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comments and questions regarding things like Charlie Sheen's
interview and building 7 soon. Spring Break just started and I am
going to us this weekend to sit on the beach because it is not raining
for the first time in more than a month.
conspiracies are wrong.
not planned and carried out by our own government but were instead the result of Islamic
fundamentalists combined with a negligent/incompetent government bureaucracy.
This tactless argument of mine was designed to get some email responses out of my readers so
that we can start a nice debate here at HoustonWade.com on the subject of 9/11. I got one
email. So I am going to use it as a starting block from which to delve into other areas of the
controversy around this topic.
appreciate your web site but you are a bit mistaken in my opinion about
your theroys on the World Trade Towers.
I would love to debate this with you and I am sure that I can convince
you of my position. With all due respect for your opinion, I feel that
there is a lot that you are not considering.
You may have math to back up your theroy about how jet fuel could melt
steel, but I actually have experience fighting flaming jet fuel fires
(USN veteran).
Remember that steel is hardened. The fire would have most likely made
it more flexible. Bending rather then breaking. In order for the building
to collapse like that the anchors holding the structural members
together had to be broken.
Get a candle
light the candle
get a piece of window screen
hold it over the flame
why does the flame not penetrate the holes in the screen?
not lack of O2,
but because the heat is diffused by the screen
now look at the structure of the girders that made up the world trade
centeryes, jet fuel is very hot but it burns very fast,
obviously you have taken organic chem, so you know that it takes about
21 molicules of o2 to oxidize 1 molicule of octane
I submit that the jet fuel burned like an oil lamp sucking limited
oxygen in from the outside. There was no "blast furnace effect", and
even if there was it is impossible for the high temperatures needed to
melt that much steel to be sustained long enough to create enough of a
melt zone to bring the whole building down.
The screen-like structure of the girders would have tended to diffuse
the concentrated heat away from the source of the combustion, much the
same way that a nail becomes hot on one end when you hold the other end
over a flame. The whole structure of the building is one big HEAT SINK.
The fires were almost out in 30 minutes and a modern smelter takes
about 2 hours to melt much less mass of steel. Math is just math. It does not
prove anything without a firm grounding in Physical Science and
Engineering.
You may have the math, but without real experience you can not
understand the dynamics of the situation. You show me a photo of a
melted girder and I will beleive you. The fires were all but out when
the towers went down, Those buildings were demolished. Period.
Buildings that are accidentally blown up do not collapse straight down.
Did you ever try to sweat copper pipes (as in plumbing)? If you did,
then you would know just how impossible it can be to deal with this
property of metals. (conduction) No airplane brought those towers down.
Sincerely,
Ray
are a bit mistaken in my opinion about your theroys on the World Trade Towers.
I would love to debate this with you and I am sure that I can convince you of my position. With
all due respect for your opinion, I feel that there is a lot that you are not considering.
You may have math to back up your theroy about how jet fuel could melt steel, but I actually
have experience fighting flaming jet fuel fires (USN veteran).
Remember that steel is hardened. The fire would have most likely made it more flexible.
Bending rather then breaking. In order for the building to collapse like that the anchors holding
the structural members together had to be broken.
Hardened steel only matters at room temp and a little above that. After Steel reaches
temperatures of a few hundred degrees recrystallization takes place. Steel is hard only when
the crystal lattice is not allowed to form throughout the material. When gradually cooled steel
forms a crystalline structure the atoms form a covalent bonding system where they share
elections throughout the entire lattice. This makes the metal malleable and not very
structurally sound (think lead or gold). To harden steel you quench it just after being forged or
welded so that the crystals did not have time to covalently bond with each other forcing the
atoms and molecules to be selfish about their electrons giving rigidity to the steel itself. Steel
and hardened steel contain the same material and have the same melting points, it’s just that
one has a crystalline structure and the other does not.
Prolonged heat will cause recrystallization of steel and make it weaker. The flames from the jet
fuel and other materials that caught fire inside the World Trade Centers did not have to reach
temperatures to where the steel would melt; instead they only had to heat the steel to a point of
creep, about 1000°C. This was easy to do because contrary to what Loose Change and many
conspiracy sites out there suggest, the adiabatic flame temperature of the kerosene fuel Jet-A
is 1727°C, not 800°C. As you can see here: http://www.fire.tc.faa.
gov/pdf/systems/BlazeTech_Inerting_Atlantic_City_2005.pdf, Jet-A gets hot.
According to my Pocket Ref the highest melting point any type of steel can achieve is 1,505°C
and lowest melting point for any type of steel is 1,388°C. Jet-A easily overcomes these
temperature barriers.
