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ARCHITECT Magazine
The Magzine of the American Institute of Architects
All of Gage’s so-called evidence has been rebutted in peer-reviewed papers, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, by the American Society of Civil Engineers, by the 9/11 Commission Report, and, perhaps most memorably, by the 110-year-old engineering journal Popular Mechanics.
29 Structural/Civil Engineers
Cite Evidence for Controlled
Explosive Demolition in
Destruction of All 3 WTC
High-Rises on 9/11
More than 700 architects and engineers
have joined call for new investigation,
faulting official reports
AE911Truth.org website are staggering,” says
founding member Richard Gage, AIA. “We therefore
invite all Americans to examine the science-based
forensic evidence very carefully and come to their own
conclusions.”
Lomba’s conclusion, drawn from his initial
perceptions and validated by subsequent
developments, is clear: “Even if, for the sake of
discussion, we accept the hypothesis that the fire
protection was damaged and the fires somehow
weakened the steel frames, that still does not explain
the relatively concentric nature of the failures.” Scott
challenges his fellow structural engineers: “The
building performance on 9/11 matched controlled
demolition. It does not match fire-induced collapse.
We have the expertise to discern this. Do we have the
courage to broadcast it?”
Civil & Structural Engineers on WTC Collapse
"The aircraft moved through the building as if it were a hot and fast lava flow," Sozen says. "Consequently, much of the fireproofing insulation was ripped off the structure. Even if all of the columns and girders had survived the impact - an unlikely event - the structure would fail as the result of a buckling of the columns. The heat from an ordinary office fire would suffice to soften and weaken the unprotected steel. Evaluation of the effects of the fire on the core column structure, with the insulation removed by the impact, showed that collapse would follow whatever the number of columns cut at the time of the impact."
There are 120,000 members of ASME(American Society of Mechanical Engineers) who do not question the NIST report. There are also 370,000 members of IEEE(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) who do not question the NIST report. There are also 40,000 members of AIChE(American Institute of Chemical Engineers) who do not question the NIST Report. There are also 35,000 members of AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) who do not question the NIST report.
Towers Weakened by Planes; Brought Down by Fire
Only a handful of architects and engineers question the NIST Report, but they have never come up with an alternative. Although at first blush it may seem impressive that these people don't believe the NIST Report, remember that there are123,000 members of ASCE(American Society of Civil Engineers) who do not question the NIST Report. There are also 80,000 members of AIA(American Institute of Architects) who do not question the NIST Report.
Why the World Trade Center Buildings Collapsed: A Fire Chief ’s Assessment
Bearing walls and Open floor design
When the jet liners crashed into the towers based upon knowledge of the tower construction and high-rise firefighting experience the following happened: First the plane broke through the tubular steel-bearing wall. This started the building failure. Next the exploding, disintegrating, 185-ton jet plane slid across an open office floor area and severed many of the steel interior columns in the center core area. Plane parts also crashed through the plasterboard-enclosed stairways, cutting off the exits from the upper floors.
The jet collapsed the ceilings and scraped most of the spray-on fire retarding asbestos from the steel trusses. The steel truss floor supports probably started to fail quickly from the flames and thecenter steel supporting columns severed by plane parts heated by the flames began to buckle, sag, warp and fail. Then the top part of the tower crashed down on the lower portion of the structure. This pancake collapse triggered the entire cascading collapse of the 110-story structure.
Did experts on the scene think WTC 7 was a controlled demolition?
Whom should we ask to find out if WTC 7’s collapse resembled an explosive demolition? How about asking the explosive demolition experts who were on the scene on 9/11? Brent Blanchard of Protec:
"Several demolition teams had reached Ground Zero by 3:00 pm on 9/11, and these individuals witnessed the collapse of WTC 7 from within a few hundred feet of the event. We have spoken with several who possess extensive experience in explosive demolition, and all reported seeing or hearing nothing to indicate an explosive detonation precipitating the collapse.
