, pertaining to your reply to LooeyPooey’s comment, most of the people who have been commenting here actually do grasp the enormity of the logistics that had to be involved, and that is why there is a manifest refusal to going beyond established, uncontroversial ‘facts,’ to weaving ‘improbabilities’ and ‘implausibilities’ on the bases of nothing.
But do see the two links that I specifically left for the likes of you and your FB friend, to a series of articles by Kevin Ryan, if only because you can’t help insisting on what at this point in the investigation of 9/11 is an unwarranted step beyond “established” evidence.
Listen, the WTC7 collapse model promulgated by NIST doesn’t look anything like the actual collapse. This in itself is enough to warrant a new investigation.
You misunderstand in the inappropriately condescending way of a pompous ass with no education in solid sciences. Let me correct you. The science is not “rather obvious” to anyone who knows anything about science, and that includes NIST and the authors of the 9/11 Commission report. They are actual science and engineering grads, Louis, so they know the science is not “rather obvious” at all. If it was they wouldn’t have spent seven years and millions of dollars trying to figure it out and still be unable to get it right. They all know what happened in 9/11 is unique and bizarre, and they have to acknowledge that in their reports because those reports are read by other scientists who will see through too much blather. The only people with think the “science is rather obvious” are those such as yourself who didn’t read/couldn’t understand the reports and got their… Read more »
For what it’s worth there are at least a dozen eyewitnesses on record who lived and worked in the WTC who say there was extensive building work going on in the weeks or months leading up to 9/11.
But Pained Scientist is right. The data is paramount, not how probable you think something to be.
I don’t understand your point. What does “building work” mean for something like the WTC? As I tried to indicate by the excerpt from a website that detailed what goes into those planned detonations, it involves a huge amount of very noisy and very obtrusive set-up. What is the chance that an investment firm like Cantor Fitzgerald would ignore a small army of engineers and demolitions experts preparing their floor to be blown up? Come on, people. This is not about politics. It is about common sense.
There was extensive work carried out in the elevator shafts and throughout several floors as I recall. There were several unoccupied floors at the time where heavy building work was reported. You can find the sources if you want to,
You didn’t include the editors’ note from the source of this article:
“This feature is somewhat different from our usual purely scientific articles, in that it contains some speculation. However, given the timing and the importance of the issue, we consider that this feature is sufficiently technical and interesting to merit publication for our readers. Obviously, the content of this article is the responsibility of the authors.”
Is that an argument (sort of) from authority by any chance?
Science stands or falls on its data, not on the people who support it.
Ridiculing research and analysis by association only works on liberal arts graduates with zero critical thinking. Blah-blah blather pseudo-sociological analysis is irrelevant. What non-scientists such as Alexander Cockwhatever once said is irrelevant. What humungous thoughts you have about the mindset of X, Y or Z doesn’t matter. You’re just blathering son, and outside your little science-free naval-gazing catchment area no one gives.
This is a scientific paper. It uses accepted laws of physics to make a case. If you don’t agree with the science, offer a rebuttal. If you’re too poorly educated in physics and engineering to understand the science then have the grace to do as the Admin suggested and BE QUIET.
Are you still on “that” Proyect. Get over yourself, you pompous fool. And do try to get a handle on your shadow projections. You’re showing signs of delusion — again. Not everybody latches on to a “theory” for purely emotional reasons. There is this thing called “evidence,” eh, and when it comes to physics, it isn’t left or right of the political spectrum, and certainly not — and I am going to say this only to preempt your eminently reflexive logic — Baaaaathiiiist. And no, not everyone who disbelieves the “Official Account” has it in for the Jeeeews, Proyect. Some of us long ago grew out of the infantile projection that is the “sentiment of the tribe,” realizing that there is but one “race” on this planet, the human one. Furthermore, the preoccupation with 9/11 can be boiled down to this: in the minds of the unwary, who happen to… Read more »
This reminds me of the cherry-picking and careful assembling of partial facts that you see in paid-for ‘analysis’ of Climate Change papers by scientists working for the fossil fuel industry.
Here is a good series that looks at the various parts to the “truther” claims and debunks them fairly well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLthPsWmE3cefpc2sBzI9gamfS9eJRdgEK
Thanks, but this is really a bit of a cop out and we don’t encourage people to make broad claims and then link to a video they assure us will prove them right. Much better if you can, in this forum, identify the flaws in this paper and offer corrections.