Metals become drastically more brittle when heated. This is why heated metals can shatter.
The anchors holding the structural members are not as big as you would think and would have
weakened incredibly when subjected to temperatures even as low as 400°C
Get a candle
light the candle
get a piece of window screen
hold it over the flame
why does the flame not penetrate the holes in the screen?
not lack of O2, but because the heat is diffused by the screen
I did this experiment and you’re right the flame did not pass through the screen… until I
provided the slightest bit of insulation. I made my insulator the only tube I could find which was
an old orange juice package and duct taped the screen to the bottom of it. Once I did that the
flame passed right through.
hot but it burns very fast, obviously you have taken organic chem, so you know that it takes
about 21 molicules of o2 to oxidize 1 molicule of octaneHere is what the steel girders looked
like in the WTC
I submit that the jet fuel burned like an oil lamp sucking limited oxygen in from the outside.
There was no "blast furnace effect", and even if there was it is impossible for the high
temperatures needed to melt that much steel to be sustained long enough to create enough of
a melt zone to bring the whole building down.
The fire from the jet fuel was very, very intense. Normally, this wouldn't affect the steel
structure of a building as the beams and supports have thermal insulating foam that covers
them. In the case of the WTC towers the insulation around the steel skeleton of the buildings
were blown off by the impact of the airliners. Here is a simulation that PBS’ Nova did on this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/minutes/q_2907.html.
The screen-like structure of the girders would have tended to diffuse the concentrated heat
away from the source of the combustion, much the same way that a nail becomes hot on one
end when you hold the other end over a flame. The whole structure of the building is one big
HEAT SINK. The fires were almost out in 30 minutes and a modern smelter takes about 2 hours
to melt much less mass of steel. Math is just math. It does not prove anything without a firm
grounding in Physical Science and Engineering.
If it is one thing I posses it is a firm grounding in the physical sciences. Your heat sink theory
doesn't hold up simply because not all the steel in the buildings lost their insulation. Since not
all the trusses, beams at columns lost said insulation only those exposed steel supports
surrounding the impact zone would have been exposed to the fire and stored and conducted
the heat. With a raging inferno like the ones inside the two towers it would not have taken long
at all to get exposed steel (a very efficient heat conductor) to reach a point of plasticity/creep.
You may have the math, but without real experience you can not understand the dynamics of
the situation. You show me a photo of a melted girder and I will beleive you.
OK, here’s a photo of some melted steel from the smoldering slag pile of the WTC towers:
I beg to differ. Reports from the few who managed to escape the floors above the impact
zones said that all the suppressant systems did not work so how did the fires get put out? Sure
after a half hour or even less the jet fuel may have been expended but there were still
thousands of pounds of volatiles that had been set on fire that continued to burn. Paper,
chairs, computers, desks, carpet, wood studs, office plants, corpses, etc… The fire was well
underway when the towers fell as evidence by the fact that the slag pile continued to burn for
weeks after the towers collapsed.
Those buildings were demolished. Period. Buildings that are accidentally blown up do not
collapse straight down.
Quite on the contrary actually. Once the fires had done their job the only force acting on the
structures was that of gravity pulling down on them. Why would they go any other way? Read
this interview from the same Nova special with Dr. Thomas Eagar, a professor of engineering at
MIT, here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wtc/collapse.html.
“NOVA: The Twin Towers collapsed essentially straight down. Was there any chance they could have
tipped over?
Eagar: It's really not possible in this case. In our normal experience, we deal with small things, say, a glass
of water, that might tip over, and we don't realize how far something has to tip proportional to its base. The
base of the World Trade Center was 208 feet on a side, and that means it would have had to have tipped
at least 100 feet to one side in order to move its center of gravity from the center of the building out
beyond its base. That would have been a tremendous amount of bending. In a building that is mostly air,
as the World Trade Center was, there would have been buckling columns, and it would have come straight
down before it ever tipped over.
Have you ever seen the demolition of buildings? They blow them up, and they implode. Well, I once asked
demolition experts, "How do you get it to implode and not fall outward?" They said, "Oh, it's really how you
time and place the explosives." I always accepted that answer, until the World Trade Center, when I
thought about it myself. And that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is, there's no other way for
them to go but down. They're too big. With anything that massive -- each of the World Trade Center
towers weighed half a million tons -- there's nothing that can exert a big enough force to push it sideways.”
Have you ever seen a professional demolition? When has an intentional demolition ever started from the
top? They don’t, and yet that is exactly what happened with both WTC towers.
