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Title: Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC “Experts”
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http://www.911blogger.com/node/6765
URL Source: http://www.911blogger.com/node/6765
Published: Mar 10, 2007
Author: Kevin Ryan
Post Date: 2007-03-10 05:15:25 by Kamala
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Keywords: 911
Views: 2644
Comments: 86
Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC “Experts” Submitted by Kevin Ryan on Thu, 03/08/2007 - 4:02pm. NIST report | wtc When Matthew Rothschild, editor of the online magazine The Progressive, wrote an article called “Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already”, we all knew he was not talking about the conspiracy theory that the US government sells us to justify the expanding 9/11 Wars.[1] To the contrary, in writing that article Mr. Rothschild was selling that same theory himself. What he actually meant was that people should not question the US government’s story of terror because credentialed experts have been found to support it. But the fact is that the experts found to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 are predominantly those who profit from doing so. That’s not to say that all of these people were “part of the conspiracy”. But they are, whether consciously or not, a part of the cover-up. And that, of course, is the greater crime. The Bush Administration employed a number of such credentialed experts to give us multiple explanations for the unprecedented destruction of three tall steel-framed buildings at the World Trade Center (WTC). Unfortunately, all of those explanations have proven to be false, and this fact reminds us that academic credentials don’t necessarily make a person more capable of, or more likely to, tell the truth. Exactly how they could find so many experts on the fire-induced collapse of tall buildings is not immediately clear, considering such an event had never happened before. But it did help that the questions were quickly framed as being solely matters of structural engineering, a sub-field of civil engineering, because structural engineers cannot find work without continual government approvals. A Chemistry laboratory manager like myself can work without permits or licenses, but people can’t just go out and build a bridge or a tall building on their own. The extensive paperwork necessary to complete civil engineering projects is obtained by working closely with, and staying on good terms with, local and national authorities. That fact may not be enough to ensure vocal support for the official story of “global collapse”, but it has been enough to keep most structural engineers from publicly opposing the intransigent government stance on the WTC events. From where, then, has the vocal support come within the engineering community? Matthew Rothschild points to some interesting characters when he says that “I made a few calls myself”, including to Gene Corley and to Mete Sozen. Additionally, Rothschild says that he consulted “some of the top building design and engineering firms”, like Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Greenhorne & O’Mara. To emphasize just how solid the government’s story is, he adds that he “also contacted engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country, and none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.” What Mr. Rothschild failed to tell us is that Gene Corley and Mete Sozen not only created the reports that he is defending, but have also, for many years, worked for the US Department of Defense (DOD) through the Blast Mitigation for Structures Program (BMSP). Since 1997, this program has provided the DOD with expertise in explosives, and has been funded at $10 million annually.[2] After 9/11, astronomical increases in DOD funding were likely to have benefited all DOD partners and programs, like DOD’s Nunn-Perry award winner, Greenhorne & O’Mara, and those involved with the BMSP. Of course, the DOD was probably already awash in black-budget funds prior to 9/11, as indicated by the missing trillions reported by the DOD on 9/10/01.[3] Rothschild also failed to let us know that Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), one of his independent engineering firms, is responsible for the architectural design of the new Freedom Tower. SOM gained that contract at the personal insistence of Larry Silverstein, the original owner of WTC 7 and the WTC towers’ leaseholder. Mr. Rothschild may also not be aware that William Baker, a top executive at SOM, was involved in several of the official WTC investigations and reports that have been generated. In any case it is clear that the “Freedom Tower” would not be the publicity-rich project it is today if an alternative explanation forced us to rename it the “There Goes Our Freedom Tower”. Getting back to those experts at BMSP, we see that DOD employs a number of consulting firms to help out Corley and Sozen, in what is called the Blast Mitigation Action Group (BMAG), including ARUP, ARA, SAIC, SGH, Thornton-Tomasetti and Weidlinger Associates.[4] It should be noted that most of these firms were major contributors to the various official explanations for collapse of the WTC buildings, as well as being government contractors in fields related to terrorism. Strangely, despite their overwhelming expertise in the use of explosives, none of their explanations for the WTC events had anything to do with explosives. That’s not to say that these characters never deal with explosives, however, as Corley and Sozen were two of the four members of the Oklahoma City (OKC) engineering investigation, along with Paul Mlakar and Charles Thornton. The work they did followed the damage estimates found within the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s (FEMA) OKC report, written by Greenhorne & O’Mara. Although none of these credentialed experts even toured the site at OKC, Corley and Sozen were able to produce an engineering report that was a highly questionable extrapolation of minimal evidence, primarily the size of a bomb crater, provided to them by the FBI.[5] Their report was created in support of the “One Guy, One Truck Bomb” political story that directly contradicted testimony given by several leading experts, including USAF General Benton Partin. After spending 25 years dealing with explosive weaponry, General Partin independently studied the damage done to the Murrah building in the month before the evidence was destroyed, and made several strong statements to members of the US Congress. In July of 1995, General Partin wrote to Senator Trent Lott, stating, “The attached report contains conclusive proof that the bombing of the Aflred P. Murrah Federal Building…was not caused solely by the truck bomb. Evidence shows that the massive destruction was primarily the result of four demolition charges placed at critical structural points at the third floor level.” He added “No government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash and bury evidence of a…terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an independent, technically competent agency.”[6] When speaking about the unprecedented destruction of evidence, General Partin was referring to the demolition of the Murrah Building by Mark Loizeaux’s company, just five days after Partin made his strong statements directly to the US Congress. But Partin might as well have been talking about the WTC six years later, where much of the steel evidence was destroyed in the month before engineering investigators began inspecting the scene. It was noted by the House Committee on Science, as they reviewed early shortcomings of the WTC investigation, that, “Some of the critical pieces of steel…were gone before the first BPAT team member ever reached the site.”[7] At the time of this destruction of evidence, Gene Corley was in charge of the investigation and his OKC partner Charles Thornton’s company was in charge of the site at Ground Zero. In any case, it is clear that Rothschild’s primary experts have a long history of involvement in US government interests, and in highly questionable engineering reports. But surely the “engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country” could not all be so tied to US government interests. There must be some objective members within the group of scientists supporting the Bush Administration’s theories, and some agreement among scientists around the world. The truth is that interpretation of the events at the WTC does include some agreement from all parties. We all agree that no tall steel-framed building in history has ever collapsed uniformly at nearly free-fall speed into a pile of rubble for any reason whatsoever, outside of demolition. And we’re in agreement that the first three occasions of such an event supposedly occurred all on the same day, all in the same place. To round out a quick agreement, we can all safely say that these improbable events were the emotional basis for the passing of legislation that had already been written (e.g. the Patriot Act), and for the invasion of several strategically-important countries, the plans for which were already in the works. From there, however, the views of the government’s credentialed experts diverge from those who are more interested in objectively seeking the truth. The initial facts of agreement should lead any objective person to seek a detailed investigation that leaves no hypothesis un-examined. But for the government’s credentialed experts, only one hypothesis was worthy of consideration, a fire-based failure of all three buildings that jibed with the overall official version of the events of that day. In support of that fire-based triple play, the experts gave us a progression of false stories. The media gave us the first false story, with help from PhD engineers, some of whom were contributors to the official reports. Eduardo Kausel, an “engineering professor at MIT” and contributor to the WTC report generated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), suggested to us in Scientific American that this catastrophe was probably due to the jet fuel fires melting the steel in the buildings.