Fire Could Easily Have Been Cause of WTC Collapse

Anybody ever take a Physics class? Remember this?

KE=1/2*M*v^2 Kinetic Energy equals 1/2 times the Mass of the object times the object's velocity squared.

Real quick and real simple.

The towers' structure consisted of load bearing columns both around the outside perimeter and around an inside core. Each floor consisted of lightweight (structurally) concrete poured on to sheetmetal that was supported by a truss system bridging the outside and inside load bearing columns.

Before the planes hit the tower's structure was supporting mainly a static load. There was a small dynamic load from the wind but it was minor for what the design allowed. Did anybody know that the towers themselves swayed? I think it was about 12 feet at the tops. Anyway the primary load at this time was the weight of the towers and everything inside them.

Then the planes hit. The impact applied a sideways load on to the columns. How much of a load is unknown. Several of the outer and inner columns had to have been sheared, while others were damaged. At this point there is are several floors that have damaged or sheared columns, while the structure above and below these floors are pretty much undamaged.

For the time being the entire load of the towers above the damaged floors is still being supported by structure in the damaged area. Safety factors work! Now the fire starts to heat this structure that is already overloaded. These overloaded columns start to have their Yield Strength reduced by the heat. When the Yield Strength becomes less than the load on the column, the column fails.

Finally enough columns fail that the mass of the tower above the damaged floors can no longer be supported and it starts to fall. Think about the weight of the building above the impact points. I think I read that it was in the order of tens of thousands of tons. Plug that number into the formula that I gave at the start. Once that mass started moving it pile drived the structure below it. This is what caused the destruction that you mention.

The problem is that you're not putting your quick figures in context.

A lot of energy, yes, but compared to what? TNT? The amount of force necessary to crush a human? An elephant? What about 97 stories of solidly welded, increasingly strong and thick steel skyscraper? That's where a red flag should raise.

You're only considering one side of the problem: the falling energy. You're not considering the energy that would be required to crush so much solid mass in such little time, producing such thorough destruction and massive ejections.

13 floors falling upon 97, though the 13 may at some point be dynamic (though NOT from a free-fall, not that this would much matter ultimately), they can't be logically expected to automatically, thoroughly negate the existance of a much, much larger structure beneath them, in a matter of a few seconds, while producing all of the observed, hugely energetic phenomena.

Also realize that upon the first impact, all that massive momentum would be transferred straight down the building into the bedrock. It isn't reusable for destroying each floor, one-by-one, with a steady and maintained energy.

[edit on 7-11-2006 by bsbray11]

So Jim how about taking your calculations and comparing the WTC towers with something a little more relevant, like the Madrid Windsor tower?

You want us to believe because a bridge had structural failure that a building would collapse down on itself, ejecting tons of steel up to 600 ft, and turning concrete and office furniture into a fine dust? All from fires that lasted less than an hour?
And no it wasn't the plane, the building survived the planes impact, you would have to be completely dense to argue that.

The [Madrid] Windsor Building was of a similar truss design to the twin towers, the fire started 11 stories from the top of the building, and it burned at temperatures of 800ºC for more than 18 hours [AFP]. The core of the building did not fail.

www.911myths.com...

Instead of trying to reach for excuses for the WTC collapses, wake up! The truth is staring you in the face.

Originally posted by ANOK
You want us to believe because a bridge had structural failure that a building would collapse down on itself, ejecting tons of steel up to 600 ft, and turning concrete and office furniture into a fine dust? All from fires that lasted less than an hour?
And no it wasn't the plane, the building survived the planes impact, you would have to be completely dense to argue that.

Well your sarcasm aside, let's face it the Madrid tower wasn't struck by a large airliner moving at high speed. There was severe structural damage from the impact of the aircraft and then the damage from the fire was added to the already weakend structure. The towers could have survived one or the other but not both.

The main arguement that I have seen here is that the fire couldn't possibly have weakened the structure enough for it to collapse. Well the photos of the beams in the story I posted disprove that.