Did you ever try to sweat copper pipes (as in plumbing)? If you did,
then you would know just how impossible it can be to deal with this
property of metals. (conduction) No airplane brought those towers down.
Sincerely,
Ray
Ray, what did bring the WTC towers down then? Explosives? Ha!
can't get one of the floors of the WTC towers to collapse towers how are explosives supposed to do it?
You are going to need more than a 500 billion Joule explosion to get it done then right? Double it, say a
trillion Joules? One Trillion Joules = 1 kiloton of TNT. Is that good enough for you?
"Loose Change", a popular film among the conspiracy theorists, claims that there were explosions evenly
spaced every ten floors throughout both buildings. OK, lets put 1 kiloton of TNT every ten floors
throughout both buildings from the 70th floor on down...
70 floors x 2 buildings = 140 floors
140 floors / 10 floor increments = 14 bombs
14 bombs = 14 kilotons of TNT
14 kilotons of TNT = 14000 tons
14000 tons= 14000 x 2000lbs(1 ton) = 28 million pounds of TNT.
How the hell do you get 14 million pounds of TNT into a building without anyone noticing?!?
You do realize that 14 kilotons is about the same power as the Little Boy, the atom bomb that was dropped
on Hiroshima?
ludicrous:
few need to go back to eighth grade science class because nothing can fall faster than free fall speeds
with out an applied force.
speeds but that the rest did not as it met up with resistance from the lower floors on the way down.
The claim is that the buildings fell in about 9 to 10 seconds time and that is "impossible." Not really.
Objects in free fall will accelerate at 32 feet per second after travelling 16 feet in the first second.
Since the collapse started at the floors of impact (oodles of video evidence supports this claim) around the
78th floor in Tower 2 were at the 78th floor, about 960 feet up. Let's imagine for a second that the
building(s) did fall at free fall speeds.
16ft in the first second, another 32 feet in the second second, 64 feet in the third, 96, 128, 160, 192, 224,
256. That's 9 seconds and the building is down.
16+32+96+128+160+192+224+256 = 1172 feet
So, the building would have collapsed in about 8 seconds if it was in free fall. So, 9 to 10 seconds is a
reasonable time for the building to collapse considering the lower floors would have made resistance to the
collapsing floors above right?
Even if the building were professionally demolished it would still take 8 seconds to fall as intentionally
demolished buildings time their explosions with the acceleration of gravity in mind.
quake strikes somewhere whether it's Turkey, Taiwan, Pakistan, or LA.
Dr. Thomas J Mackin explains it a whole lot better than I do, but to summarize: When the upper floors
gave way the weight of the impact was equal to 30x the normal bearing weight of the lower floors.
Engineers will compensate for excess stress but no more than 5 or 6x the expected weight. There is there
little surprise that floors basically turned to powder beneath the crushing mass falling from above?
that were set off down there:
towers fell from the top-down long after people climbed out of the basement to report damage.
Here is why there was extensive damage in the basement of both WTC towers after the impacts of the
airliners:
Imagine the towers as simple machines, levers, if you will. Levers can be explained mathematically very
simply; just take the distance of the lever from the fulcrum to where the force was applied and multiply it by
the magnitude of the force and you have the force on the fulcrum. I'll use Tower 2 as my example again:
877.8 billion Joule release of energy at the tower's base. (3 billion x 292.608 meters = 877.8 billion Joules
Granted, the building itself would have absorbed some of the energy but the release must have been
substantial none the less. The release of energy would have been even greater in Tower 1 where the
impact happened at much higher floor than Tower 2. So basically, there was the equivalent energy
release of about 1 kiloton of TNT in the basements of both towers when the planes struck.
that it would have easily stood up against the heat from the fires.
Wrong, UL never certified steel. Ever.
department on products involved with consumer safety disputes. Second UL fired his ass for making wild ass
claims about UL certifying the steel int he WTC buildings when they have never done such a job in their
entire history.
An article from the South Bend Tribune tells it all (need a subscription so I found a nice link to a permanent
version) Can you say "oopsie?"
support HoustonWade.com at the
same time. Thank you.
in general don't forget to write me bout it. I will be sure to offer a response.
I still contend that the US government was merely incompetent and or negligent in the events of September
11th. I mean, how did a guy like Bush and his cronies pull off something like that and yet have bungled
every other challenge or decision that has come along. If they were so smart and meticulous Iraq,
Afghanistan and Katrina wouldn't have been the complete fuck-ups that they are.
I would also suggest reading the entire transcript of the Nova special on why the towers fell found here.