[8] He was joined in this early theory by a handful of other PhD engineers and professors around the country, and by the US government’s top suspect - Osama Bin Laden. The US State Department still promotes the melting steel theory by promoting the alleged confession video of the alleged Bin Laden, which Matthew Rothschild finds convincing as well. In this confession video, the credentialed expert Bin Laden said -- “Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building..."[9] Apparently Bin Laden’s plan was a complete failure after all, because even the experts now agree that jet fuel-accelerated office fires cannot melt steel (or Iron for that matter). Another structural engineer who made early claims of melting steel, in the infamous 2002 Nova video “Why the Towers Fell”, was Matthys Levy. Mr. Levy was a principal at the BMAG consulting firm Weidlinger Associates that, later, with the help of many other PhD engineers, produced a report on the WTC disaster as part of an insurance claim by Larry Silverstein.[10] This Silverstein-Weidlinger investigation was based on extensive computer modeling and involved many of the same contractors that contributed to the government studies. Their final report told us that floor failure had nothing to do with the WTC disasters, but “that the failure of columns alone, independent of the floors, explains the collapses.”[11] At the time, Levy told us “There is no doubt left about the sequence of failure.”[12] Unfortunately, the credentialed experts were wrong again. Until NIST’s final report came out in 2005, the “Pancake Theory” had replaced the column failure theory as the most widely accepted explanation for collapse. FEMA, along with a professor of Engineering from Northwestern, Zdenek Bazant, championed this theory of pancaking floors as the major explanation for the collapse of both towers, directly contradicting the Silverstein-Weidlinger report. This was strange, considering many of the same experts were involved in both the FEMA and Weidlinger investigations, including Gene Corley. Amazingly enough, just last summer NIST finally admitted that the explanation could not involve pancaking floors either, by saying “NIST’s findings do not support the “pancake theory” of collapse”.[13] NIST’s findings, first reported in their final draft report of October 2004 and built over a period of several years, originally consisted of two considerably different stories for the two towers. But NIST modified this nine months later in their final, final draft report, giving just one story for both towers about “widely-dislodged” fireproofing and sagging floors pulling the external columns inward, with no mention of pancaking. Their final, final collapse initiation sequence, the essence of their report, is now known to be false in every aspect.[14] Through the years, NIST and the other official investigators ignored the demolition hypothesis completely, as can be seen from their reports and archived presentations. That’s not surprising though, as the scientists working for FEMA and NIST, and therefore for the Bush Administration, would not likely lead their investigation toward a result that would limit or stop the 9/11 Wars. For example John Gross of NIST and Therese McAllister of Greenhorne & O’Mara, who not only co-authored the most important sections of NIST’s report, but were also primary authors of FEMA’s report, continue to act deaf, dumb and blind when it comes to evidence for the demolition hypothesis.[15] And we can imagine that all those “independent” contractors who contributed to the ever-changing story, who were also consulting firms for the DOD’s interesting Blast Mitigation Action Group, would be hard-pressed to offer an explanation that would require a less militarily focused solution. The only supposedly independent corroboration that the Bush scientists at NIST could produce for their appalling pack of lies was from that old respected scientific institution, Popular Mechanics. This Hearst magazine is not, as most people know, a scientific publication in any way, shape or form. When they talk about Mechanics, they do not mean Quantum Mechanics or Statistical Mechanics, or even Classical Mechanics. Popular Mechanics (PM) is simply a gloss-covered advertisement for numerous consumer items ranging from ATVs to lawn mowers. You know – mechanics. This hasn’t prevented many who cling to the official story from using PM as their scientific champion. For example, in his poorly researched hit piece against “conspiracy theorists”, British essayist George Monbiot foists Popular Mechanics upon us, saying they “polled 300 experts” to support their findings.[16] But science is not about popularity, and PM’s “poll” of “structural engineering/building collapse experts” actually consisted of only about 33 people, some of them listed as photographers, media-relations staff and spokespersons. Of those that were engineering-related, most were in some way related to OKC, FEMA, NIST or DOD, and many were responsible for the Weidlinger report, the Pancake Theory, or the NIST report.[17] It turns out that, when it comes to scientific explanations for terrorist acts, it’s a small world after all. It's in PM’s book, “Debunking 9/11 Myths”, that we find this survey. Here they include other figures like Forman Williams, although they fail to tell you that Dr. Williams was also a member of NIST’s top advisory committee, and therefore was defending his own work. Williams is presented by PM as a disinterested academic expert, but one must wonder how disinterested Williams was when the University of California San Diego received $393 million in federal grants in 2005, the same year the NIST WTC report came out, with his own Engineering department receiving $44 million of that sum.[18] Another of PM’s disinterested experts was Engineering professor Richard Fruehan of Carnegie Mellon University, an institute that received $100 million in federal grants that same year, with Engineering and research grants accounting for approximately half of the total. In the case of Popular Mechanics, we see people being quite openly deceptive in their strong support of the Bush Administration’s terror story. In their book they promote false claims that the government no longer supports, including the Pancake Theory. They also promote other, more ridiculous ideas including the claim that massive damage was done to the basement levels of a WTC tower by a bolus of jet fuel that meandered its way through several elevator shafts in the jogged elevator system, moving carefully around the elevators themselves and waiting all the while to explode in the sub-basements over 90 stories below. Additionally, PM repeats the false and ludicrous claim that the buildings were designed for airliner impacts, but not for jet fuel fires. In fact, John Skilling, the actual chief engineer of the WTC, made it clear in 1993 that jet fuel fires were considered in the structural design.[19] In the forward to PM’s book, Republican Senator John McCain describes how he feels the truth behind September 11th is more mundane than “conspiracy mongers” would have us believe. Strangely, he refers us to the “banality of Nazi evil” to show that 9/11 was probably not an elaborate conspiracy. That is, according to McCain, 9/11 was probably NOT part of a simple plan by corporate-funded politicians to maintain and expand their power, but was instead the work of a small group of powerless fanatics whose plans to bring about worldwide totalitarian rule were held back only by our own cherished freedoms. That’s a tough bit to swallow, to be sure, but the idea that a Hearst publication would resort to the “banality of Nazi evil” is absolutely astounding. That’s because in writing this forward, Senator McCain joined an infamous group of Hearst publication authors, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering, who wrote for Hearst, the latter until 1938.[20] Those of us fighting for the truth about 9/11 owe it to the victims of the expanding 9/11 Wars, and to ourselves, to reveal these ongoing lies from corporate criminals and their credentialed “experts”. It is becoming increasingly obvious that those giving us one false story after another, while simultaneously ignoring much of the evidence of 9/11, might have more than just a cozy relationship with this government, and more than a benign past. It seems quite possible that some among those providing these explanations are knowingly complicit in the greater crime of a 9/11 cover-up. It is also true that, like Matthew Rothschild, many of us simply want quick and easy answers, in order to relieve ourselves of any need to think about the facts of 9/11 and the changes in worldview that might be demanded of such an examination. The problem is, the easy answers have all been wrong, while at the same time the experts have ignored one fairly simple hypothesis that is now becoming obvious to many. It should be clear that this is because the credentialed experts we’ve been dealing with are all quite well invested in maintaining the official version of events. 1. Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already, The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild, September 11, 2006 http://www.progressive.org/mag_wx091106 2. For a short description of DOD’s BMSP, see “Department of Defense Should Broaden Communication Efforts to Protect Federal and Civilian Buildings From Bomb Attacks”, The National Academy of Sciences, November 2001, http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=10230 3. Missing Trillions: Rumsfeld Buries Admission of Missing 2+ Trillion Dollars in 9/10/01 Press Conference, http://911Research.com, http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/trillions.html 4. US Army Corps of Engineers, Blast Mitigation Action Group (BMAG), Consulting Firms, https://bmag.usace.army.mil/consulting_firms.php 5. Blast Loading and Response of Murrah Building, Mlakar, Corley, Sozen, Thornton, 1997, http://www.terrorisminfo.mipt.org/pdf/forensicengineering2.pdf 6. General Partin’s letter to Senator Lott can be found in its entirety in the Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, April, 19,1995, The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Appendix, page 378-380. This letter is also reproduced here -http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm 7. See Context of 'March 6, 2002: House Committee on Science Holds Hearing on WTC Collapses Investigation, Cooperative Research, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a030602collapseheari... 8.“When the Twin Towers Fell”, Scientific American, October 9, 2001 http://www.public-action.com/911/jmcm/sciam/ 9. The US State Department still appears to be promoting this first false theory by promoting Osama (Fatty) Bin Laden’s baseless statements. US State Department website: The Top September 11 Conspiracy Theories, http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=pubs-english&y=2006&m=A... 10. Profile: Weidlinger Associates, Cooperative Research http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=weidlinger_associat... 11. “Report Ties WTC Collapses to Column Failures”, Engineering News-Record, 10/25/02, McGraw Hill Construction, http://www.construction.com/NewsCenter/Headlines/ENR/20021025b.asp 12. Study Absolves Twin Tower Trusses, Fireproofing, Engineering News-Record, 11/04/02 http://enr.construction.com/news/buildings/archives/021104.asp 13. Answers to Frequently Asked Questions, August 2006, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster, http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm 14. See my essay, What is 9/11 Truth? – The First Steps, at the Journal of 911 Studies, http://www.journalof911studies.com . Also see the critique of my presentation Review of 'A New Standard For Deception: The NIST WTC Report' A Presentation by Kevin Ryan, Jim Hoffman, http://911Research.com, 10/15/06 http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/kevin_ryan/newstandard.html 15. See video of John Gross’ presentation at the University of Texas Austin, with testimonies and evidence of molten metal at the WTC. Project for New American Citizens, http://911blogger.com/node/6104 16. “A 9/11 Conspiracy Virus is Sweeping the World, But it Has No Basis in Fact”, George Monbiot, The Guardian, February 6, 2007, http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2007519,00.html 17. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand up to the Facts, Dunbar & Reagan, Hearst Press, 2006. Note: See also Eduardo (melting steel) Kausel’s glowing review in the front cover. 18. See http://Fedspending.org, Grants, http://www.fedspending.org/ 19. City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, James Glanz and Eric Lipton, (New York: Times Books, 2003), 138 20. Remembering “The Chief”, PBS’s Online NewsHour, 9/07/00, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec00/nasaw_9-7.html
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#2. To: Kamala, robin, ALL (#0)
Oh this should be good ... Expert in WATER TREATMENT. This is utterly silly garbage that slanders hundreds of top-notch professionals from around the world in numerous professions. Furthermore, support comes in two forms. One is making statements about what happened ... statements that support the NIST scenarios. Hundreds have done that. The other is in NOT making statements supporting the conspiracy theories. And the second is just as powerful as the first when one realizes that MANY TENS OF THOUSANDS of experts in structures, demolition, fire, steel, impact, buckling, concrete, materials, seismology and macro-world physics FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, have not seen fit to utter ONE WORD supporting the explosives brought down the WTC towers and damaged the Pentagon theories. So one either believes these tens of thousands are incompetent (they don't see what a water treatment expert, a theologian, an economist, a janitor and a sub-atomic particle expert say is obvious) or they are part of some worldwide conspiracy/coverup. Either excuse is utter nonsense. This is an example of what a liar Kevin Ryan has become, folks. The 9/11 conspiracy crowd has not, by even the most remote standard, *proven* the explanations false. And there are many other examples of dishonesty in Ryan's writings over the past few years. For example, he tried to make people think he represented Underwriter Laboratories when he wrote his initial letter. He tries to mislead people in to thinking the WTC steel members should have withstood 2000F temperatures for several hours because they passed UL tests (what he ignored is that is only for steel components with fire protection still in place). He tries to mislead people by suggesting the NIST report said steel in the WTC was exposed to temperatures of only about 500F. That's completely FALSE. He's tried to suggest that steel won't soften at temperatures below 1100C. Again, FALSE. He's tried to claim the fires in the towers were only briefly burning. FALSE. ROTFLOL! This is what the 9/11 Truth Movement is now forced to do. Insist credentials don't matter. Because in 5 YEARS they've been unable to get ANYONE with appropriate credentials to support their accusations. Well, maybe ONE OR TWO, but one can easily show they aren't reliable or credible. And now Ryan is trying to suggest they made up the credentials of the engineers and scientists who have come forward. How desperate can he get? This is a LIE. There are thousands of structural engineers working around around the world in private industry and without "continual government approvals". The notion that the conspiracy is so big that these thousands of structural engineers (not to mention all the demolitions experts, material engineers, macro-world physicists, etc) are being told to shut or else is absolutely silly. But they don't go to federal authorities for most of those approvals. So now Ryan is enlarging his conspiracy to include *evil* employees of state regulating agencies too. They must all have gotten a memo that said threaten the structural engineers about 9/11. Silly. Silly is what the misnamed 9/11 Truth Movement has become. Do you see the underlying assertion of Ryan? That ANYONE who has ANYTHING to do with the government, whatsoever, must be bought and paid for if they don't agree with the conspiracists. That they will not dare speak the truth ... (unlike he supposedly has). Not even if thousand of Americans are murdered. They are only interested in $$$$. I guess the rest of us aren't as *good* and *decent* as him and the 9/11 *Truthers*. That's a pretty low opinion to have of Americans ... because truth be told a great many of us have *something* to do with the government ... are regulated at some level by the government. But the proof he is wrong is that hardly a day goes by when someone in government, or relying on government, blows the whistle on something the government has done. Often at great personal and financial risk. It is unheard of to have a successful conspiracy of silence involving hundreds, much less tens of thousands. Someone always comes forward. Over even the most trivial of complaints. Why is the 9/11 conspiracy so atypical? Well gee ... maybe none was required. That these experts actually have so much experience in explosives makes the assertion (by laymen such as Ryan) that explosives were *obviously* used, that much more ridiculous. Unless you folks want to believe that the structural engineering community as a whole is filled with thousands of *evil* money-grubbing men and women. Is that the case? ROTFLOL! I laugh when bombs-in-the-towers conspiracists such as Ryan use General Partin to make their case. I gather they think he's credible. Well here is what General Partin had to say about the WTC and Pentagon damage. ********** From >http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/printer_1253.shtml Looking for Truth in Credentials: The WTC “Experts”
Submitted by Kevin Ryan
But the fact is that the experts found to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 are predominantly those who profit from doing so.
