How to Collapse Without Explosives

reply to post by NWOwned


I assume that the core is kind of like the spine of the building and has slightly stronger connections than the exterior. Also, stuff did collapse internally. There is proof from the spurs of dust and debris on the tower's way down. There was major destruction going on internally before it was externally destroying itself a few floors above to the naked eye.

Originally posted by Varemia
reply to post by NWOwned

 

I assume that the core is kind of like the spine of the building and has slightly stronger connections than the exterior. Also, stuff did collapse internally. There is proof from the spurs of dust and debris on the tower's way down. There was major destruction going on internally before it was externally destroying itself a few floors above to the naked eye.

Right. On the spine idea we agree and this is what I was discussing in my previous post.

You bring up a few things I haven't thought about too which relates to that.

One being the pulling in.

Why is it "pulling in" you see? Because it's sagging and connected to the much stronger spine on one end of the truss and the slightly weaker mesh on the other? Really? So the core is strong enough to assist in the "pulling in" and is the strongest part (this "spine") of the building but in the videos we only see exterior ejecting of material and NO SPINE AT ALL!

Right?

So something that doesn't even appear to be there is pulling the exterior walls in?! You follow?

So it's strong enough to pull in the exterior due to sagging yet not strong enough to have been there to be filmed as the building fell?

And after the first tower fell, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that the second one would, and so, with all the news choppers in the area, how come we have no top down angled footage of the interior of the second collapse as it fell?

Are all the collapse videos from below the descending wave of destruction? Interesting.

There's no core shown in the collapse videos and yet we agree the core is like the spine and is probably the strongest part of the towers?! Why is there no evidence or nothing left AT ALL of the strongest part of the towers? Either while it's falling or after?

I imagine 'pancaking' happening in buildings with whole floors and no central 'spine'. I can see, therefore, the terminology changing from the earlier 'pancaking' idea to the idea and terminology of "collapsing", but I don't necessarily think that's the end of the term and idea changes...

Cheers

Originally posted by NWOwned

Why is it "pulling in" you see? Because it's sagging and connected to the much stronger spine on one end of the truss and the slightly weaker mesh on the other? Really? So the core is strong enough to assist in the "pulling in" and is the strongest part (this "spine") of the building but in the videos we only see exterior ejecting of material and NO SPINE AT ALL!

Well, it technically doesn't have to be pulling in just on one side. There is always the possibility that the floor's weight was sagging it, and it was tugging on both the exterior and the core.

And after the first tower fell, it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that the second one would, and so, with all the news choppers in the area, how come we have no top down angled footage of the interior of the second collapse as it fell?

This one is because of the smoke. It would be highly dangerous to fly a helicopter into a cloud of smoke or near enough for wind to change slightly and engulf a helicopter.

Are all the collapse videos from below the descending wave of destruction? Interesting.

There is one with a helicopter viewing a collapse, but I can't find it on my initial searches on youtube, so I'll just leave it to my word that a video of it exists.

There's no core shown in the collapse videos and yet we agree the core is like the spine and is probably the strongest part of the towers?! Why is there no evidence or nothing left AT ALL of the strongest part of the towers? Either while it's falling or after?

There was, refer to my lower comments. Judy Wood loves to use the falling of the highly damaged core section to say that things disintegrated, because she has never tried putting a bunch of loose dust on something and dropped it.

I imagine 'pancaking' happening in buildings with whole floors and no central 'spine'. I can see, therefore, the terminology changing from the earlier 'pancaking' idea to the idea and terminology of "collapsing", but I don't necessarily think that's the end of the term and idea changes...

Well, pancaking in and of itself has been rejected as the theory of why the towers collapsed. It was more like a partial pancaking with unconsolidated gravity-driven collapsing the rest of the time (to my knowledge). There are in fact videos where the cleanup crew was commenting about there being multiple floors compressed into each-other, so there was at the very least some pancaking.

Then you have the second collapse, which left part of the core standing, the rest having been ripped and sheared away on the collapse down. That's evidence right there that the core was in-fact there and was offering support that just wasn't strong enough horizontally to resist high vertical stress.

Originally posted by Varemia
reply to post by NWOwned

 

I assume that the core is kind of like the spine of the building and has slightly stronger connections than the exterior. Also, stuff did collapse internally. There is proof from the spurs of dust and debris on the tower's way down. There was major destruction going on internally before it was externally destroying itself a few floors above to the naked eye.

Oh yeah, ASSUME!

There isn't any other bone between the bottom of you rib cage and your pelvis so what percentage of your upper body weight must be supported by your spine?

The NIST report says the core supported 53% and the perimeter supported 47% so what does that say about your ASSUMPTION?

NINE YEARS and we can't get simple stuff resolved. Too many people talking BS. So people either don't know what they are talking about and don't want to know. Or they know but are deliberately keeping the water muddy.

psik

Some interesting quotes from before 9-11...

“The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure. The preliminary calculations alone cover 1, 200 pages and involve over 100 detailed drawings… The building as designed is sixteen times stiffer than a conventional structure. The design concept is so sound that the structural engineer has been able to be ultra-conservative in his design without adversely affecting the economics of the structure.”[3]

According to calculations made by the engineers who helped with the design of the Twin Towers, “all the columns on one side of a Tower could be cut, as well as the two corners and some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind.”[5] As well, “Live loads on these columns can be increased more than 2,000% before failure occurs.”[6]

“The Office of Special Planning (OSP), a unit set up by the New York Port Authority to assess the security of its facilities against terrorist attacks, spends four to six months studying the World Trade Center. It examines the center’s design through looking at photographs, blueprints, and plans. It brings in experts such as the builders of the center, plus experts in sabotage and explosives, and has them walk through the WTC to identify any areas of vulnerability…”O’Sullivan consults ‘one of the trade center’s original structural engineers, Les Robertson, on whether the towers would collapse because of a bomb or a collision with a slow-moving airplane.’ He is told there is ‘little likelihood of a collapse no matter how the building was attacked."[7]

“looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side… A previous analysis carried out early in 1964, calculated that the towers would handle the impact of a 707 traveling at 600 mph without collapsing.”[8] John Skilling

“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed… The building structure would still be there.”[14] John Skilling

“The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC 8) traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.”[17]

“Leslie Robertson, one of the two original structural engineers for the World Trade Center, is asked at a conference in Frankfurt, Germany what he had done to protect the twin towers from terrorist attacks. He replies, ‘I designed it for a 707 to smash into it,’ though does not elaborate further.”[23]

Also according to Robertson, the WTC towers were “in fact the first structures outside the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airplane.”[24]

“The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it. That was the largest plane at the time. I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door—this intense grid—and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting.”[25] Frank A. Demartini

“Skilling—a recognized expert in tall buildings—doesn't think a single 200-pound car bomb would topple or do major structural damage to a Trade Center tower. The supporting columns are closely spaced and even if several were disabled, the others would carry the load. ‘However,’ he added, ‘I'm not saying that properly applied explosives—shaped explosives—of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage.’ Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down. ‘I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.’”[22]

reply to post by Varemia


How does a sagging truss do ANY pulling?

If the truss is sagging from its own weight, due to it becoming malleable from heat, how is it going to exert any force on the stronger columns it's attached to?

But regardless, NIST reported that the highest recorded temperatures of the jet fuel fires from the WTC were not even enough to weaken the steel.

C. Analysis of steel

* Most of the steel evidence destroyed
o Tomasetti decision (Thornton's partner)
o 236 samples saved for testing (0.3%)
* NIST tests
o Paint tests indicated low steel temps (480 F) "despite pre-collapse exposure to fire"
o Microstructure tests showed no steel reached critical (half-strength) values (600 C)

Originally posted by ANOK
reply to post by Varemia

 

How does a sagging truss do ANY pulling?

If the truss is sagging from its own weight, due to it becoming malleable from heat, how is it going to exert any force on the stronger columns it's attached to?

But regardless, NIST reported that the highest recorded temperatures of the jet fuel fires from the WTC were not even enough to weaken the steel.

C. Analysis of steel

* Most of the steel evidence destroyed
o Tomasetti decision (Thornton's partner)
o 236 samples saved for testing (0.3%)
* NIST tests
o Paint tests indicated low steel temps (480 F) "despite pre-collapse exposure to fire"
o Microstructure tests showed no steel reached critical (half-strength) values (600 C)

How about damaged connections after all the trusses were bolted to short pieces of angle



What about the simple fact each floor had between 700-800 tons of concrete do YOU not think that would exert some force!

Do you have a link to the NIST test because they have been questioned on here and different info given!

Originally posted by wmd_2008
How about damaged connections after all the trusses were bolted to short pieces of angle

That is not going to cause the trusses to pull in the columns they were attached to.

What about the simple fact each floor had between 700-800 tons of concrete do YOU not think that would exert some force!

The buildings were designed to hold that weight many times over. No extra weight was added. The weight of the floors would cause the trusses to sag more, but it isn't putting any more force on the outer columns they didn't already hold. Remember the trusses are SAGGING due malleability from heat, how can they sag and exert a force to the columns they're attached to? Even if there were extra force acting on the trusses it would just simply cause them to sag more.

But even IF the trusses did pull in columns, it could not have caused a complete collapse of the building. Newtons laws of motion proves that when the floors impacted, (seeing as they were all destroyed, no floors were left post collapse, and they were of more or less equal mass), the forces on the impacting, and impacted floors, are the same (equal/opposite reaction), so both impacting, and impacted, floors would have been destroyed as they impacted each other, and the collapse should have stopped before it was complete as the upper block would have ran out of floors before the bottom section did.

And we know floors were being destroyed because of all the concrete dust, and lack of floors in the footprint post collapse (as Bazants paper requires to work btw).

I didn't include the mechanical floors to ease confusion, but they were reinforced and would have resisted the collapse even more than the regular floors did.

Do you have a link to the NIST test because they have been questioned on here and different info given!

Not on me, do you?

reply to post by ANOK


If truss connections are damage more load is taken by other ones would it not, also as we can never KNOW how bad the damage was in there we can only look and reason at what could have happened.

Have said this before HOW MUCH of that dust was sheetrock!!!!!!

Originally posted by ANOK


How does a sagging truss do ANY pulling?

If the truss is sagging from its own weight, due to it becoming malleable from heat, how is it going to exert any force on the stronger columns it's attached to?

But regardless, NIST reported that the highest recorded temperatures of the jet fuel fires from the WTC were not even enough to weaken the steel.

Oh my freakin... are you really this dense?! It's not the sagging truss doing the pulling; it's the weight on the truss pushing it down while it is weakened by the fire. Then, the weight pulls the sides in. Go ahead, prove the physics yourself by attaching a string to two different objects and making it taut. When you push down almost anywhere on the string, it shortens the distance between the two and creates a pulling effect on one side or both depending on the resistance offered. You are practically saying that the steel GAINED mass as it sagged. That's a violation of the laws of physics.

Ok, your quote says this:

C. Analysis of steel

* Most of the steel evidence destroyed
o Tomasetti decision (Thornton's partner)
o 236 samples saved for testing (0.3%)
* NIST tests
o Paint tests indicated low steel temps (480 F) "despite pre-collapse exposure to fire"
o Microstructure tests showed no steel reached critical (half-strength) values (600 C)

That indicates that the steel DID lose strength, just not the critical loss. The damage and such obviously plays in here.