Mike Pecoraro's testimony, proof bombs in WTC basement

Originally posted by ThePieMaN
I don't think the C4 coating sounds right..Otherwise why wouldn't the first bomb back in 1991 have triggered a much bigger event.
If so much fuel poured down the elevator shaft that it caused so much damage, why was there still so much up top that it was able to melt the steel ? You'd figure it would have burned off a lot quicker that way if so much had dropped down the elevator shafts.



Pie

The fuel pouring down the shaft is the very reason there most likely was no FAE - the fuel/air ratio was not right.

Originally posted by HowardRoark

The descriptions of the fires and flames in the elevator shafts, the damage to the doors and equipment at the bottom of the shaft are all consistent with the description of the blast effects of a FAE.

When your FAE bomb caused the following:

1) The machine shop in rubble and the 50 ton hydraulic press gone.

2) The parking garage gone.

3) The steel and concrete fire door that weighed about 300 pounds, wrinkled up "like a piece of aluminum foil" and lying on the floor.

4) Elevator doors missing.

5) 20 by 10 foot sections of marble missing from the walls.

6) The revolving doors were all broken.


why wasn't there any remaining jet fuel still on fire in the lobbies?

Originally posted by HowardRoark
So, if you read it, how come you don't understand it?

So have you stopped beating your wife yet?

I do understand it. You don't.

The temperatures of those things are only around 500 C. You can post all the b.s. you want and no sane person is going to believe that caused the damage down there. Right?

So I assume you move on to things like the waves created by such explosions. Well, read your own freaking site. The blast waves don't go very far.

Again, look at the impacts. How much damage did those fireballs do? Knocked out windows and set stuff on fire. Yet they traveled down to the basements and did much more damage? How much sense does that make?

You're really dense if you expect anyone to seriously buy that one Howard.

I tend to stay out of most of the 9/11 conspiracy talk, but I must admit this piece of the puzzle is incredibly intriguing. It seems like the more you look into things around the WTC, the more holes you find.

Anyone else "jet fuel" and "single-bullet theory" sound similar?

Originally posted by bsbray11
The temperatures of those things are only around 500 C. You can post all the b.s. you want and no sane person is going to believe that caused the damage down there. Right?

Almost all organic material in the form of a dust cloud will ignite at temperatures below 500 oC - approximately the same temperature as a newly extinguished match.

That's the ignition temperature, not the temperature of the fireball.

Originally posted by bsbray11
The blast waves don't go very far.

A wide spectrum of flame speeds may result from flame acceleration under various conditions. High flame front speeds and resulting high blast over pressures are seen in accidental vapor cloud explosions where there is a significant amount of confinement and congestion that limits flame front expansion and increases flame turbulence.

I'd say an elevator shaft is pretty confining, wouldn't you?



Something else just occured to me. What would happen to the air flow in the elevator shaft when the plane cut the cables and the elevator cars fell?


[edit on 2-6-2006 by HowardRoark]

Originally posted by diggs

Originally posted by HowardRoark

The descriptions of the fires and flames in the elevator shafts, the damage to the doors and equipment at the bottom of the shaft are all consistent with the description of the blast effects of a FAE.

When your FAE bomb caused the following:

1) The machine shop in rubble and the 50 ton hydraulic press gone.

You never did answer my question. How much do you think a 50-ton hyrdaulic press weighs?

2) The parking garage gone.

The parking garage was not "gone" they later excavated it and the cars in it.

3) The steel and concrete fire door that weighed about 300 pounds, wrinkled up "like a piece of aluminum foil" and lying on the floor

4) Elevator doors missing.

5) 20 by 10 foot sections of marble missing from the walls.

6) The revolving doors were all broken.

Yes, FAE can produce that kind of overpressure, especially in a confined elevator shaft.

why wasn't there any remaining jet fuel still on fire in the lobbies?

Because it was a fuel vapor explosion.



[edit on 2-6-2006 by HowardRoark]

Let me get this straight. The fuel vapor poured down the elevator shaft directly into the basement and lobby right? Thus making an airway from the top to the bottom that was not airtight, right? Well then, how could the air pressure build up so much as to cause the "squibs" running down the building?

I know....the other elevator shafts right? IMO, wrong. The air would be forced down into the path of least resistance...i.e. this new OPEN elevator shaft. You might say that the doors would be closed on certain floors right? Well if this blast wave had enough destructive force behind it, wouldn't it have blown all elevator doors open and not just a select few on the bottom of the building? Or did the vapor wait until it got to the bottom to ignite?

Originally posted by HowardRoark
Something else just occured to me. What would happen to the air flow in the elevator shaft when the plane cut the cables and the elevator cars fell?