The Bush Administration employed a number of such credentialed experts to give us multiple explanations for the unprecedented destruction of three tall steel-framed buildings at the World Trade Center (WTC). Unfortunately, all of those explanations have proven to be false,
and this fact reminds us that academic credentials don’t necessarily make a person more capable of, or more likely to, tell the truth.
Exactly how they could find so many experts on the fire-induced collapse of tall buildings is not immediately clear, considering such an event had never happened before.
But it did help that the questions were quickly framed as being solely matters of structural engineering, a sub-field of civil engineering, because structural engineers cannot find work without continual government approvals.
A Chemistry laboratory manager like myself can work without permits or licenses, but people can’t just go out and build a bridge or a tall building on their own.
Strangely, despite their overwhelming expertise in the use of explosives, none of their explanations for the WTC events had anything to do with explosives.
When speaking about the unprecedented destruction of evidence, General Partin was referring to the demolition of the Murrah Building by Mark Loizeaux’s company, just five days after Partin made his strong statements directly to the US Congress. But Partin might as well have been talking about the WTC six years later, where much of the steel evidence was destroyed in the month before engineering investigators began inspecting the scene.
"Partin did not personally witness the crash, but he lives near the Pentagon, is very familiar with the building's structure, and began studying the evidence immediately after the event. Does he see any problems with the official Flight 77 crash scenario? "No, not at all," he told The New American. "I've seen the videos claiming that it was a missile, not a 757, that hit the Pentagon," he says, angrily dismissing the claim in scatological terms.
"When you slam an aluminum aircraft at high velocity into a concrete structure, it's going to do exactly what we saw happen at the Pentagon on 9/11," Partin said. "If you look at a frontal mass cross-section of the plane, you see a cylinder of aluminum skin with stringers. When it impacts with the exterior [Pentagon] wall at 700-800 feet per second, much of the kinetic energy of the plane converts to thermal energy, and much of the aluminum converts to vapor, burning to aluminum oxide. That's why on the still photos from Pentagon surveillance camera, you first see the frame with that brilliant white luminescent flash just before the frame of the orange fireball, the jet fuel burning. The aluminum cylinder — the plane fuselage — is acting like a shaped charge penetrating a steel plate. It keeps penetrating until it is consumed. The Boeing 757 is over 150 feet long, so it's going to penetrate quite a ways before it's spent. The wings have a much lower mass cross-section and are loaded with fuel besides, so there is little left of them except small bits and pieces."
... snip ...
General Partin, an Air Force Command Pilot, sums up the case for Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon: "The alternative explanations just get crazier and crazier. In addition to the physical evidence and the photographic evidence supporting the official story, there are literally hundreds of eyewitnesses — including many people I know personally — who saw the 757. Besides that, there are the light poles that were knocked down — which I saw personally and which are in the photographic record — that can't be accounted for by a missile or small jet wingspan. Then you have the Flight 77 victim remains and the black boxes. If you reject all of that, then you have to come up with an alternative explanation for what happened to Flight 77. I've seen the alternative explanations and they're absurd!"
... snip ...
Some of these 9/11 productions even cite Gen. Partin as an authority to back their theories about the Twin Towers. General Partin exposed the evidence that the OKC blast included internal demolition charges, in addition to the Ryder truck bomb.
But Partin says the OKC and WTC incidents are completely different. The Murrah building was only nine stories tall and made of heavy steel-reinforced concrete. And, since the Ryder truck was outside the building, the damage it caused was primarily from the shock wave of pressurized air. The Twin Towers, on the other hand, were 110 stories tall, supported by steel columns, and the planes — which served as missiles — dumped large quantities of high-energy, hot fuel.
"The claims that the explosions and fires would not have generated enough heat to cause the building to collapse are nonsense," Partin told THE NEW AMERICAN. "Steel doesn't have to 'melt' as some of these people claim. The yield strength of steel drops very dramatically under heat, and the impact of the airliners would have severely impacted the support columns. When they could no longer support the upper stories and the top started coming down, the dynamic loading caused a very rapid collapse, or 'pancaking,' that would have very nearly approached free-fall rate. No demolition charges were needed to accomplish this."
*************
Wonder if Ryan still thinks he's credible.
We all agree that no tall steel-framed building in history has ever collapsed uniformly at nearly free-fall speed into a pile of rubble for any reason whatsoever, outside of demolition.
No tall steel framed structure in history with the construction of the WTC towers has been hit by a large commercial jet traveling near maximum velocity and allowed to burn without firefighting efforts. Can we agree on that too?
we can all safely say that these improbable events
They were only improbable because hijackers weren't crashing commercial jets into buildings on a daily or even yearly basis.
Through the years, NIST and the other official investigators ignored the demolition hypothesis completely, as can be seen from their reports and archived presentations.
Maybe there is a reason for this. Let's let some experts in demolition have a word.
