Backglass wrote:Think about this. Every once in a while you here about a drunk driver plowing into a house. Why doesnt the house just topple over like a house-of-cards?
According to you then, the towers should not have fallen. Unless you take MASS + GRAVITY, but then the towers should not have fallen straight down, because of the weight of the mass and it's center of gravity. Like your tree example, sorta.
Backglass wrote:But there wasn't enough lateral force from the airplane to topple the building which is what Juan doesn't understand.
Its the idea that neither tower toppled at all that I don't entirely get.
Mass.
hecter wrote:I figured that he was saying that it would have fallen differently because each side was effected differently... And just because something is big and heavy doesn't mean it can't topple. It happens all the time.
Yes. One side of the building would have been more damaged than the other side. I would expect this side to give out first.... and for the top of the building fall that way... just like a tree actually. The force of weight would not be distributed evenly.
I don't get too hung up on the path of least resistance like others do, because there was a lot of weight. What I get caught up on is the cause. At any rate, the topple scenario is just a question that I can't understand on my own. To me, the areas below the crash could come straight down, maybe. But the area above should have fallen a perticular way. And if it did, then I would expect all of the building to topple a perticular way.
hecter wrote:Wrong. It isn't melting, it's just incredibly hot and flexible. When you apply pressure to flexible things, it bends. In a building, that's very bad. Jet fuel would be an easy way to start the fires, but it definitely was not the only thing burning in that building.
The building had just gone through a new more advanced fire proofing. It also had an "heat sink." And there simply wasn't enough stuff inside the towers to burn.
According to the firefighters who were inside the building, at the floor that was burning the most hot, they only needed two handlines to knock the fires out.
I cannot imagine for a second that the engineers of the towers would use steel that would melt with the first fire in the WTC. And according to them, and the city of New York, they didn't. Even if the floors were a raging inferno, which they weren't, the heat still could not reach a temp to melt that steel. Not even anywhere near enough to flex it. I do not believe that fire weakened those beams enough. Other towers around the world have caught on fire, without collapsing.>
a. The 47 massive steel core columns of each of the towers were adequately designed to withstand collapse.4. Structural steel begins to melt at 1510 degrees Celsius (2750 degrees Fahrenheit) and only if that temperature is maintained over a long period of time. Burning jet fuel can only reach temperatures of 1120 degrees Celsius and decreases in temperature if the fuel feeding it is being depleted (as was the case in the Twin Towers). Therefore, the temperature from the burning jet fuel (commonly cited as the reason for weakening the structure) could not possibly have melted the steel-reinforced columns.
The point becomes moot very quickly anyway because, as FEMA acknowledged, the level of dissipation of the jet fuel precluded its ability to burn long enough to even threaten structured steel
The actual temperatures of the WTC fires were only 650 degrees Celsius (1200 degrees Fahrenheit) which is dramatically insufficient to melt steel. Thermite (the incendiary explosive of which there was evidence at Ground Zero), however, typically reaches 2500 degrees Celsius (4500 degrees Fahrenheit).
Thermite traces have been found on the structural steel, though that's not what I'm talking about here.
hecter wrote:But it could do damage. It's fire, it's what fire does.
It could but couldn''t in this scenario. The fire couldn't have come close to damaging the structural steel. The fire would have to be around 1510 Celsius... but the jet fuel(which is sited as the reason for the collapse) could
at very best reach 1120 Celsius. From a scientific comparison there isn't much of a comparison. And then you consider that the ACTUAL WTC FIRE burned at 650 Celsius... you really don't have a valid comparison.
Now had I not heard the tape of the firemen at the hot spot, and seen the footage of the jets hitting the tower, I might be convinced that fire could have weakened those beams.
But the bottom line is that most of the fuel exploded outside of the towers, and the inside of the towers wasn't burning much. And there is no way in hell an engineer is going to build a skyscraper with steel that has the same melting point that office furniture can reach while burning.
hecter wrote:Again, nobody said anything about melting steel. And just because a fire is contained doesn't mean it's not burning extremely hot.
An office fire can burn as hot as it wants. Certainly structural grade steel will not be effected. There was a tower in Spain that burned for two days. After the ffire was put out the only thing left was the steel frame.
Which is why the fuel gets blamed. But the fuel burned up in an instant, and most combusted outside of the towers. PLUS Tower 7 was never hit with a plane, so there was no jet fuel even involved. But that tower collapsed the same as the other two. And again, the actual fire was only 650 Celsius, which isn't half what it takes to even begin to weaken the structural steel.
hecter wrote:Believe what you want, it doesn't make much difference to me, just don't get your facts and your theory mixed up. In theory the buildings were designed to withstand all these fancy things and it was designed to suffocate the fires and blah blah blah. But when you see smoke billowing from the fires, it's quite clear that there are fires burning, despite what the building was designed to do. And when you see the building being pulled inwards, it's clear that something is seriously wrong, despite what it was designed to do.
This is exactly what we are both talking about. Something wen't seriously wrong here.