As one eyewitness told us, "We were all standing around helpless...we knew full well it was going to collapse. Everyone there knew. You gotta remember there was a lot of confusion and we didn't know if another plane was coming...but I never heard explosions like demo charges.
WTC Pre-Collapse Bowing Debunks 9/11 "Controlled Demolition" Theory
Indications of the Imminent Collapse of the World Trade Center Buildings Disprove Explosives Theory
NYC Police Saw Sign of Tower Collapse, Study Says (Update2)
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Federal engineering investigators studying the destruction of the World Trade Center's twin towers on Sept. 11 said New York Police Department aviation units reported an inward bowing of the buildings' columns in the minutes before they collapsed, a signal they were about to fall.
The World Trade Center's Steel Structure Was Buckling Before the Collapse
Police, Firemen and Civilians Saw Warning Signs of Collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001
The Structural Engineering Community Rejects the Controlled-Demolition Conspiracy Theory
The structural engineering community rejects the controlled-demolition conspiracy theory. Its consensus is that the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings was a fire-induced, gravity-driven collapse, an explanation that does not involve the use of explosives.
The American Society of Civil Engineers Structural Engineering Institute issued a statement calling for further discussion of NIST's recommendations, and Britain's Institution of Structural Engineers published a statement in May 2002 welcoming the FEMA report, noting
The structural engineering faculty at the university issued a statement which said that they "do not support the hypotheses of Professor Jones". On September 22, 2005, Jones gave a seminar on his hypotheses to a group of his colleagues from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at BYU. According to Jones, all but one of his colleagues agreed after the seminar that an investigation was in order and the lone dissenter came to agreement with Jones' suggestions the next day.
Northwestern University Professor of Civil Engineering Zdeněk Bažant, who was the first to offer a published peer-reviewed theory of the collapses, wrote "a few outsiders claiming a conspiracy with planted explosives" as an exception. Bažant and Verdure trace such "strange ideas" to a "mistaken impression" that safety margins in design would make the collapses impossible. One of the effects of a more detailed modeling of the progressive collapse, they say, could be to "dispel the myth of planted explosives".
Thomas Eagar, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also dismissed the controlled-demolition conspiracy theory. Eagar remarked, "These people (in the 9/11 truth movement) use the 'reverse scientific method.' They determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion."
Civil & Structural Engineers on WTC Collapse
"The aircraft moved through the building as if it were a hot and fast lava flow," Sozen says. "Consequently, much of the fireproofing insulation was ripped off the structure. Even if all of the columns and girders had survived the impact - an unlikely event - the structure would fail as the result of a buckling of the columns. The heat from an ordinary office fire would suffice to soften and weaken the unprotected steel. Evaluation of the effects of the fire on the core column structure, with the insulation removed by the impact, showed that collapse would follow whatever the number of columns cut at the time of the impact."
WTC 7’s “Collapse” Displayed Features
Never Seen Outside of Controlled Demolition
Key Facts Are Admitted By Government Scientists, After A Period
Of Public Comment, Yet They Refuse To Change Their Conclusion. In
every respect for which we have evidence one way or the other, the destruction
of WTC7 was indistinguishable from a classic controlled demolition.
Speed of Collapse
WTC7 descended at free-fall acceleration over 2 seconds for a distance of
over 100 feet – at least eight stories.
NIST Withheld Crucial Evidence
Had officials taken all the relevant evidence into account and provided
a superficially coherent explanation, it would at least make sense to
entertain the idea that, 1) fire might have acted in ways that it had never
acted before, 2) modern structural steel might have acted in ways that it
had never acted before, and 3) that this all just happened to occur on a day
when terrorists did something they had never done before. Yet, officials have
not taken all the relevant evidence into account and they have not provided
even a superficially coherent explanation.