The temperatures of the fire aren't enough to melt steel. No one ever claimed the steel melted before the building collapsed.

The impact of the plane caused significant structural failure to the towers. If you deny that then I suggest going back to kindergarten. This meant the upper floors of the tower no longer had the same support they did before. If there was no fire, the building would have remained standing.

All the towers needed now to collapse was a significant weakening of the remaining support steel. This is where fire comes in. The temperatures burning in the trade towers were sufficient to weaken the supports to the point where they could no longer hold the weight of the towers.

And no it wasn't the plane, the building survived the planes impact, you would have to be completely dense to argue that.

You would have to be completley dense to argue that the planes caused no damage. Which is what you appear to be doing.

www.911myths.com...

Read that whole page. This is not the first time you have sourced 9/11 myths without reading the content of the page outside the yellow quote boxes.

Our take...

The Madrid Windsor fire is sometimes cited as being relevant to the WTC collapse, but in reality there are major differences between the two situations.

No plane flew into the Madrid Windsor Tower, for instance. It didn't sustain any structural damage prior to the fire beginning. (And for those who keep emailing us to say that neither did WTC7, reports of the damage there are covered here.)

The Madrid Windsor Tower was much smaller than the WTC, too, at 32 storeys.

More significantly, the design of the Madrid Windsor Tower was entirely different to that of the WTC.

You know - the 9/11 Myths page quoted a source that isn't debunking the argument at the same time. Mabey you should have used that instead?

Instead of trying to reach for excuses for the WTC collapses, wake up! The truth is staring you in the face.

Right back at you buddy.

like valhall pointed out, there are terminations at the sky lobby/mechanical floor levels.
the mechanical floors house all the winches and motors that hoist the elevators. these floors were structurally more robust, with aggragate concrete and heavier trusses.
the sky lobby floors above the mechanical floors had a mostly continuous floor space.

and as bsbray pointed out, all the lobby windows were blown out, huge marble panels were cracked.

there are reports (and i just heard an audio recording taken in an adjacent tower) of TWO explosions, seconds apart.

and, besides mike percaro's, and william rodriguez' testimony, emergency services responded to a call to an explosion and collapse on the b4 level, with possible trapped victims.

and, the plane was going five-hundred miles an hour when it hit the tower, so it was like a water balloon, and most of the fuel's forward momentum carried it out into the huge fireball we've all seen.

nist estimates that the jet fuel burned off quickly. i think the NIST is part of the cover-up, but they can't just bold-faced lie about everything, so MOST of their data, if not conclusions, are fairly trustworthy.
NOONE is pushing the idea that jet fuel brought the towers down, anymore. it's a dead shill horse.

when steel becomes heated to 'failure', it BENDS, WARPS, TWISTS....ie. becomes more malleaeble....not more BRITTLE. the buildings went 'essentially into freefall' according to NIST. if you've ever seen steel frasme structures collapsed from earthquakes, you can see that these 'intense steel grid's (frank martini, construction mananger of WTC project, R.I.P september 11, 2001) will hold together as they tip. they do not just start shattering and breaking themselves apart.

the sudden collapse has no resemblence to a steel structure being heated to failure.

watch the top of the windsor tower collapse, and you will see how a REAL steel structure fails from extreme heat(and the heat at the windsor tower was astronomically greater than the towers. 24 hours of CONFLAGRATION vs. two hours of mostly smoldering.

if you read the nist report, you will see from there spectral heat graphs, that the core never reached any steel compromising temperatures. according to their legend(colour code: temperature) it looks like around 250°C was as hot as it got.

although fire CAN cause a collapse of a steel structure(as seen at the windsor tower), the fires at the towers were neither hot, nor widespread, nor longlasting enough to cause the sudden EXPLOSION witnessed.

an, as an aside, yes i trust the NIST over USA today reporters. in fact, USA today seems involved in the cover-up from the get-go. check out the old 'mystery of the moved taxi' thread, and see the huge list of 'witnesses' from the pentagon that were employees of USA today. i find it so obvious, it's obscene, personally.

explosions from below could also burn people in elevators, so burned people in elevators is not any kind of proof that jet fuel was responsible.

