Fire not destroying steal? Try these on for size.

So I'm new to the forums. just joined last night, and I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that fire has destroyed "Steel structrues" before...

Eygptian ferry fire. February 5, 2006
www.iklimnet.com...

Close to 1,000 people are feared dead as chances dwindle of finding many more survivors from an aging Egyptian ferry that caught fire and then sank in the middle of the Red Sea.

The slovak cargo ship Polana , Wed 21 Dec 2005
www.iklimnet.com...

Yesterday morning, Polana sank by itself, its hull damaged by high temperatures, Novinar newspaper reported.

The Itallian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in 1994
www.iklimnet.com...

The Achille Lauro is listing by at least 40 degrees and you can still see smoke and flames - the passenger decks on the stern side are burning and flames are licking halfway up the vessel," he said.

The Eygptian steamer 10th of Ramadan, 1983 May 25th
www.iklimnet.com...

caught fire and sank; 357 people died

Indonesian passenger ship "Tamponas II". 1981 January 27th
www.iklimnet.com...

caught fire and sank; 580 people died

Egyptian liner "Patria",1976 December 25th
www.iklimnet.com...

caught fire and sank; 100 people died

British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth, 1972 January 9th
www.iklimnet.com...

caught fire and the blaze swept to the entire vessel, forcing the ship to role over in 43 feet of water

The French passenger ship "Paris", in 1939
www.iklimnet.com...

caught fire and flipped on its side in the shallow harbor waters

Now granted a ship is not a building, however, ships are structures made almost entirely out of steel. There were other incidents of collisions, explosions, and "Completely destroyed" in that website. However since I am only talking about a steel structure failing from fire I only show those listed as sunk. Some of the fires (According to wiki, which I will not link as I feel it is hearsay) lasted only 5 hours, "Blistering the paint of rescue ships" before sinking.

Ways ships are like buildings:
1: Massive size
2: Ventilation systems(Albeit smaller)
3: Asbestoes treated steel.
4: Stairways/elevators
5: Heavy relience on steel.

Specificaly desgined with fires in mind (Ship board fire being the 2nd most deadly incidents aborrd ships) They have several advantages compared to the WTC.

1: Every member of there crew is required, to be trained in fire supression.
2: Sourrounded by water.
3: HAL fire suppresion.
4: LESS ventilation.
5: Much higher rating fire walls.

Lets take a look at WWII specificaly. over 115 American ships were sunk by Japanesse flying planes into ships... Sure some of those planes, like the "baka' were specificaly desgined to make sucide attacks, however the Baka only carried a payload of 2645 lbs worth of explosive, and a 23 mile supply of fuel.

In my mind claiming that no other steel structure has been brought down by fire is deliberatly unturthful. No where on earth have these same conditions occurred (And we pray that they won't again) and claiming that a small fire in a penthouse hasn't brought down a skyskrapper before is disengenious to me.

Sorry for the length of my post, I hope you will read it, and try to see things from my perspective. I know my argument is not flawless, but I hope you realize that yours' is not as well.

You do make a good point for a first post. It absolutely is something to take into consideration. It's new information for me about how fireproofing is impemented on ships.

I expect the counter arguments to address that:

1. Ships are still not buildings.
2. Ships don't have a firm, structural attachment to the ground, so they're easier to "destroy".

reply to post by coldain


You are correct coldain.

Fire weakens steel and it won't hold the load.

The conspiracy nuts will come after you, so I wish you well.

Roper

Originally posted by Roper
You are correct coldain.

Fire weakens steel and it won't hold the load.

In less than an hour?

I will say this is an interesting comparrison but yes, totally different than a steel framed building globally collapsing.

Steel does weaken in fire. I'll give you that. It produces partial collapses or in the case of a ship, an area is weakened and punctures due to water pressure. The ship doesn't just start to collapse upon itself then sink. If that happened, I'd take this with a little more than a grain of salt.

1. Ships are still not buildings.
2. Ships don't have a firm, structural attachment to the ground, so they're easier to "destroy".

Certianly, ships are not buildings, however I would expect some leway here, as I have not claimed they were either in my post, or my title (Which I can't belive I misspelled, not that I don't misspell... but come on its a tittle to a 4k count post...) I have chosen to use the "fire has never destryoed a Steel structure argument". I belive that I have shown fire has indeed destroyed structrues. I would hope no one would argue against a ship being a structure.