Prior to the NIST investigation, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, had conducted a preliminary, cursory, underfunded
investigation and produced a Building Performance
Assessment Report. In Appendix C of that report,
FEMA described steel samples from Building 7 that had
undergone a “high temperature corrosion attack” that had
turned a heavy steel flange “into Swiss cheese.” They found
“evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack
on the steel, including rapid oxidation and sulfidation with
subsequent intergranular melting….”
FEMA’s metallographic analysis showed that the steel
had not only melted but some of it had even “evaporated”.
“A liquid eutectic mixture containing primarily iron,
oxygen, and sulfur formed during this hot corrosion attack
on the steel.”... “No clear explanation for the source of
the sulfur has been identified.” The New York Times called this “perhaps the
deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation.” What did NIST say about
this mystery described by FEMA? They did not
mention it.
Neither jet fuel nor office fires can reach
anywhere close to steel’s melting point, much less
its boiling point, even if those critical temperatures
had been lowered by the presence of free sulfur.
So what could have caused this “high temperature
corrosion attack”?
Thermite is a mixture of powdered iron oxide
and elemental aluminum which, when ignited, reacts violently at 4000-4500° F. – well
above iron’s melting point of 2800° F,
producing aluminum oxide and molten
iron in a very dangerous, volcaniceruption-like
display. When free sulfur
is added to the mixture, the iron melts
at a lower temperature. Thermite with
sulfur added is called
thermate. Structural steel
in contact with ignited
thermate also melts at
a lower temperature.
Contrary to what NIST
and others have claimed,
the sulfur could not
have come from gypsum
wallboard in which it is an
inert, chemically “locked”
ingredient. (FEMA
metallurgists would have
proposed that explanation
themselves if it were
within the realm of possibility.)
“A High Temperature Corrosion Attack” and Molten Iron/Steel: Undeniable Evidence of Thermitic Incendiaries
Introduction
The scientific paper Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe conclusively shows the presence of unignited aluminothermic explosives in dust samples from the Twin Towers, whose chemical signature matches previously documented aluminothermic residues found in the same dust samples. The present review of the paper and related research is intended to summarize those findings for the non-technical reader. To that end, I first provide a short introduction to the subject of aluminothermic explosives, then outline the methods and results of analysis of the dust samples, and finally explore the significance of these findings.
The scientific paper Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe conclusively shows the presence of unignited aluminothermic explosives in dust samples from the Twin Towers, whose chemical signature matches previously documented aluminothermic residues found in the same dust samples.
Thermite is a mixture of powdered iron oxide
and elemental aluminum which, when ignited, reacts violently at 4000-4500° F. – well
Other than the video, NIST left us with only some vague statements about a few sagging floors suddenly destroying two hundred super-strong perimeter columns and forty core columns. But since sagging floors do not weigh more than non-sagging floors, it is difficult to see how this might occur, especially so uniformly. NIST claimed the perimeter columns saw increased loads of between 0 and 25% due to the damage, but it never reconciled this with the original claim that these columns could resist 2000% increases in live load. And the outward-buckling theory, suggested by Thornton, was changed again to inward buckling---apparently the forces involved were never well defined. Additionally, NIST suggested that the documents that would support testing of the steel components, along with documents containing Skilling's jet-fuel-fire analysis, could not be found.26
Ultimately, NIST failed to give any explanation for the dynamics of the towers as they fell, about how and why they dropped like rocks in free-fall. For both buildings, NIST simply stated that "once the upper building section began to move downwards . . ., global collapse ensued," as if just saying so was enough.27 As for WTC7, NIST as of yet has not elaborated on its "working collapse hypothesis," which was vaguely presented in June 2004.28 The bottom line is that, after more than four years, it is still impossible for the government even to begin to explain the primary events that drive this War on Terrorism.
The bottom line is that, after more than four years, it is still impossible for the government even to begin to explain the primary events that drive this War on Terrorism.