JimC, are you suggesting that with the rather small time window of the jet fuel fires and its temporarily brief exposure to the "exposed" structural elements, that it was just enough to compromise the integrity of the building?

"USA Today and Navy Times are both part of the Gannett family of news outlets. Gannett also publishes Air Force Times, Army Times, Marine Corp Times, Armed Forces Journal, Military Market, Military City, and Defense News. In other words, it's just your typical independent, civilian media organization.

Having established that, let's now take a look at who our group of mystery witnesses are (or who they were at the time of the Pentagon attack):

Other "eyewitnesses"...

Bob Dubill was the executive editor for USA Today.

Mary Ann Owens was a journalist for Gannett.

Richard Benedetto was a reporter for USA Today.

Christopher Munsey was a reporter for Navy Times.

Vin Narayanan was a reporter for USA Today.

Joel Sucherman was a multimedia editor for USA Today.

Mike Walter was a reporter for USA Today.

Steve Anderson was the director of communications for USA Today.

Fred Gaskins was the national editor for USA Today.

Mark Faram was a reporter for Navy Times."

eternal gratitude to 'merc_the_perp' for his relentless search for truth.

Originally posted by JIMC5499

The main arguement that I have seen here is that the fire couldn't possibly have weakened the structure enough for it to collapse. Well the photos of the beams in the story I posted disprove that.

You guys are so dumb you can't even understand the point of the Windsor building.
(I'll happily take a warn for that *shrugs*)

One second you say the fires were enough to weaken the steel to collapse, but when faced with obvious contradictions to that theory all of a sudden you want to throw the plane into the mix. Where is the plane impact in your bridge?

Obviously the planes didn't cause the collapse, and obviously the fires didn't either.
Both have been proved over and over again, except you disinfo agents want to keep arguing in circles siting stuff from news agents known to be under the control of the gov/military. Where is the independent research that proves your point? You're not gonna buy me with USA Today...

The one thing, among others, that convince me there had to be explosives of some kind was the way WTC 2 began to topple and then change it's mind and fall straight down with no resistance whatsoever from lower undamaged floors. None of what you guys say or quote has answered that physical anomaly.
I asked this before and it went ignored, what do you understand about inertia? Without pointing me to a government sponsored link, I want to know what YOU understand about physics, not what you can read and spin.

[edit on 7/11/2006 by ANOK]

Originally posted by JIMC5499

Originally posted by denythestatusquo
If your logic is correct then that bridge would have fallen down on the highway below it and the picture would show that. But there is no parallel with what happened at the WTC at all.

If a gasoline fire can cause that huge I-beam to warp that badly, then how come it is so hard to believe that a jet fuel fire can't do the same to the smaller I-beams in the WTC tower's structure?

Okay you have a point. But then the way the towers came down then does not reflect the reality of the story they are telling us then... right? I mean the building would tip over before collapsing in on itself then if we agree on the metal warping instead of melting or disintegrating.

OP look into controlled demolitions. the wtc collapse fits every pattern of a controlled demolition albiet on a magnitude never seen before. The fires would have had to burn for weeks and planes would have had to been crashed into the basement.

Controlled demolitions throw up an incredible amount of dust because all the different building materials being blasted. And on top of that controlled demolitions put the building in it's basement which is exactly what happened except for all the material that was blasted outward.

All this is covered in 911 mysteries (google video) and it proves beyond reasonable doubt that explosives were used. A LARGE amount of explosives. They're still finding bone fragments on rooftops that aren't even part of the complex five years later. Only one kind of kinetic force is capable of that. 911 mysteries

[edit on 8-11-2006 by soundaddicted]

Hey JIMbo,

Wheres the thousands of gallons of molten metal in the foundation of the bridge?