2: Ships are eassier to destroy. Well yes and no. First of all if you comprimise the ships ability to remain boyant, obviously it will be destroyed, however take the sinking of the Oriskany for example. There was a wonderful show about the sinking on the history channel (Maybe it was discovery, I've been up for 36 hours now, and am too tried to cite everything i'd like) a while back, you should deffinately Tivo it.

everything2.com...

In the end, the Navy settled on a plan to convert the warship into an artificial reef, a project requiring over three years and $20 million to complete.

I would argue that destroying a building that was 888 feet tall would take far less then 3 years and 20 million to just bring down, Now granted a lot of the cost was ensureing exact placementas they didn't want to block the channel for other vessels. But if you were destroying a building, you would have to truck out all the debris, and I'm willing to bet that cost more then 20 million alone for the WTC clean up.

So if you don't really care how the ship sinks, you just want it gone what do you do? Well you'd find the biggest baddass torpedo you could and explode it under the keel. letting the shockwave rip it in half.

www.upi.com...

The Russian-built and designed Sunburn -- known by the Chinese as the Hai Ying or Sea Eagle HY2 -- in particular is designed to be a U.S. carrier killer. It can fly at Mach 2.5, or two and half times the speed of sound -- around 1,700 miles per hour carrying an almost 500-pound warhead. And it can deliver a tactical nuclear weapon.

Some random guy's blog that sounds like he knows what he's talking about is not the best way to validate your argument I know, but again too tired to go look for the article I'm thinking of.

Now to take out a 900 foot tall building, I'm pretty sure we could do it with less then a tactical nuke, they suppose a super carrier could withstand 3-4 direct torpedo hits, or 4-5 conventional 2k boimb blasts. I would like to see any above ground building survie that.

burning ships usually succumb to firefighting efforts, because putting large amounts of water on board leads to capsize.


excpetions are either lost to internal explosions (especially warships but we don't debate these, do we?) or leaks caused by various forms of damage, to external piping (f-ex. sea cocks), due to warped and subsequently torn external plating, and the simplest of all, lack of damage control, ie. abandoned ship.

once list sets in just one open bullseye will continuously take in large amounts of water until the ship founders or capsizes.

iow, a popped rivet will sink a ship given enough time. it's not that hard to imagine a hundreds of feet long steel construction which is buning hot on top and immersed in water on the bottom to warp to the point where exactly that occurs.

then, it takes hours or days until the ship finally sinks.


to compare this to 9/11's disintigrating buildings is as you put it 'deliberately untruthful', because last time i checked, the sunken wrecks were not scattered around on the seabed in pieces measuring a few inches across, with a few severed I-beams strewn in between save submarines lost at great depth of course, like the Thresher and Scorpion.

why not compare mountains to trees next time? or apples to oranges for that matter?

Originally posted by Long Lance
iow, a popped rivet will sink a ship given enough time. it's not that hard to imagine a hundreds of feet long steel construction which is buning hot on top and immersed in water on the bottom to warp to the point where exactly that occurs.

This is an excellent explanation of what happens. The fire side expands and pops the rivets. In comes the water and the ship sinks. Nothing like a steel framed building at all. Other than saying that steel expands when heat is applied to it.

Fires don't sink ships. The loss of mechanical control and the loss of stability that fires cause sink ships.

As far as I know, no building in the world has sump systems that must be operating, control surfaces that must operate, nor ballast tanks that must be operating properly to keep the building erect.

Just the loss of all power for a long enough time period can sink a ship. Have you ever seen a building collapse because the grid was down too long? I didn't think so.

A ship is a dynamically balanced structure that needs constant refinement to stay above water. Highly trained bridge crews aren't there just in case something goes wrong any more than skilled pilots are in planes just for take-off and landing.

Most of these ship sank only after they listed badly. Ships list when they are unbalanced. Say the fire burns off 1000 gallons of fuel from fuel cells on the left side of the ship. How do you think a floating structure is going to react with something like two less tons on one side? To add to that unbalance, people are naturally going gather themselves on the side of the ship away from the fire!

The whole misguided OP attempts to prove a point to the gullible equivalent to: It is easy to die in a car if you lose engine power because here is a list of fatal plane crashes caused by loss of engine power.

Jon

EDIT: Commas, bold.

[edit on 6.8.2008 by Voxel]

In less than an hour?

I will say this is an interesting comparrison but yes, totally different than a steel framed building globally collapsing.

Steel does weaken in fire. I'll give you that. It produces partial collapses or in the case of a ship, an area is weakened and punctures due to water pressure. The ship doesn't just start to collapse upon itself then sink. If that happened, I'd take this with a little more than a grain of salt.