The NIST investigation of the WTC building failures was extensive, but NIST did not substantiate its conclusions
experimentally. On the contrary, many of NIST’s tests contradicted its conclusions. Furthermore, there are several
examples in which NIST chose to manipulate input data, and then certify its findings based upon the inevitable
conclusions that derive from the manipulated input. One finds little acknowledgement on the part of NIST that
uncertainties in its simulations translate into uncertainties in its findings.
NIST’s physical tests were inadequate. Their ASTM E119 tests and their workstation burn tests were improperly
modeled. Further, the former produced results that contradicted NIST’s conclusions and the latter fell far short of
testing the performance of realistic steel members in the actual fire conditions. The workstation burn tests showed
that the temperatures were generally too low, especially in the ventilation-controlled WTC environments. The
ASTM E119 tests showed that the WTC floor trusses should have easily withstood the fires they experienced on
9/11.
There were also flaws in NIST’s computer simulations, including its impact simulation, its fire loading simulation,
its temperature mapping simulation, its thermal/structural component simulations, and its global simulation. The
LS-DYNA simulation showed that the aircraft would have done much less damage than NIST assumes, and NIST’s
subsequent “scenario pruning” was confused and unsubstantiated. The decision to exclude the hat truss from the
structural/thermal response simulations was a significant omission. The sequence of failed truss seats leading to
pull-in forces on the exterior columns is central to NIST’s theory but not explained or supported by simulation.
This paper will conclude that the findings of the NIST investigation, although not necessarily incorrect, are not
inherently linked to the reality of the failure mechanisms that took place in WTC buildings 1 and 2. The author calls
on NIST to explain the discrepancies in its reports, admit the level of uncertainty in its findings, broaden the scope
of its investigation, and make its raw data available to other researchers.
When NIST encountered the sticky problem of how to explain the various facets of the collapse of the WTC Towers which did not fit their pre-ordained conclusion they must have been overjoyed to come across a hastily written paper by Dr. Bazant which purported to show, in a theoretical manner, that once started, the tower collapse would inevitably progress to ground level.
Dressed up a little to remove the obvious shortcoming that it talked of the columns reaching temps of 800 C the paper could be presented in NIST's final report in place of what should have been there - a comprehensive examination of all of the evidence which could be gleaned from the collapse and the debris field. When it all comes on top NIST can stand back and point at Dr. Bazant as the reason for their failure to study the collapse. It was he after all who assured them that collapse was inevitable.
But NIST's attempts to hide behind this theoretical paper, hampered as they were by the large hole at its centre, are now under threat by Dr. Bazant's latest attempts to bolster his ailing theory. Moving from the previously safe haven of his theoretical world he now moves into the real world of physical observations of the events of the day. But the harsh light of reality easily shines through the still retained security blanket of mathematical formulae to reveal this theory's true nudity.
Did it never occur to him ask why NIST avoided like a plaque, any detailed mention of the collapse process?
Continued after the jump...
Perhaps he should be congratulated for moving the debate away from what to some is an incomprehensible sea of mathematical formulae and back into the physical world where anyone can see and understand the evidence. His motive in doing so, protection of his theory, is also understandable.
But the fundamental problem with his theory remains that it is a physical impossibility. He assumes that all of the energy of the upper section will be somehow transferred to act only on the uppermost storey of the lower section. He ignores the fact that in order for the energy to even reach that storey, it must be transferred through every column in the storeys of the upper section. For his theory that the energy would concentrate in and overcome the columns sequentially down the tower to be correct, the columns of the upper section would have to transfer loads sufficient to cause failure to the stronger, less damaged and less thermally affected columns of the lower section, without themselves absorbing any energy whatsoever.
With increasing awareness of the shortcomings of his theory, Dr. Bazant, has selected a single piece of physical evidence and now holds it up to fend off the criticism. NIST could not have asked for a more staunch defender. But the physical world is a dangerous place for a flawed theory.