This isn’t a ‘paper’, it is a collection of cherry-picked elements from actual papers (used as straw men) and misdirection. There are a lot of easily understood debunkings of these claims widely available, and I gave a link to such an example. Your collection of opinion pieces is a diservice to those who died during this event, and to those who are still seeking to hold the officials to account who were responsible for allowing these attacks to occur — through negligence and ineptitude. Allowing the authorities to paint everyone who challenges their version of events as nutcases that can’t fathom physics, and are convinced ‘the government’ blew up buildings and deliberately killed thousands of people, provides them cover for their actual actions and inactions. Do you plan on supporting ‘Moon landing hoax’ conspiracists as well? How about the anti-vaccination crowd? Flat earthers? ‘Young Earth creationists’? Where is the bar… Read more »
If you continue to rely on generic abuse and to avoid directly critiquing any of this papers’ claims you are going to give the impression you aren’t able to rebut.
Once again, we’re very interested in seeing any rebuttal of this paper’s claims and if you write one we will guarantee to publish it.
Why would you publish a rebuttal from an unknown source? That is just compounding the problem of muddying the water, and there are already entire websites debunking ‘truther’ assertions.
Do you have any standards for what you will publish on any subject?
I’m done. If people want to believe nonsense, it is sad. But it is the dumbed down world we live it. And a dumbed down world is a dangerous place
The problem is that people invent ‘facts’ and dispute basic physics. I have been watching some YouTube videos on the Apollo missions that debunks the claims of the ‘Moon landing hoax’ people, and it is quite amazing what they will assert.
“Rockets can’t work in a vacuum” was the latest one that just blows my mind. Then of course the perennial failure to comprehend basic physics: the Van Allen belts have radiation in them so ‘obviously’ astronauts could not survive travel through them. Then they claim that they’re the ones using science to back their insane opinions up.
And then there is just straight out lying. People claiming that they can take a photo with the Moon properly exposed and capture stars in the shot. Demonstrably false, yet they’ll keep on claiming that they can do so.
Yes, but Jerome, can you draw upon science to argue against what these authors have written?
I am genuinely interested to read if you think you can.
What “basic physics” is this article disputing?
Admin – if he doesn’t answer I suggest removing his comment as spam.
Rather than giving up, how about writing up an article sourcing and supporting your opinion the towers fell because they were jerry built?
We will certainly publish it if you send it to us
Great series of articles and links,thank you OffG,
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
The fundamental fault with this report is that the twin towers were not steel framed buildings. They used an innovative structure that essentially piled one thing on top of another without a unifying frame. This meant they were liable to progressive collapse. One element falls onto the one below and then the weight of two onto the one below and so on. Ronam Point in London is another famous example of progressive collapse where there is no frame to the building and one thing falls on top of another all the way down. The twin towers were inherently unstable and would never have been approved by a British building inspector. Repeat – they had no steel frames and I cannot believe the ignorance of those who said they had. Building 7 is a different story. if you watch the way the twin towers collapse you see they the base stays… Read more »
An entire article on the physics of high-rise collapse, and the authors missed the “fact” that the towers were not “steel framed buildings” but made of “things” piled up on top of other “things?”
Yup, pretty “fundamental” as an oversight, I’d say.
You wouldn’t by any chance be that ‘British building inspector’ to which you allude, Peter?
If WTC towers 1, 2 and 7 were inherently unstable, you’ll have to explain how they were able to stand for just over 28 years since they opened in April 1973, with up to 50,000 people working in the buildings each weekday plus thousands of visitors passing through. The buildings were tall enough to have generated their own microclimate with strong vertical wind shear effects which would have affected their long-term stability.
They stood up until they received some kind of shock. For instance an internal gas explosion – which is why Ronan Point suffered collapse. This was a cheap way to build. The Empire State Building was hit by an aircraft [admittedly not an airliner] and it did not budge due to its steel frame. Frankly your question is unreasonable
Uh – WTC1 was bombed in 1993. It didn’t fall down. Are you saying the architect/chief engineer was lying when he said the towers were built to withstand the impact of a 707?
Ronan Point was not a total collapse. Just look it up on wikipedia, aside from the damaged corner the whole structure remained standing.
Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcaz6N75mjM about 30 minutes in shows how progressive collapse works where there is no steel frame. The whole program is good
Come on Peter, nice try but these folk here are not going to fall for it. Attempts such as yours to suggest these unique collapses are explicable by some unique design flaw are rendered nul by the fact NIST itself neither attempts nor endorses any such easy solution. So anyone who’s read the NIST report or any amount of study around the subject knows you’re talking baloney. These kinds of memes are planted unofficially in forums and elsewhere to persuade non-scientists and casual readers there is an easy and obvious explanation for what they saw on 9/11. They are never proposed or endorsed by the actual official literature or by any reputable scientist, because they would not be sustainable in an informed and professional environment. They work at a level to convince the likes of our Phil that the smart folks know why the towers fell, in hopes they’ll by… Read more »
I am afraid we live in a world where uninformed opinion overrides facts. NIST nowhere says the twin towers were steel framed buildings – for the simple reason that they were not. The authors of this article are talking baloney for reasons of their own. NIST advances a theory that the entire “collapse” was caused by a beam disconnecting itself from its column supports through thermal expansion that girders lacked shear studs and had only two seat bolts per connection. This is far and away the most reasonable explanation. The building was “Jerry-built”. I believe there are massive unanswered questions about 911 – most importantly how come the “plane” that hit the Pentagon just vaporised. And the collapse of WTC7 looks like a demolition job. It is sad that people are clinging on to a total lie about the twin towers were being steel framed. This ignorant nonsense works against… Read more »
so WTC 7 was a controlled demolition, but WTC1 and 2 just fell down by accident on the same day eight hours earlier?
Well, at least Peter’s theory is consistent with the idea that the planes didn’t bring down the Towers. They didn’t have to.
WTC7 is obviously different, though.
Can you imagine, had the Towers not collapsed, the harebrained story that the establishment would have had to concoct to explain why WTC7 had collapsed, that is, “because” two planes flew into the neighboring Towers?
Oh . . . but that’s right . . . that’s what they are having to spin even now under the current scenario . . .
@peterkkellow If “a beam” or “some beams” disconnected then there would have been a partial asymmetrical collapse. To get the effect we see on 9/11 all of the beams would have had to fail simultaneously. If you’re really an architect you know what the odds are against that.
Cross-section of one of the WTC towers: http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f239/354238d1334706486-9-11-laymens-terms-wtc-design.jpg Does this look as if the buildings were just clapped together as your comments suggest? And then there’s this: “The towers’ perimeter walls comprised dense grids of vertical steel columns and horizontal spandrel plates. These, along with the core structures, supported the towers. In addition to supporting gravity loads, the perimeter walls stiffened the Towers against lateral loads, particularly those due to winds. The fact that these structures were on the exterior of the Towers made them particularly efficient at carrying lateral loads. Richard Roth, speaking on behalf of the architectural firm that designed the Towers, described each of the perimeter walls as essentially “a steel beam 209′ deep.” 1 Regardless, it is clear that the core structures were designed to support several times the weight of each tower by themselves …” http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/arch/perimeter.html Now keep telling us the buildings still had no… Read more »
Look at photos of the walls of the towers before they came down (figure 6 in this article, for example). Do they appear to be in a condition that is load-bearing?
No, they are bowing in a way similar to what you might expect once shape charges have started blowing the support columns.
But look, even if we ignore the fact fire can’t bring down steel-frame high-rises and accept that there was something unique but unidentified going on that day which made the impossible possible – we’re still left with the fact the towers didn’t just fall, they fell SYMMETRICALLY. Which means all the support structures had to have given way simultaneously – the damaged ones AND the undamaged ones – at exactly the same moment.
How would this be? What physics is this? How can asymmetrical damage produce symmetrical collapse?
I’m sorry but your claim that WTC towers are not steel framed buildings is wrong. All you have to do is go check the wiki page on them which details their construction-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_(1973%E2%80%932001)#Design_and_construction
Here’s a quick quote from the above article-
“The World Trade Center towers used high-strength, load-bearing perimeter steel columns called Vierendeel trusses that were spaced closely together to form a strong, rigid wall structure, supporting virtually all lateral loads such as wind loads, and sharing the gravity load with the core columns. “
Yep! That is right. The structure consisted of a load bearing wall of steel columns [this is why the windows are so small and narrow] and a core structure in the centre (I think the core was of steel by the way offering no protection to escape staircases and lifts). Between wall and core there were beams spanning but these were not integrated into wall or core. It is not quite true to say they were resting there unattached but this not far off the truth. With the impact of the planes plus the fires caused by aviation fuel [the tanks were full as the planes has only just taken off] it would only take a few of these beams to be dislodged for them to crash down on the floors below. Then two lots of beams were falling onto the next floor, then three and so on – which… Read more »
Yes, and an important factor in the construction is how the floors were supported — attached to the outer framing and to the core beams. Once a floor breaks free it falls down onto the next, and you get the entire structure pancake — with a series of loud bangs as each floor drops down, blowing out windows as it goes.