What would happen? It would be constricted because the elevators would not "free fall to the basement" as you suggest. Elevators have braking mechanisms built into them in the event of a cable failure. If the plane had cut the cables (highly unlikely as the elevators were part of the concrete and steel core) the elevators would have dropped several floors before the breaking mechanism would have kicked in and stopped the cars, acting like a cork in the neck of a bottle. As well, the elevators in the WTC were staggered. It would have been a physical impossibility for fuel to have travelled down the elevator shafts and find their way to the basement. As someone else mentioned, this is as bad as the magic bullet theory. The jet fuel does some impossible things, like switching elevator banks and zipping around blockages. Also, one more point about the fuel. As soon as the wings ruptured the fuel would have been aerated and turned into a mist that would have immediately exploded. If any had the opportunity to find its way into the elevator shafts it would have burned immediately, not some how managed to snake its way 500-600 feet down a snake of elevator shafts before exploding. That just makes no sense at all.

Originally posted by Griff
Let me get this straight. The fuel vapor poured down the elevator shaft directly into the basement and lobby right? Thus making an airway from the top to the bottom that was not airtight, right? Well then, how could the air pressure build up so much as to cause the "squibs" running down the building?

“Squibs?” Who said anything about squibs?

We are talking about the airplane impact, not the collapse.

But, since you brought it up, how come there was such a long delay between these so-called “basement bombs” going off and the building collapse?

I know....the other elevator shafts right? IMO, wrong. The air would be forced down into the path of least resistance...i.e. this new OPEN elevator shaft. You might say that the doors would be closed on certain floors right? Well if this blast wave had enough destructive force behind it, wouldn't it have blown all elevator doors open and not just a select few on the bottom of the building? Or did the vapor wait until it got to the bottom to ignite?

I do know that the building elevators were being retrofitted with new door safety locks (which, incidentally, were responsible for a number of people being trapped and unable to exit the elevators before the collapses.). Also, you have to consider the effects of the reflection of the blast wave from the bottom of the shaft.

Vapor cloud explosion modeling historically has been subject to large uncertainties resulting from inadequate understanding of deflagrative effects. According to current single-degree of freedom models, blast damage/injury can be represented by Pressure-Impulse (P-I) diagrams, which include the effects of overpressure, dynamic pressure, impulse, and pulse duration. The peak overpressure and duration are used to calculate the impulse from shock waves. Even some advanced explosion models ignore the effects of blast wave reflection off structures, which can produce misleading results over- or under-estimating the vulnerability of a structure.

www.fas.org...

Obviously there are many variables in the WTC case and it would be impossible to say with absolute certainty that things “should” have happened one way or another. However, Like I said before, As far as I am concerned, all of the available evidence points to a fuel air explosion in the elevator shafts.

Originally posted by RockerDom
Anyone else "jet fuel" and "single-bullet theory" sound similar?

Did you go to the source referenced by Diggs in his original post? If you did, you would have noticed that he was rather selective in what he cut and pasted to support his theory.

For instance, if you read the original article you would have seen this:

They had been told to stay where they were and "sit tight" until the Assistant Chief got back to them. By this time, however, the room they were working in began to fill with a white smoke. "We smelled kerosene," Mike recalled, "I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs", referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working.

www.chiefengineer.org...

Originally posted by ThePieMaN
I don't think the C4 coating sounds right..Otherwise why wouldn't the first bomb back in 1991 have triggered a much bigger event.
If so much fuel poured down the elevator shaft that it caused so much damage, why was there still so much up top that it was able to melt the steel ? You'd figure it would have burned off a lot quicker that way if so much had dropped down the elevator shafts.



Pie

Nobody but Christopher believe that the building was built with explosives in place. That is just insane and stupid.

The planes were carying around 10,000 gallons of fuel by some estimates.

Even a couple of hundred gallons of vaporized fuel would be enough to trigger a massive blast.

50 tons is the hydraulic press's rating.

In other words it can press 50 tons maximum.
It's actual weight is probably less than 500#.

In my own small shop, I have a 20 ton rated hydraulic press.
It weighs perhaps 200# and I have no problems moving it around the floor by myself . . . and I'm not as strong as I used to be . . . if I ever was.

A 50 ton rated press is probably adequate to do anything building maintenance would require.

It is common to speak of hydraulic or arbor style presses by their rating and not their weight.

Ah its good to see the fairy tale is still going.

The whole thing about this WTC thing is that it all sides in the debate are right. Their burden and type of proof is different.

There are too many experts and pseudo "surf the web for evidence" experts on all sides. I still believe in my very humble opinion that the WTC events will only really be understood by duplication and that ain't happening.

This ain't bucket and shovel science here. The scale of the physics is immense.
There could be processes going on that only occur in destruction on such a massive scale. The organic material igniting at below 500 c is a case in point. Who knows what contribution this had? It reminds me of the old mill-houses and their explosions due to dust. Get large tin put in some dry flour shake it take lid off insert match "woompf". In certain ratios to air and right conditions materials that you could not light easily by flame will essentially explode.

The size of the structures, the weights involved, who really knows what temperatures, pressures or other destructive forces were present? Fact is we got more chance of understanding the workings of the Sun as it is relatively stable and can be continuously observed. Not so the WTC et al.

Personally I believe a couple of planes hit a few buildings. I have seen nothing to change my mind....pages of internet derived photos, graphics, statements and opinions is not evidence.....IMHO.

Look guys trying not to dis you too much but it is 2006, you are not converting anyone else, a good few years have passed. This will never be resolved to the satisfaction of all. Just get on with your lives, if you don't someone else will

Originally posted by Valhall

The fuel pouring down the shaft is the very reason there most likely was no FAE - the fuel/air ratio was not right.

Why? do you think it was too rich or too lean?

I don't think that the ratio would have been even and consistent thoughout the shaft.

Originally posted by The Iconoclast
The jet fuel does some impossible things, like switching elevator banks and zipping around blockages.

The freight elevator ran the whole length of the building.

Also, one more point about the fuel. As soon as the wings ruptured the fuel would have been aerated and turned into a mist that would have immediately exploded.

Given the speed and momentum of the aircraft impact this would have happened when? on the outside of the building? or on the inside? We are talking about hte first impact here.

If any had the opportunity to find its way into the elevator shafts it would have burned immediately, not some how managed to snake its way 500-600 feet down a snake of elevator shafts before exploding. That just makes no sense at all.

Like I said, the freight elevator shaft ran the whole distance.

Also, I don't beleive that all of the fuel instantly areated. It may have been dispersed into sheets and clouds of liquid droplets, but liquid jet fuel does not burn.

Originally posted by HowardRoark

“Squibs?” Who said anything about squibs?

I did...off topic I know but it still is related to what happened in the basement. If this fuel vapor can reach the basement, then the so called pressurized air could have also. That was my point.

We are talking about the airplane impact, not the collapse.

But, since you brought it up, how come there was such a long delay between these so-called “basement bombs” going off and the building collapse?

Not that I totally believe in the demo theory but, thermite takes time to melt the steel enough for initial collapse.

I do know that the building elevators were being retrofitted with new door safety locks (which, incidentally, were responsible for a number of people being trapped and unable to exit the elevators before the collapses.). Also, you have to consider the effects of the reflection of the blast wave from the bottom of the shaft.

What does that have to do with fuel vapor being able to reach the basement and pressurized air not being able to do the same thing?

Obviously there are many variables in the WTC case and it would be impossible to say with absolute certainty that things “should” have happened one way or another.

Many variables that haven't even come to light in these disscussions I would imagine.

However, Like I said before, As far as I am concerned, all of the available evidence points to a fuel air explosion in the elevator shafts.

That's fine and I can agree with you a little. But, my post above still stands that if the fuel could have made it's way down the elevator shafts like you state, then the pressurized air would have done the same exact thing. It didn't. So, either the fuel didn't do these explosive damages or the "squibs" weren't from pressurized air.

Now do you see the correlation of the elevator shafts, fuel vapor, pressurized air and "squibs"?

I note, that the article that howard references talks about functional uses of the fuel air explosions...

they are used against soft targets... not concrete reinforced ones...
just how hard were the walls that this explosion destroyed?

Originally posted by HowardRoarkYou never did answer my question. How much do you think a 50-ton hyrdaulic press weighs?

Probably 100's of lbs. What's your point? Presses are made out of solid steel. How did your "FAE bomb" disintegrate it?

The parking garage was not "gone" they later excavated it and the cars in it.

"There were no walls, there was rubble on the floor, and you can't see anything" he said.

Yes, FAE can produce that kind of overpressure, especially in a confined elevator shaft.

Can you prove with photos of what a FAE can do? If not, then your THEORY is overpressured.

why wasn't there any remaining jet fuel still on fire in the lobbies?

Because it was a fuel vapor explosion.

So vapor fell down the shafts, not liquid?

Originally posted by HowardRoarkThe freight elevator ran the whole length of the building.

So why did the fuel "vapor" stop coincidentally at the ground floors and not continued all the way down deep into the sub-basements?

I was aware of the basement bomb (my thought laser technology) within the year of it happening, its not news to me but i i always say it as a feasible reason as to why the buildings collapsed. by weakening the structure of the foundation combined with explosive devices set on strtegic floors