As for the less then an hour, its very hard to get a large ship to sink in less then an hour. Again the Oriskany which had been preped for 3 years prior to it's demiss took 37 minutes to sink once the charges had been detonated.

(See link above)

As to a fire destroying a ship in a relitive short time frame,

perdurabo10.tripod.com...

The Yarmouth Castle keeled over to port and sank at about 6 a.m., about five hours after the fire was first noticed. It sank in about 1,800 feet of water.

if you wire a ship with explosives and it takes 37 minutes versus a building takeing 1.4 seconds, I'd say a five hour time on a burn would be equivilent to an hour burn time on a building.



Something Else I have seen in my research since this Idea has sprang to my caffeine strung mind, almost all the reports of ships sinking do to fires made it quite clear that the wind was a MAJOR factor in the fire becomeing uncontrolled. I'd have to imagine that it gets pretty windy at 900 on a skyskrapper.

Yes steel structures are compromised by moderate to extreme heat.

Modern steel ships like buildings are hallow shells with bracing supports keeping the whole of the structure together with some flexibililty built in. With a raging fire a large enough count of these cross braces can be compromised to lead to failure. For a ship this would mean losing 1, 2 or more bulkheads depending on design. Since most are double hulled this would also allow the interior shell to heat up also and not be cooled by water as if on a single hull ship. On buildings it usually means 2,3 or more floors compromised and considering the Twins, they held up remarkably well under such tremendous strain.

Fires don't sink ships.

Well I guess we can just throw those SOLAS conventions just out then huh?

Lets see thier prioity of fire prevention...

Chapter I - General Provisions(flag's responsibility blah blah blah. Home gov't is responsible for upholding this treaty)

Chapter II-1 - Construction - Subdivision and stability, machinery and electrical installations (Build a good ship. make it not leak)

Chapter II-2 - Fire protection, fire detection and fire extinction(Don't let it catch on fire)

Hmm apperantly almost every sea going country in the world decided that fire saftey was so important (Even though like you say it's not the reason ships are destroyed) It needs to be right up therein the same chapter as with multiple water tight compartments.

As far as I know, no building in the world has sump systems that must be operating, control surfaces that must operate, nor ballast tanks that must be operating properly to keep the building erect.

Kansai International Airport it has hydrolic rams that continuosly lift the entire terminal building. when originaly built the island settled 13 feet the first year.

Just the loss of all power for a long enough time period can sink a ship. Lots of these ships were lost in shallow berths at port hell some of them went down in less water to cover thier bows, Rough sea's were not the causes listed on the accident reports, all of them had fire listed as the cause of the sinking.

Most of these ship sank only after they listed badly. Ships list when they are unbalanced. Say the fire burns off 1000 gallons of fuel from fuel cells on the left side of the ship. How do you think a floating structure is going to react with something like two less tons on one side? To add to that unbalance, people are naturally going gather themselves on the side of the ship away from the fire!

First the fuel would be closer to 4 tons second it's only a change of 2% on a 160k cruise ship vessel is only around .000025% of it's overall weight, and after comeing to this realization I'm not gonna even bother figuering passengers "Fleeing the severly listing ship now" rushing over to the other side alla the posideon adventure.

The whole misguided OP attempts to prove to the gullible that it is easy to die in a car if you lose engine power because here is a list of fatal plane crashes caused by loss of engine power.

Not at all. The point I am makeing is that steel structures have failed because of fire.and I pointed out ten or so. The saftey reports and accidents reports all list fire as the determining cause of the loss of the ship.

iow, a popped rivet will sink a ship given enough time. it's not that hard to imagine a hundreds of feet long steel construction which is buning hot on top and immersed in water on the bottom to warp to the point where exactly that occurs.

So why is it hard to imagine, that a 1,727' tall mound of tons is struck by a bomb, (I'm useing bomb for the word plane, as the plane i'm fairly certian struck with the force of at least 1 2k bomb) and set on fir 2/3rd's the way up is left to roast for an hour, the steel warping and bending, with a full third of the wieght of the tower above it. (We all know from being little boys and interested in in ninja's and stuff that in order to make a sword you get metal hot and then add the force of a hammer to it...) that it wont pop a rivot? or in this case a support beam. Or a floor joist, dropping double the weight onto the floors below it? and starting the proccess over again?

(Easy experiment, take a beer can put a cinder block on it, take a torch to the beer can and see if it holds up for an hour)

Griff, why didn't you go after coldain, he started this?

Has anyone calculated the tonnage of the buildings above where the planes went in and how much support frame was taken out buy the planes on impact?

Roper

Griff, why didn't you go after coldain, he started this?

It's cause my argument is so fail he's makeing up totaly new fail poster to pu in this thread,.. Thats ok though I'm here to debate. My ideas in this post suggest a problem I see with an arguement, and I attempt to address it in a way I've never seen done before.

Originally posted by coldain
..
Hmm apperantly almost every sea going country in the world decided that fire saftey was so important (Even though like you say it's not the reason ships are destroyed) It needs to be right up therein the same chapter as with multiple water tight compartments.
..

security provisions are usually clustered in one chapter or consecutive chapter, because it does, after all, make indexing and reading them a bit easier. as such, watertight integrity issues and fire preparations should be expected to be grouped loosely together.

Fire does destroy ships and kills passengers and crew in a nasty way. it does not sink them very quickly, though, or very reliably.

it should be noted that every sane captain and crew will fight the fire at nearly any cost until the passengers are safe, at least, using large amounts of seawater. noone will let a ship burn then break out the stopwatch, so you need to take this into acccount.

list results, no counterflooding occurs and that combination sinks ships, even simple waves don't help, because flooding is by its nature cumulative. you said wind stoked the fires? guess what, at sea, wind is accompanied by waves and wind alone causes list, if the superstructure is tall enough, enough to threaten the ship. as late as WW2, warships were lost to typhoons under the wrong circumstances, despite their watertight bulkheads and a crew fighting for their lives. an ocean liner or your average 3rd world ferry will not be as resilent, by far.

buildings can't sink and are therefore irrelevant for comparison. i haven't heard of ships just falling apart due to fire, either, unless they were transporting large amounts of explosives, of course.

PS: you failed to adress my objections regarding sea cocks (coolant water intakes and exhausts) and other external piping. no engine is mounted directly to the frame, it uses elastic mountings. guess how you will connect the piping? through flexible material, which will be consumed by fire, causing a leak deep in the ship. where do fires usually start? the engine room? guess what's next?!

but you already know that, obviously.

[edit on 2008.6.8 by Long Lance]

Originally posted by coldain
So why is it hard to imagine, that a 1,727' tall mound of tons is struck by a bomb, (I'm useing bomb for the word plane, as the plane i'm fairly certian struck with the force of at least 1 2k bomb) and set on fir 2/3rd's the way up is left to roast for an hour, the steel warping and bending, with a full third of the wieght of the tower above it. (We all know from being little boys and interested in in ninja's and stuff that in order to make a sword you get metal hot and then add the force of a hammer to it...) that it wont pop a rivot? or in this case a support beam. Or a floor joist, dropping double the weight onto the floors below it? and starting the proccess over again?

You said it right here. Partial collapses. No one is doubting that fire does damage to steel structures. "They" want you to believe that the full thirds of the top came down all at once. That doesn't fit partial collapses from fire, that fits a form of controlled demolition IMO.

(Easy experiment, take a beer can put a cinder block on it, take a torch to the beer can and see if it holds up for an hour)

Seeing how a beer can is aluminum and we are talking steel here, I have no idea what this would prove?

Originally posted by Roper
Griff, why didn't you go after coldain, he started this?

Just because I may disagree doesn't mean I go after someone. Anyway, I mostly agreed with you. That fire damages steel at high temperatures.

Has anyone calculated the tonnage of the buildings above where the planes went in and how much support frame was taken out buy the planes on impact?

NIST did I believe.

www.tms.org...

It is known that structural steel begins to soften around 425°C and loses about half of its strength at 650°C.4 This is why steel is stress relieved in this temperature range. But even a 50% loss of strength is still insufficient, by itself, to explain the WTC collapse. It was noted above that the wind load controlled the design allowables. The WTC, on this low-wind day, was likely not stressed more than a third of the design allowable, which is roughly one-fifth of the yield strength of the steel. Even with its strength halved, the steel could still support two to three times the stresses imposed by a 650°C fire.

jnocook.net...

A jet fuel fire would produce great quantities of smoke, which would reduce the radiant heat energy entering structural components. According to G. Charles Clifton HERA structural engineer, speaking of the fires in the Towers; In my opinion, based on available evidence, there appears no indication that the fires were as severe as a fully developed multi-story fire in an initially undamaged building would typically be.(Elaboration..., p5)

[edit on 9-6-2008 by ULTIMA1]