There are a lot of very good discussions of and explanations about these building failures on YouTube and throughout the Internet. “9/11 truthers” are as daft as the “Moon landing hoax” people, in my view.
The pancake theory has been ruled out by NIST itself.
That is false. The NIST report determined the sequence of events, but made no suggestion as to the exact mechanism of collapse.
Are you sure, Fyer? You mean there were not revisions after everyone decided that pancakes is what they had for breakfast?
Oh, look what is written here:
https://www.nist.gov/engineering-laboratory/faqs-nist-wtc-towers-investigation
Quote begins:
NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse, which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system—that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns—consisted of a grid of steel “trusses” integrated with a concrete slab; see diagram). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.
Quote ends.
Just so you don’t miss it, Fyer:
NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse
You are correct that they mention in that section (part 8 of the FAQ) that they do not believe a floor failure triggered the collapse. Once the collapse started, the towers did ‘pancake’ down as the structural design is an outer tube with a central core, with the floors attached between. The floors were not held up directly by columns spaced evenly as is the usual design.
What NIST are referring to was evidence of the outer walls being pulled in by the partial collapse of floors (due to fire). This was visible on one tower.
Both towers clearly collapsed progressively, destroying most of the central supports as they did so, and ejecting large sections of the outer structural walls — that subsequently did enormous damage to surrounding buildings.
Read the entire NIST FAQ.
“NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse which is premised on a progressive failure of the floor systems in the WTC towers (the composite floor system – that connected the core columns and the perimeter columns – consisted of a grid of steel ‘trusses’ integrated with a concrete slab). Instead, the NIST investigation showed conclusively that the failure of the inwardly bowed perimeter columns initiated collapse and that the occurrence of this inward bowing required the sagging floors to remain connected to the columns and pull the columns inwards. Thus, the floors did not fail progressively to cause a pancaking phenomenon.”
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
“6. What caused the collapses of WTC 1 and WTC 2? Based on its comprehensive investigation, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large number of jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New York City Police Department… Read more »
But . . . but . . . but the “Moon Landing” is a hoax, Fyer! There is “plenty” of evidence proving it, about as “plenty” as there are examples of “steel frame structures” collapsing due to “fire alone,” and by extension, high-rise buildings, eh.
BTW: how is that list of high-rises having suddenly collapsed from “fire alone” coming, Fyer?
The WTC towers were steel-framed tube in tube high rises. Ask the architect, ask the owners, ask the 9/11 Commission, ask NIST.
The WTC towers were steel-framed tube in tube high rises built to withstand the impact of a 707.
The WTC towers were steel-framed tube in tube high rises with enormous redundancy, and their chief architect claimed they would withstand almost anything but controlled demolition.
The WTC towers were steel-framed tube in tube high rises that were – as NIST acknowledges – the first and only such design ever to collapse completely and symmetrically through fire.
Stop trying to drown this discussion in lies and weasel words son.
I won’t apologize as ‘Pained Scientist’ has already proven you wrong. Like he says, you are just here to play games and waste other people’s time.
The WTC towers were steel framed tube in tube high rises.
The WTC towers were steel framed tube in tube high rises.
The WTC towers were steel framed tube in tube high rises.
What happens when an aircraft slices through a large part of the outer framing? How is it still functional as a supporting structure?
I assume that you understand gravity, even if you seem blissfully unaware of the effects of heat on steel.
Are you staying within the officially accepted explanation (or partial explanation) given by NIST, or are you just ad hoc inventing things and proclaiming them obvious, even though they have never been stated in the official report?
NIST acknowledges the event was unique and strange, and has declined to offer a serious scientific explanation for all of it, because such a holistic explanation is impossible to construct without pulverising the normal laws of physics.
So as soon as you begin pretending “everyone knows” this was totally predictable and easy to explain you betray your agenda of appealing over the head of science to an uninformed public that might buy your bullshit.
In my experience, Pained, an aspect of “knowing” manifests in the “tone” of your voice and the “grammar” and “syntax” of your enunciation. “Knowing” therefore has a superficial appearance that is easily mimicked. And there are some who, having a talent for mimicry and on the basis of this mimicry, even go so far as to convince themselves that they are ipso facto the “substance” of what they mimic because they can mimic it. I think Fyer is this kind of “substance.” Among 5 year olds, there are “plenty” of examples of this sort of behavior as they strive to internalize the norms of the culture into which they are born . . . Some people fixate more than others in the modalities of certain stages of childhood. This perhaps helps to explain the “cuteness” of Fryer’s replies. And who knows, maybe he is a 5 year old, but one… Read more »
From the NIST FAQ: “6. What caused the collapses of WTC 1 and WTC 2? Based on its comprehensive investigation, NIST concluded that the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns, and widely dispersed jet fuel over multiple floors; and (2) the subsequent unusually large number of jet-fuel ignited multi-floor fires (which reached temperatures as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit) significantly weakened the floors and columns with dislodged fireproofing to the point where floors sagged and pulled inward on the perimeter columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of the south face of WTC 1 and the east face of WTC 2, initiating the collapse of each of the towers. Both photographic and video evidence—as well as accounts from the New… Read more »
The link isn’t working for me and your point is?
Try this link: https://www.nist.gov/engineering-laboratory/faqs-nist-wtc-towers-investigation
Use Google if the link doesn’t work. It is the NIST FAQ on the WTC investigation.
My point is that the physical evidence — all of the video and still photography, all materials obtained after the disaster, and all investigations performed — are against the convoluted assertions made by ‘truthers’. This is exactly the same situation as with the ‘Moon landing hoax’ believers.
You can believe anything you want and have any opinion you want: but that has no bearing on the actual reality as it is understood by the experts whose job it is to make determinations as to what is true.
Look, Jerome, whenever you have been shown to have made a patently false statement — which is pretty much everything that you write — you just ignore the “fact,” and keep coming back with more bullshit.
You are either truly incapable of learning and thinking, or are playing the fool.
For a time, you were a useful fillip for inciting “informed” commentary. But at this point, your bullshit is becoming tediously repetitive, since all of your points have been rebutted, and nothing that you write anymore serves to further the discussion. And if you are trying to be cute, your game was actually dull from the get go.
Either way, do yourself a favor, and stop trying. For the only thing you now elicit is second-hand embarrassment.
Peter Kellow.
The Ronam Point building was a prefab panel design using concrete bolt together construction. The WTC towers had approx. 60 I(eye) columns made of tensile steel high strength some three floors in length all offset from those above and below them and welded with a further core of 47 steel columns running top to bottom each floor supporting it’s own weight and subject weight and resistant to sway(because the designer had a fear of heights and the Harbor Port Authorities wanting more floors).
If you really believe you are knowledgeable in the specifics of designing tall buildings able to withstand high velocity wind speeds and the pitch and roll of seismic activity then why on earth would you compare the two incomparable designs?
Does ” chalk and cheese ” mean anything to you?
Al this article is telling me is that the NIST investigators are traitors! Why not call a spade a spade for Heaven’s sake?
Well, there is a minor point of semantics here. NIST are almost certainly deliberate liars and scientific frauds but as they were doing such in the service of their government they aren’t actually traitors. The traitors were the ones in power who deemed it acceptable to murder citizens in order to more easily achieve their political and military goals. The civil servants made an oath to the people, which they broke, NIST made no such oath. But screw the semantics, I say hang them all…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8mz09VQQ2M&feature=youtu.be&t=26 here is the experience of an amazing doctor who continued filming even as he was covered in dust after the end of Tower 1, who even has the sang-froid to declare ” i hope i live”. Its powerful stuff. So why in all this high heat and molten metal they insist on ,which fire personnel were working over a few hours later and which didnt overheat the oil in their various grabbers which simply cant stand high heat,the China Syndrome of those who rightly have recognised that there was a clear nuclear signature on 9/11 esp tritium, hasnt this brave doctor been kippered to death or turned into a smoked haddock?Could it be because the dust isnt hot? In fact most people called it coolish.( sometimes it was hot and sometimes cool they will claim) . Theres this massive molten well at GZ and these guys dont even get… Read more »
Reblogged this on Taking Sides.
As a qualified engineer with too many years experience, the entire “Official’ buildings collapse stories (pancake effect) are an insult to the intelligence of every single engineer on the planet.