**************
http://www.implosionworld.com/Article-WTC%20STUDY%208-06%20w%20clarif%20as%20of%209-8-06%20.pdf
"Our company's archived recordings of original news broadcasts from the morning of 9/11 begin well prior to the collapse of the first tower and continue uninterrupted beyond the collapse of WTC 7. These original unedited recordings have allowed us to compare and scrutinize the collapse of all three structures free from any possibility of image tampering or modification. In addition, we have examined dozens of freelance and amateur video recordings incorporated into various documentary programs chroniclying 9/11 and studied countless ground-based and aerial images captured by private, press and government-contracted photographers.
Protec and its employees have not been paid or hired by anyone to analyze this event, nor do we possess any political affiliations or contribute to any political party or individuals. We have undertaken this endeavor entirely at our own expense, with the singular goal of facilitating constructive dialog and providing a factual voice of reason to our friends and associates who were affected by the attack."
... snip ...
Assertion #1
"The towers' collapse looked exactly like explosive demolitions."
PROTEC COMMENT: No they didn't. It's the "where."
When discussing similarities between the towers' collapse and an explosive demolition, many people overlook the single question most central to any objective investigation. It is not "how" or "when" the buildings failed, but "where" they failed. That answer holds the key to understanding almost everything that occurred at Ground Zero.
Since their inception in the late 1800s, blasting engineers have understood that building implosions work best when the forces of gravity are maximized. This is why blasters always concentrate their efforts on the lowest floors of a structure. While smaller supplemental charges can be placed on upper floors to facilitate breakage and maximize control as the structure collapses, every implosion ever performed has followed the basic model of obliterating structural supports on the bottom few floors first, "to get the structure moving."
This was not the case with the collapse of Towers 1 and 2. Close examination of these events from every video and photographic angle available does not indicate failure originating from the lowest floors, rather clearly shows each building beginning to fail at precisely the point where the respective planes struck. That is, no floors above or below the impact points ever move until the structural elements within the impact zone begin to collapse (WTC 7 collapsed differently, which we will cover later).
Furthemore, there are no independent failures present while the structures are collapsing (we're not talking dust plumes or debris, but actual structural failure). All lower floors remained completely intact until they were consumed by the collapse from above.
Because countless images confirm this assessment and none contradict it, we believe this fact to be visually indisputable.
Therefore, for explosives to be considered as a primary or supplemental catalyst, one would have to accept that either, a) dozens of charges were placed on those exact impact floors in advance and survived the violent initial explosion and 1100+ degree Fahrenheit fires, or b) while the fires were burning, charges were installed undetected throughout the impact floors and wired together, ostensibly by people hiding in the buildings with boxes of explosives. There is no third choice that could adequately explain explosives causing failure at the exact impact points.
The chemical properties of explosives and their reaction to heat render scenario A scientifically impossible and scenario B remarkably unlikely, as we know of no explosive compound that could withstand such force and/or heat without detaching from the columns or simply burning off prior to detonation.
There are other problems with both scenarios. Given the consistent weight distribution around the outer perimeter of each structure, one would have needed access to a prohibitively large quantity of load bearing I-beam columns to allow "cutter charges" to initiate failure. Those columns would have needed extensive preparation, also known as "pre-burning", to allow the explosives to perform their function. And in order to prepare the columns you first had to be able to see the columns, which means at least partially removing the outer-perimeter walls of all blast floors, including furniture, plumbing and conduit lines, insulation, etc.
All of this would have been performed within the 55 minutes between plane impact and collapse - working in an environment of unspeakable heat and destruction - or have been performed completely undetected, in advance, on multiple floors in both buildings, while suffering no adverse effects from the plane' impact with these same areas.
This is impossible.
ASSERTION #2
"But they fell straight down into their own footprint."
PROTECT COMMENT: They did not. They followed the path of least resistance, and there was a lot of resistance.
Any discussion of how the towers fell on 9/11 requires a fundamental understanding of how buildings collapse and an examination of the damage inflicted upon adjacent structures that morning.
With very few exceptions, a tall office building (i.e., 20+ stories) cannot be made to tip over like a tree. Reinforced concrete smokestakes and industrial towers can, due to their small footprint and inherently monolithic properties. However, because the supporting elements in a typical human-inhabited building are spread over a larger area to accommodate living and work space, they are not nearly as rigid, and the laws of gravity cause them to begin collapsing downward upon being weakened or tipped off center to a certain point.
... snip ...
The collapse of towers 1 and 2 followed this principle exactly. When the impact floors of both towers eventually failed, the upper sections did not simply tumble over onto the street below, rather they tilted while simultaneously collapsing downward.
One primary difference between these two collapses and a typical building implostion was that the initial failure occurred very high up on the structure, which lead to an extended-duration "pancake-like" effect down to the ground. WIth the weight and mass of the upper sections forcing the floor trusses below rapidly downward, there was no way for outer perimeter walls to fall in, so they had to fall out. A review of all photographic images clearly show about 95% of falling debris being forced away from the footprint of the structure, creating a giant "mushroom" effect around the perimeter.
As we now know, significant amounts of heavy structural debris rained down for blocks around the site. Many of the closest WTC buildings were completely destroyed and others heavily damaged. Predictably, the north tower's collapse caused slightly more ancillary damage than the south tower, as its impact point was higher and thus a larger volume of debris was projected farther from the footprint. Video of the north tower collapse clearly shows a roughly 50-story tall section of the building shearing away intact and laying out towards the west, heavily damaging the American Express Building and others on the adjacent block. Aerial photos taken just after both collapses show massive volumes of debris impacted WTC 7 (and other buildings to the north) the effects of which were directly responsible for the intense fires within that structure.
These facts indicate that a relatively small amount of structural support debris actually landed straight down within the towers' footprints, making this event notably dissimilar to a planned demolition event."
****************
And it goes on from there demolishing more assertions by folks like Ryan.
It concludes with this:
"With all due respect to distinguished scholars and others alike, it matters little whether Alex Jones is drawing parallels to building explosions, Steven Jones is drawing conclusions from hot metal or Chuck Jones is drawing dynamite in the hands of Wile E. Coyote; for assertions to be credible they must eventually comply with the scientific principles of explosive initiation and of structural failure, realistic judgements of probability, and indisputable visual evidence. Thus far, every assertion we have investigated scores a resounding 0 for 3. "
But science is not about popularity,
But science is about getting scientists and engineers to form a consensus about theories. And in that regard the 9/11 Truth Movement has TOTALLY FAILED. ONLY the *official* theory of collapse has had article after article written about it in peer reviewed technical journals ... all of them supporting the basis of that theory. The 9/11 Truth Movement has had NOTHING published in scientific or engineering publications. Nor have qualified experts in any of the fields I listed come forward in any other venue to champion the assertions of the *Truthers*. To claim peer review, Steven Jones had to get his paper *peer reviewed* by marxist economists. ROTFLOL! And Jones then started his own journal so others could claim they'd been *peer reviewed*. So don't preach to us about science being a popularity contest, Ryan.