One thing that I distinctly remember about 9-11 is of the people that had came out of the elevators on fire. This tells me that not only did the jet fuel start fires on the effected floors, it also spread to other floors. The jet fuel had went down the elevator shafts on fire, therefore it set the whole core of both buildings ablaze.

Originally posted by gimmefootball400
One thing that I distinctly remember about 9-11 is of the people that had came out of the elevators on fire. This tells me that not only did the jet fuel start fires on the effected floors, it also spread to other floors. The jet fuel had went down the elevator shafts on fire, therefore it set the whole core of both buildings ablaze.

so you're saying that because the elevator shafts were on fire, the core was so hot that they failed to hold the building? a fire doesn't mean that it's blazing hot and if it was hot enough it would take maybe a few hours or more to bring down the whole building like it did,and remember that some of the fuel was consumed on impact and the planes were not to the maximum capacity of fuel, some of it was consumed on the journey to the towers.

Well i have to say that it is an interesting find of the original poster.

Steel can bend in these heavy fires.

There is only one point concerning this bridge and the WTC buildings.
The fire in the WTC buildings was not as hot as you mmostly hear.
Maybe in the first beginning it was quite hot but not much later we saw people standing in the openings of the building.
This is why we know it was noot so hot anymore shortly after the crashes.
The fact that people could stand in these gaps with all their hair still visualy on htem shows that the heat must have left the buildings quite quickly.
The steel didnt seemed that bend at that point, atleast not visible.

The other point is that melting steel is kind of erratic in its movement, so two steel buildings melting in almost exact teh sme way is strange.

But wat is most strange is that the steel bended after we know that the heat was gone for quite long allready.

Poeple could not have standed so close by these so called melting beams.
Have you aver tried to get close to melting steel yourself?
Your hair will catch fire in no time

Originally posted by gimmefootball400
One thing that I distinctly remember about 9-11 is of the people that had came out of the elevators on fire. This tells me that not only did the jet fuel start fires on the effected floors, it also spread to other floors. The jet fuel had went down the elevator shafts on fire, therefore it set the whole core of both buildings ablaze.

Conjecture.

did you know that most elevators were divided into 3 segments? that's what the sky lobbies were for, only maintainance elevators went all the way through, but these were not open to the public.

in other words, people being injured (especially burnt) on sub level floors are a tell-tale sign of manipulation, like it or not, failure of a few floors higher up will not destroy the entire building, there was little to no deformation before the collapses, but the bridge used as an example showed plenty of warping. ignore the evidence at your own peril.

Originally posted by gimmefootball400
One thing that I distinctly remember about 9-11 is of the people that had came out of the elevators on fire. This tells me that not only did the jet fuel start fires on the effected floors, it also spread to other floors. The jet fuel had went down the elevator shafts on fire, therefore it set the whole core of both buildings ablaze.

Please, stop. Our senses can only take so much. The stairs used by the survivors were in the cores. The whole core of neither building was "set ablaze".

Check out this short video,this guy says the wtc buildings could probably withstand mutiple impacts from planesvideo he was the construction manager for the wtc buildings also since the towers were built to "sway" in high winds would'nt that absorb much of the impact energy?

[edit on 8-11-2006 by crowpruitt]

JIMC4599,


I agree wholly and totally with Vallhall (as well as most other people in this thread) ,
THere is no way that , that fire would have compromised the structual integrity of the towers so much that it would cause them to pancake in on themselves the way they did, and i have never heard of mere fire spewing pyroclastic clouds through a massive area like it did either, Trully i think that you should go through and find out some facts before shooting off such sensitive matter such as this .
Your not one of those hologram people are you ??
lol. seriously though all viewpoints are respected here but i think that it is a wise move to do some research on the subject before you go making statements. just a neutral thought.

I would recommend having a look at some of the other wwc threads on ATS what you will read and learn will be amazing , have a look at the video on the main page too,
it trully is fascinating .




Omega

[edit on 8/11/2006 by Omega85]

JimC, can we count you to the list of USA today employees?

Or are you just ignorant?

[edit on 8-11-2006 by buddhaLight]