The heat dwell time from jet kero burn off CANNOT soften beams, bolts or joints in any column & beam steel construction standing in the Western World & maybe even the 3rd Word & we all know it, just as we all know what “Intumescent Paint” is & why you cannot build a a column & beam structure without it & that’s been like this for decades !
You’re aware that the buildings were full of combustible materials, right? The aviation fuel alone probably would not have been enough to bring the buildings down, but multiple floors filled with plastics and paper went up in an uncontrollable fire.
The impacts weakened the buildings severely (reliant as they were on the outer wall as a supporting element) and they had multiple stories above that eventually came down.
If you can’t figure this out then I have to doubt your claimed qualification.
More than 2200 professional engineers and architects in the US say you’re talking hogwash. As someone else has already pointed out, NIST abandoned the impossible ‘pancake’ theory long ago. Partial structural failure (even if one accepts the evidence-less “planes hitting the Twin Towers” theory) could not result in what the videos reveal: the explosive destruction of both buildings which did not so much ‘fall’ (only sections of the massive core columns fell to the ground – with clear signs of them having been diagonally cut with thematic cutter charges) as ‘dissolve’ (all 100,000 tons of it) in mid-air into powder which one can see drifting away with the wind, some of it settling to cover nearby streets with a thick white layer. A structural failure could not produce that – nor could it explain the “into their own footprint” phenomenon of total disintegration at close to freefall speed. Incidentally, one… Read more »
Repeating outlandish claims with no evidence is equivalent to believing the random proclamations of pub patrons.
You appear to be embellishing sone of the claims, too. For example, the designers did consider the possibility of a strike by a Boeing 707 (the largest aircraft at the time), but did not consider high speed nor fuel load — let alone “multiple” impacts, which you seem to have added yourself.
The fuel load is irrelevant as NIST accepts the kerosene burned off very fast and was not responsible for more than ten minutes of burn.
The weight diff between 707 and 767 – what is it?
Oh, look at what the pub patrons are making up about planes and the design of the WTC Towers today: Pub patron proclamation #1: Quote begins: Even though the two Boeing 767 aircraft that were said to be used in the 9/11 attacks were slightly larger than the 707, technical comparisons show that the 707 has more destructive force at cruising speed. Quote ends. http://www1.ae911truth.org/faqs/655-faq-9-were-the-twin-towers-designed-to-survive-the-impact-of-the-airplanes.html Pu patron proclamation #2: Quote begins: “When interviewed in 1993, Lead WTC Structural Engineer John Skilling told The Seattle Times: “We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side… Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed. [But] the building structure… Read more »
Less than 0.1 percent of all engineers, 2200 engineers signed Gage’s petition, but they have done nothing. You have a fringe few who fail to do more than sign a petition. With no damage to WTC steel by explosives, it means 2200 engineers and assorted unqualified conspiracy theorists failed.
Yeah, because every single engineer in the U.S. and everywhere else on the planet has seen Gage’s petition and has carefully weighed what 2200 others have signed on to.
Speaking of a fringe, does the name Galileo Galilei mean anything to you?
Interestingly, when Gage show the WTC7 collapse to architects and engineers at AIA (American Institute of Architects) conferences he finds that very few of them have seen or heard of it before.
I believe there are around 80,000 members of AIA, and to believe that the majority of them have seen the evidence, read the NIST explanations, and support them is laughable.
For heaven’s sake, are we regarding a desk with some paper on it as “full of combustible materials” that can burn hot enough to soften steel, even if there was no visible fire until at least the 70th floor of both towers? The structures of the South Tower was fully intact for at least 150 meters up, and the North Tower for at least 200 meters up. Then they suddenly collapsed in great billowing clouds of pulverizing concrete, neatly cutting more than 200.000 tonnes of massive steel beams. By burning a few desks, some pieces of paper, a few computers, some printers? According to the firefighters, there was no raging inferno, just a few isolated office fires: “On August 4, 2002, the New York Times reported (20 months before the 9/11 Commission published its findings in 2004) that a 78-minute radio tape of FDNY firefighters ascending to the 78th floor… Read more »
A really big round of applause for Off-Guardian! It’s great to see this material being posted on a UK website at last. Hopefully many more people here will wake up to the lies and cover-ups. It would be good if OG could publish something on Gladio – preferably by Daniele Ganser, who is the real expert on this. It would help people to understand that what we have been experiencing in Europe over the past couple of years is nothing new. They’re using the same playbook.