Additionally, PM repeats the false and ludicrous claim that the buildings were designed for airliner impacts, but not for jet fuel fires. In fact, John Skilling, the actual chief engineer of the WTC, made it clear in 1993 that jet fuel fires were considered in the structural design.
Actually, both of the above assertions are misleading. While impact of a jet was figured into the design of the towers, impact by one moving at the speed of the 9/11 jets was not. The difference in energy of the design and the actual impact was about a factor of 8. Hardly insignificant. And the head structural engineer on the project, Leslie Robertson, said that fire was NOT accounted for in the design ... if for no other reason they had no means in those days of doing so. And even their tools for assessing the effects of the impacts were crude by today's standards.
Those of us fighting for the truth about 9/11
... will never find it by starting on from a foundation of misinformation, lies and silly assertions, as Kevin Ryan has.
#5. To: BeAChooser, *9-11* (#2) (Edited)
UL ran floor system tests with NO SFRM on the bridge trusses or floor decks. UL also tested the floor systems with DOUBLED the known loads with vats of water and concrete bricks. UL also tested with a .5" of SFRM even though the towers were upgraded to an average of 2.2" with some areas at 2.5 inches. NO FAILURE of the floor systems. The president of UL then resigned. No steel in the fire zones saw tempertures above 480 degrees. ALL REAL forensic scientific evidence that NIST did proves this. NEITHER tower saw gas temps of 1100c, or 2012 degrees. The NIST doesn't even claim this. A NIST engineer stated that NIST tested a unfireproofed core girder in a furnace at 1100c and it took 30min for it to reach 550c. In the NIST, it states the core area had no fuel and combustibles to burn and the jet fuel was burned up in minutes, but still claims the core saw high temps. What raised temps in the core area? NIST never explains this. Which again disproves their own theory because the fires in the towers were no where near those gas temps and it would take much, much longer to heat any steel for any amount of time. The NIST states the fires were fuel poor, ventilation limited, were transient in nature and had no more than 20min of fuel before moving on. The NIST Report is nothing more than speculation based on false computer modeling.
#8. To: Kamala, SKYDRIFTER (#5)
But all the explosions heard in the basement on the street point toward the answer. The immediate disposal of the steel removed most of the evidence, yet there is still enough evidence that points to thermite/thermate. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/thermite.htm So the next question is asked by Bollyn: 9/11 - Who Put Thermite In The World Trade Center? http://www.rense.com/general75/thrm.htm I just created a thread for this, (couldn't find it here yet): What raised temps in the core area? NIST never explains this.
Replies to Comment # 8.
#9. To: Robin, Critter, Brian S, Christine, Honway, Aristeides, Diana, All (#8)
The WTC issues are all resolved by a stopwatch, attesting to three free-falling buildings; falling onto their own footprint. Only controlled demolition could have done that. The rest is so much interesting detail. If your house burns down, the insurance company builds you a new one - you don't get a check delivered. In New York, arson is traditionally known as "Jewish Lightning." Larry got a BIG check! Take a clue!
Christopher Bollyn is dishonest. He and Steven Jones are leading you astray robin with disinformation and lies. Let's take a look at the claim made in your source (http://www.rense.com/general75/thrm.htm ) that "After examining the photographic and physical evidence, Professor Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University has concluded that the yellow and white glowing metal pouring from the east corner of the 81st floor of the South Tower was, most likely, molten iron created by a Thermite reaction. It could not have been molten aluminum as the federal government's Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers (NIST, 2005) speculates, Jones says, because, among other things, molten aluminum at that temperature would appear silver-grey in daylight conditions." In other sources, Jones is quoted saying "In the videos of the molten metal falling from WTC2 just prior to its collapse, it appears consistently orange, not just orange in spots and certainly not silvery." This is untrue. If you watch this video, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2991254740145858863&q=cameraplanet+9%2F11, you will see silver color in the stream of material once it gets away from the window. This occurs from 12 seconds in the video to 33 seconds in the video. It is especially clear at about 32 seconds. You'll also see it from 57 seconds to a 67 seconds. And from 74 to 75 seconds, material can be seen pouring from the corner of the tower and that material is very clearly silver, not orange. So Steven Jones is demonstrably lying. Why would you trust such a liar? Why trust Bollyn who has also lied about the seismic data and quotes by seismologists? You would be better off trusting someone like Dr Greening ... someone with a PHD in chemistry who actually might understand the chemistry of aluminum, sulfur, water and such ... compared to a guy who has been studying sub-atomic particles and another quack theory (cold-fusion) for the past 30 years. Here: http://www.911myths.com/WTCTHERM.pdf http://www.911myths.com/html/traces_of_thermate_at_the_wtc.html http://www.911myths.com/html/other_contributions.html ********** Sorry robin, but with regards to allegations about molten steel, molten aluminum and temperatures at the WTC, you'd be better off reading and understanding this: *************** http://911myths.com/html/wtc_molten_steel.html The story... Molten steel was discovered in the basements of the collapsed WTC. Fire couldn't raise the temperature high enough to melt steel, but explosives, particularly thermite, could. As Lisa Giuliani put it: -------------- The existence of these burning pools of molten steel were confirmed by: - Mark Lorieux of Controlled Demolition, Inc Please explain where these molten pools of steel came from, because hydrocarbon fires are not going to burn in an oxygen-starved environment as these underground fires did. --------------- Our take... So we have three sources? Maybe not. Let's go back to a more complete telling of the story. ---------------- Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, New York, told AFP that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted on September 11 to remove the debris from the site. Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland, for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures." Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived on the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation. AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site. "Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800° Fahrenheit (1535° Celsius). Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel." -------------------- Okay, so we have two sources here, Tully and Loizeaux, who were then reported in the third (American Free Press). Or do we? Note that Tully is the one claiming he saw the steel, and the article then says he called Loizeaux. So it Loizeaux simply repeating what he's heard from Tully? That would make sense, and it appears to be confirmed by this claimed email from Loizeaux: -------------------- Here is what he wrote to me today at 10:38 PST: Mr. Bryan: I didn't personally see molten steel at the World Trade Center site. It was reported to me by contractors we had been working with. Molten steel was encountered primarily during excavation of debris around the South Tower when large hydraulic excavators were digging trenches 2 to 4 meters deep into the compacted/burning debris pile. There are both video tape and still photos of the molten steel being "dipped" out by the buckets of excavators. I'm not sure where you can get a copy. Sorry I cannot provide personal confirmation. Regards, Mark Loizeaux, President ----------------------- If accurate, the source has now moved from Loizeaux back to contractors, but there’s no information here on how the substance was identified as “molten steel”, or who might have performed the analysis to figure it