A theory must fit all of the evidence and a cursory glance at the sequence of the collapse of the towers shows evidence that completely contradicts his argument.
Dr. Bazant has not amalgamated all of the evidence into his theoretical argument. It is of no use to simply select a single piece of physical evidence and crowbar that into position in a flawed theory. All of the available evidence must be accounted for within a cogent, detailed, meaningful collapse scenario.
It is difficult to accept that the twin towers were demolished by means other than the aircraft impact and subsequent fires, especially so when acceptance also means the abandonment of a strongly held belief with which one has become associated. But that is where the growing evidence is inevitably leading. This brief run through of the various facets of the collapse shows that the official story lags a long way behind the current knowledge even when limiting the examination to the mechanical aspects of the collapse. Many other areas of research are throwing up questions for which the official story not only has no answers, but far more importantly, refuses to even acknowledge the questions.
Report chronicles the final moments of WTC tragedy
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , NEW YORK
But the fires continued to burn. Black smoke poured from shattered windows on floor after floor, fresh oxygen sucked in from the gaping holes caused by the impacts. In the northeast corner of the building's 80th floor, where office furniture had been shoved by the plane, the fire burned so hot that a stream of molten metal began to pour over the side like a flaming waterfall.
The apparent source of this waterfall: molten aluminum from the airliner's wings and fuselage, which had also piled up in that corner. Within minutes, portions of the 80th floor began to give way, as evidenced by horizontal lines of dust blowing out of the side of the building. Seconds later, near the heavily damaged southeasterly portion of this same floor, close to where the aircraft had entered, exterior columns began to buckle.
Fifty-six minutes and 10 seconds after it was hit, the top of the south building tilted horribly, to the east and then to the south, and initiated the collapse of the entire tower, floor upon floor.
www.taipeitimes.com...
No Scientific Basis for the Conclusion that Explosions Brought Down the Towers
"There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
The report issued by Lamont-Doherty includes various graphs showing the seismic readings produced by the planes crashing into the two towers as well as the later collapse of both buildings. WhatReallyHappened.com chooses to display only one graph (Graph 1), which shows the readings over a 30-minute time span.
On that graph, the 8- and 10-second collapses appear—misleadingly—as a pair of sudden spikes. Lamont-Doherty's 40-second plot of the same data (Graph 2) gives a much more detailed picture: The seismic waves—blue for the South Tower, red for the North Tower—start small and then escalate as the buildings rumble to the ground. Translation: no bombs.
www.popularmechanics.com...
Introduction:
2) Another theory was put forward by Thomas Eager, a professor of materials engineering from MIT. It appeared in JOM, the journal for the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and was also presented in a NOVA interview that many people have seen. The transcript is available online. Eager claims to believe that the Towers were not designed to withstand a fire covering an entire single floor! He doesn't say where he gets this idea, but we know from the comments presented earlier that Skilling certainly DID allow for this possibility.
Because the spilling of the jet fuel may have caused this to happen, Eager suggests that the heat from this type of fire scenario caused the floor slab truss connections ("clips" he calls them) to fail — "unzipping" almost simultaneously around an entire floor — causing a pancaking sequence that also somehow pulled down the vertical support structures.
www.tms.org...
"Pancaking" collapses are sometimes seen in Third World countries where badly designed and poorly reinforced structures with heavy concrete floors are subjected to earthquakes. Modern American buildings (including the WTC Towers) are designed and built according to robust standards and specifications that require structural unification of horizontal and vertical assemblies. This is done specifically to prevent pancaking floor collapses under any circumstances.
Eager also ignores the continuous vertical strength of the core structure and its heavily cross-braced and unified design. Even if some of the floor connections had somehow broken loose, the more heavily built and potentially free-standing column structures would have remained in place. While the floor assemblies interconnected the core with the perimeter columns and added strength and flexibility to the structure as a whole, they were also designed to be as lightweight as possible.
A detailed evaluation of Thomas Eager's analysis can be found here: