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Subject: How did the WTC fall?
I am not a conspiracy theorist! I think
there are enough weird things going on any single day
that upon ultra close inspection any day one
could find evidence that there is some monster plot afoot.
Having said this there is one aspect of the events
of that fateful day where the official story does not fit
the events as observed. In particular I
am exceptionally dubious of the official explanation of the collapse
of the twin towers. As a licensed professional
engineer my opinion is not entirely the musing of the ignorant.
While Jet Fuel does burn at up to 3000 degrees
(easily hot enough to melt structural steel) burning at these
temperatures only occurs under very specific
conditions, (which are not present outside of a jet engine.
Otherwise you can safely smoke around Jet-A’s
chemical cousin kerosene.
Enough said, there is a reason to doubt the fire
story.
However, if we accept the official fire story
at face value; that intense fires caused the structural steel in
the building to soften then sag, the resulting
disaster scenario could not be what we saw on 9/11.
Accepting the fire assertion, what the aircraft
strikes and steel softening should have produced a rotation
then toppling of the portion of the building
above the strike in the direction of the plane strike – like felling a
tree.
The top ~30 floors would have landed sideways
or nearly sideways on the ground. A less dramatic option
but more probable scenario is that 10 to 15 stories
are completely burned, with sagged worthless structural
steel and within a few days the towers need to
be imploded.
The softening and sagging effect at the center
of the official story is a relatively slow, sluggish event.
A building that slowly sags down onto its lower
stories will be uninhabitable but would have no reason
to explosively collapse like we saw on 9/11.
Theoretically, each floor in a skyscraper can withstand up
to 4 times the weight of all the floors above
it; changing the composition of these floors (sagging and local
collapsing) should not trigger the explosive
near instant failure of each floor as seen. A slowly sagging load
should not have caused a pancaking collapse.
Further, as implied above, since engineers don’t
know for sure EXACTLY the results of our calculations,
a factor of safety is applied to compensate for
any unknowable structural conditions. This is especially true
for high-rise buildings. In my discipline, where
things fly, and weight can have a big negative effect on performance,
we use safety factors of 20 to 40 percent then
test like crazy. For a building, expected to stand at a specific
location for 40 to 1000 years, the expected safety
factor would be 100 (2X) to 300 percent (4X). It is therefore,
quite possible that this building was designed
to survive if 12 of 16 main columns were cut.
Another way to look at this is if all the steel
on the floors where the plane hit was at 1100 degrees the building
still could double in weight and not fail.
If the aircraft strike zone was at 1800 degrees, and the steel retained
only 10 percent of its strength, the build could
hold 40% of its weight. Given the softened steel it would sag,
warp and collapse locally.
Now, for a brief look at some of the “expert”
counter arguments against these concerns.
This building was designed to survive a 707 strike.
While some may figure that a 767 is much heavier than a 707,
research on the Boeing website shows that the
performance parameters of these planes are very close (within 50,000
pounds in weight, fly at similar speeds).
The advances of the last 31 years have not raised aircraft weights
(on the contrary, the drive to reduce costs has
led to reduced-weight, higher-strength components.
If a typical factor of safety was applied to
this design (4X), the effective weight of the 707 accounted for
in the WTC designs would be around a million
pounds.
Further, defenders of the official story claim
that the idea that the towers were brought down by explosives is
impossible because the plotters would have had
to wire up the entire building.
Even when intentionally imploding a building,
they don’t wire the entire building. To have achieved the effect
seen on 9/11 only a couple of adjacent floors
(perhaps unleased) would have needed to be wired.
Once the supports in those floors were released,
the momentum and energy in floors above where the
explosives were placed would have driven the
violent pancaking collapse that was observed.
These doubts are primarily a result of the superficial
data available. It is possible that new or revised data could
mitigate these doubts but so far the evidence
and the narrative do not fit. The NIST and Popular Mechanics
“expert” teams seem to think that their credentials
are sufficient to erase all doubt. However, while these teams
were loaded with Phd Engineers there were few
PEs (only one is recalled) on the team.
Between PEs and Phd Engineers only one group has
to PROVE their competence through testing
and professional activities. That would be the
PEs.
Author's Identity Withheld