out. There’s another complication in terms of the WTC debris temperatures, according to NASA analyses made on September 16th and 23rd. --------------------- Initial analysis of these data revealed a number of thermal hot spots on September 16 in the region where the buildings collapsed 5 days earlier. Analysis of the data indicates temperatures greater than 800 degrees F. Over 3 dozen hot spots appear in the core zone. By September 23, only 4, or possibly 5, hot spots are apparent, with temperatures cooler than those on September 16. --------------------- Over 800 degrees F is hot, but not nearly hot enough. A more speculative view on the paper suggests maximum temperatures of 1341 degrees F ( http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0429/thermal.r09.html ), but that's still well below the “about 2,800° Fahrenheit” we need to get "literally molten steel". The get-out here is that NASA could only see surface temperatures, obviously. And they took their first measurements on the 16th, so temperatures could have been even higher before then. Keep in mind that the hotspots had reduced significantly by the 23rd, though, and excavators wouldn’t have been digging anywhere close to the basement levels until some time after that. Other accounts suggest the temperatures needn’t have been that high to produce noticeable and dramatic effects. ----------------- However, Clark doesn't know how deep into the pile AVIRIS could see. The infrared data certainly revealed surface temperatures, yet the smoldering piles below the surface may have remained at much higher temperatures. "In mid-October, in the evening," said Thomas A. Cahill, a retired professor of physics and atmospheric science at the University of California, Davis, "when they would pull out a steel beam, the lower part would be glowing dull red, which indicates a temperature on the order of 500 to 600 °C. And we know that people were turning over pieces of concrete in December that would flash into fire--which requires about 300 °C. So the surface of the pile cooled rather rapidly, but the bulk of the pile stayed hot all the way to December." -------------------- Perhaps aware of these problems, some people use other accounts to support the "molten steel" idea. Let's look at a few of those. -------------------- Dr. Keith Eaton toured Ground Zero and stated in The Structural Engineer , "They showed us many fascinating slides [Eaton] continued, ranging from molten metal which was still red hot weeks after the event, to 4-inch thick steel plates sheared and bent in the disaster." (Structural Engineer , September 3, 2002, p. 6;.) -------------------- The observation of molten metal at Ground Zero was emphasized publicly by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer responsible for the design of the World Trade Center Towers, who reported that "As of 21 days after the attack, the fires were still burning and molten steel was still running." (Williams, 2001, p. 3.) -------------------- Sarah Atlas was part of New Jersey's Task Force One Urban Search and Rescue and was one of the first on the scene at Ground Zero with her canine partner Anna. She reported in Penn Arts and Sciences , summer 2002, "'Nobody's going to be alive.' Fires burned and molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet." (Penn, 2002.) -------------------- Dr. Allison Geyh was one of a team of public health investigators from Johns Hopkins who visited the WTC site after 9-11. She reported in the Late Fall 2001 issue of Magazine of Johns Hopkins Public Health, "In some pockets now being uncovered they are finding molten steel. --------------------- Eaton's quote refers to "molten metal", not steel. The use of “glowing red” suggests he may not mean it’s liquid metal, either. The "Leslie Robertson" quote comes second-hand from James Williams, SEAU President, in an account of a Robertson presentation ( http://www.seau.org/SEAUNews-2001-10.pdf ). We emailed Roberston to find out if it was accuate, and his brief reply arrived quickly: ---------------------- I've no recollection of having made any such statements...nor was I in a position to have the required knowledge. ---------------------- http://911myths.com/html/leslie_robertson.html only talk of “molten metal”, not steel. It’s possible to construct a case that Robertson mentioned “molten steel” in the lecture, but forgot it later, and Williams wrote “molten steel” rather than metal because, ah, he just did. But short of some evidence to support that, this quote doesn’t appear to have much substance. The Sarah Atlas story also appears to be use “molten steel” for dramatic effect, rather than anything else. How could she possibly know for sure that “molten steel flowed in the pile of ruins still settling beneath her feet"? We checked with the author, and he said this information would have been a quote from someone, but he doesn’t remember who (and none of the possible subjects would really qualify as an expert witness). We recently discovered another pointer to the use of “molten steel”, too. A message on the LibertyPost forum referred to a now defunct site called http://WTCGodsHouse.com, where a WTC construction worker published a potentially relevant photo ( http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=30926 ). Could this be true? The site is dead, but there’s a copy in the WayBack machine, and the front page has this guys credentials: ------------------------ My name is Frank Silecchia. I am one of the many WTC Ground Zero workers who was devastated by what I saw and encountered after the Twin Towers collasped. http://web.archive.org/web/20020608142217/http://www.wtcgodshouse.com/ ------------------------ Proceed to the photos section ( http://web.archive.org/web/20020609005905/www.wtcgodshouse.com/photos.html ) and you’ll find something captioned “this is a picture of Tower #1 ..2 months later, molten steel”. Which looks like this. Now maybe it’s just us, but we have some problems with that. First, there’s no proof here other than the caption of when and where this was taken. Second, whatever’s glowing red here clearly isn’t isn’t “molten” in the sense of “melted”.There may possibly be something dripping off one end, but we don’t know what that is. Third, there seems an odd lack of conduction amongst the materials being picked up. We can see that the excavator has picked up a considerable amount of nearby material that presumably was very close to the same heat source, and it looks like glowing metal, but it’s completely black. There’s no orange -- bright red -- dull red transition across the materials, it’s just a straight orange to black. Steel isn’t a good conductor of heat, it’s true, but is that enough to explain the photo? And fourth, we know there were underground fires at the site for some time. How hot could they get? Depends on the materials and the supply of oxygen, but in some cases the temperatures can be surprisingly high: ----------------- Australia is the home of one of the world's few naturally burning coal seams... The fire temperature reaches temperatures of 1,700°C deep beneath the ground. ------------------- Coal fires produce higher temperatures than we’d expect from the debris pile, but then Steve Jones suggests we only need 845°C to 1,040°C to explain our glowing steel. Could that be produced with the materials available, and oxygen filtering in from above, or from the subways connected to the WTC basement level? There’s a clue in the results of this fire test intended to simulate conditions in a timber frame building: ------------------ Peak temperatures in the living area of the fire flat reached approximately 1000°C and remained at this level until the test was stopped at 64 minutes... Despite average atmosphere temperatures in excess of 900°C for 30 minutes... http://www.mace.manchester.ac.uk/project/research/structures/strucfire/CaseStudy/Timber/default.htm ------------------ The Structural Fire Engineering department of the University of Manchester tells us that adding plastics to the mix can make things hotter still: ------------------- The standard fires do not always represent the most severe fire conditions. Structural members having been designed to standard fires may fail to survive in real fires. For example, the modern offices tend to contain large quantities of hydrocarbon fuels in decoration, furniture, computers and electric devices, in forms of polymers, plastics, artificial leathers and laminates etc. Consequently, the fire becomes more severe than the conventional standard fire. ---------------------- Office fires can be severe, then. What temperatures are achievable? The same page details four different fire types, and shows their temperature range over time. ---------------------- Figure 1 shows the various nominal fire curves for comparison. It can be seen that, over a period of 2 hours, the hydrocarbon fire is the most severe followed by the standard fire, with the external fire being the least severe fire although the slow heating fire represents the lowest temperature up to 30 minutes. It is noteworthy that for standard and smouldering fires, the temperature continuously increases with increasing time. For the external fire, the temperature remains constant at 680°C after approximate 22 minutes. Whereas for the hydrocarbon fires, the temperatures remain constant at 1100°C and 1120°C after approximate 40 minutes. ------------------------ Note that the hydrocarbon fire passed 1000 degrees Centrigrade (1832°F) very quickly, and even the smouldering fire reached this point over time. An article by two Arup Fire engineers tells a similar story, pointing out that under some conditions fires can reach much higher temperatures than indicated by the standard curve. Here’s the chart they use: This shows that temperature increases with fire load (that is, more fuel). And they point out that reduced ventilation doesn’t necessarily have the result you’d expect: The well ventilated compartments experienced lower temperatures and fires of shorter duration. Less ventilation means more severe fires? This obviously only works up to a point -- reduce the oxygen supply too much and the fire will die down -- but it does illustrate that the relationship between ventilation and temperature isn’t a simple one. Another study offers more confirmation of the temperatures that can be reached in fires, and their effect on steel. BRE (Building Research Establishment) carried out a project based around "the development and validation of a CFD-based engineering methodology for evaluating thermal action on steel and composite structures" a few years ago. They build a fire compartment, used various loads (either wood, or wood with plastic) and reported peak temperatures: --------------------- As can be seen in the above table, peak measured temperatures exceeded 1300°C in five tests, this measurement being supported by the observation of total heat fluxes of up to 350 kW/m2 and velocities of over 15m/s. These values are somewhat higher than those observed in typical full-scale compartment fire tests and can be attributed in part to the highly insulating walls, the inclusion of plastic in the fuel and the short residence times (due to high flow rates). ---------------------- Again, ordinary fuels with a little plastic, and the right conditions, yielded high temperatures. And this applied even to the steel itself, where the maximum temperature record in four tests proved to be 1220, 1301, 1245 and 1196 °C (that’s a peak of 2372 °F). Do these temperatures exist in special conditions only? No. A National Fire and Arson Report article from 1992 details the tests done on four steel mattress springs from a normal fire, which appeared to be partly melted: ----------------------- The apparently melted ends of each of the four springs were cut off and mounted in a metallurgical mounting medium, polished, etched, and examined at up to 500x. Three of the four springs exhibited a decarburized ferrite microstructure, with oxidation on the top surface. Such a microstructure is typical of steel exposed to temperatures in the range of 1800°F [982 °C]. One of the wire ends exhibited a ferrite microstructure with oxidation on the top surface and incipient melting at the grain boundaries. This particular wire end had attained temperatures of between 2100°F [1148 °C] and 2200°F [1204 °C]. This wire end had, in fact, just begun to melt, which is what we would expect if there was melting further down the wire. ----------------------- It doesn’t require special materials for a fire to approach 1000°C, then. And in this final case, one steel spring sample could have attained temperatures as high as 1204 °C. Whether the conditions in the debris pile would allow it is another matter, but beware people who dismiss this out of hand: no-one knows for sure. None of this proves anything, of course, but it is interesting. Especially because, if this is an accurate photo of what someone was describing as “molten steel” then it’s clearly different from the entirely “liquid steel” that some people imagine. There’s some support for this use of “molten” elsewhere. ------------------------ NYDS played a major role in debris removal — everything from molten steel beams to human remains — running trucks back and forth between Ground Zero and Fresh Kills landfill, which was reopened to accommodate the debris. ------------------------ A “molten” steel beam? If it’s a steel beam, then it’s not “molten” in the sense of being liquid metal. Does he just mean steel that appeared deformed, or was glowing when first removed from the debris pile? Back to the Allison Geyh story, there's no explanation of how a public health investigator is going to identify molten steel. Is she just reporting second-hand accounts that we’ve discovered already, perhaps from Peter Tully? We emailed to ask, and it turns out that Geyh saw no molten steel herself, and is only repeating what she heard from someone else: ------------------------ I personally saw open fires, glowing and twisted I-beams. I was told, but do not remember by whom, that the workers were finding molten steel. ------------------------ Of course you could argue that there are too many stories to be “explained away”, that there’s no way fire alone could account for all these reports. But if so, what about these? -------------------------- Underground it was still so hot that molten metal dripped down the sides of the wall from Building 6. (Kenneth Holden, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Design and Construction) --------------------------- RICH GARLOCK: Going below, it was smoky and really hot. We had rescue teams with meters for oxygen and carbon dioxide. They also had temperature monitors. Here WTC 6 is over my head. The debris past the columns was red-hot, molten, running. --------------------------- Only “molten metal” and debris, but if that phrase is good enough in Keith Eaton’s testimony, why not here? Does this show that thermite was planted in Building 6, too? Or could it be that the fire was enough, after all? To finish, none of these stories prove there was molten (as in liquid) steel at the WTC. There's no evidence temperatures were hot enough to produce that (whatever the energy source), and some of the stories claiming "molten steel" have built-in implausibilities. There was certainly glowing metal, but this only indicates temperatures within the range of a fire. **************** You see folks? There is always more to a story than the conspiracy crowd would have you believe.
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#59. To: robin, ALL (#8)
- Peter Tully, President of Tully Construction
- and the American Free Press newspaper
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/03/312837.shtml
http://www.serendipity.li/wot/bollyn2.htm
==========================
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION, INC.
2737 Merryman's Mill Road
Phoenix, Maryland USA 21131
Tel: 1-410-667-6610
Fax: 1-410-667-6624
http://www.controlled-demolition.com
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.alien.visitors/msg/dfef90067070254e?dmode=source
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/ofr-01-0405/ofr-01-0405.html
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/NCW/8142aerosols.html
http://www.reopen911.org/womaninhole.htm
Details here 
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_786127.htm
BAC - here is the source 
(BAC - here is the source)
http://projects.bre.co.uk/FRSdiv/ecsc/
http://www.atslab.com/fire/PDF/MeltedSteel.pdf
http://wasteage.com/mag/waste_dday_ny_sanitation/
From here
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/9-11_commission/030401-holden.htm
http://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds/engineering/engineering_debris_06.html
End Trace Mode for Comment # 8.
