Who is Joe toolie O'toole

MG1962

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MG1962
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Having the old molten steel discussion on another forum, and bumped into something that I have had a bit of trouble with

It is widely reported that a Bronx fireman Joe toolie O'toole, saw molten steel during his time at the WTC site.

The claim is usually sited as comming from this publication

http://www.messenger-inquirer.com/public/information/search.htm

I searched their data base, and turned nothing up

but - according to another message board the article appeared as

Recovery worker reflects on months spent at Ground Zero, Messenger-Inquirer.com, 6/29/02

Search that title also turned up a blank

Now according to this site http://bulldogpolitics.blogspot.com/2006/01/listening-to-twin-towers.html

The article was written by Jennifer Lin of the Knight Ridder newspaper group. She is a real person and works for the Phillidelpia Inquirer

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/

Searching their data base turns up nothing either

But - going to this site http://www.911research.com/cache/wtc/evidence/messengerinquirer_recoveryworker.html

Seems to show a legitimate article. Is the article real, or a forgery or something else.

According to this article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Ridder

The organisation has never owned the other newspaper. So I dont see how the article could have gotten there in the first place.

Now am I just getting jaded here, or is there something really obvious among all this that I am missing.

Finally the quote that is so important seems odd

O'Toole remembers in February seeing a crane lift a steel beam vertically from deep within the catacombs of Ground Zero. "It was dripping from the molten steel," he said.
Can a steel beam be heated like that, example melting at one end, while holding enough shape at the other to be lifted. And what exactly does he mean dripping from the molten steel. I would have thought, something like, dripping with molten steel. Is this some sort of Bronx talk lol - or as above, is there something obvious I am missing.
Thanks
 
I've seen a picture similar to what O'Toole describes. A crane is lifting a piece of orange-hot steel. The steel sags down under its own weight, but it is not "molten". Nothing to imperil the official story, at all.

The picture is somewhere on this forum. I'm sure Gravy, with his encyclopedic knowledge of all things 9/11, could post it in a couple of minutes.

ETA: I believe in the picture in question, a bunch of other debris is being lifted along with the steel. I'm sure that had an insulating effect.
 
That's the one, Firestone. Sure it's hot, but not "molten".

When I was growing up, we used to melt beer bottles into odd shapes in a regular old wood fire. According to the CTists, we shouldn't have been able to do that, as glass melts at a higher temperature than wood burns.
 
The article is genuine and was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer

It was posted on a non-CT site on the day it was published:

http://www.fallenbrothers.com/community/showthread.php?p=2948

If you go to http://nl.newsbank.com and do a search for "recovery worker", narrowing down the search to the Philadelphia Enquirer and the year to 2002, it's the 2nd article on the list (you'd have to sunscribe to get the whole article, but it shows the first paragraph).

This link may also do the same thing.

Edited to add: I'm assuming that the Philadelphia Inquirer syndicated the article to the (Kentucky) Messenger-Inquirer - this seems to be quite common practice between regional newspapers in the US. The 911research.wtc7.net version has obviously been grabbed from the Google cache, but the article is too old to still be there.
 
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jhunter1163 said:
That's the one, Firestone. Sure it's hot, but not "molten".
Click to expand...

And who's to say that what we're seeing in that picture is steel? It could be any one of numerous types of metal. The twoofers seem to lump all metals together in one box for the sake of their argument. :boxedin:

If it's orange...well...it must be steel. Koo-koo.
 
jhunter1163 said:
When I was growing up, we used to melt beer bottles into odd shapes in a regular old wood fire. According to the CTists, we shouldn't have been able to do that, as glass melts at a higher temperature than wood burns.
Click to expand...

Has this been a common claim in these 9-11 CT discussions? If so it can be rejected quite easily. You can give a temperature at which a substance such as wood will ignite, but there is no specific "temperature at which it burns." Combustion doesn't release "temperature," it releases heat. The temperature that can be reached depends on how much heat is generated, how much is heat is lost from the immediate surroundings due to conduction, convection, and radiation, and the heat capacity of those immediate surroundings.

Big pile of debris -> enough air diffusion to sustain combusion while severely limiting heat transfer -> lots of heat accumulating in small spaces -> pockets of very high temperature -> red-hot girder being pulled out of the pile.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
Myriad said:
Has this been a common claim in these 9-11 CT discussions? If so it can be rejected quite easily. You can give a temperature at which a substance such as wood will ignite, but there is no specific "temperature at which it burns." Combustion doesn't release "temperature," it releases heat. The temperature that can be reached depends on how much heat is generated, how much is heat is lost from the immediate surroundings due to conduction, convection, and radiation, and the heat capacity of those immediate surroundings.

Big pile of debris -> enough air diffusion to sustain combusion while severely limiting heat transfer -> lots of heat accumulating in small spaces -> pockets of very high temperature -> red-hot girder being pulled out of the pile.

Respectfully,
Myriad
Click to expand...
Well tossed in - and another indication of why the CTIs need real education in all the fields they think they know.
 
Myriad said:
Has this been a common claim in these 9-11 CT discussions? If so it can be rejected quite easily. You can give a temperature at which a substance such as wood will ignite, but there is no specific "temperature at which it burns." Combustion doesn't release "temperature," it releases heat. The temperature that can be reached depends on how much heat is generated, how much is heat is lost from the immediate surroundings due to conduction, convection, and radiation, and the heat capacity of those immediate surroundings.

Big pile of debris -> enough air diffusion to sustain combusion while severely limiting heat transfer -> lots of heat accumulating in small spaces -> pockets of very high temperature -> red-hot girder being pulled out of the pile.

Respectfully,
Myriad
Click to expand...

Yes, this has been a common claim of CTists. They claim that, since jet fuel burns (ignites) at a lower temperature than steel melts/softens, the jet fuel could not have sufficiently weakened the steel to cause collapse. They propose that therefore, explosives were actually used to bring down the Towers.

A nonsensical argument, as Myriad pointed out, but still very current in CTland.

ETA: Also, there's no way to be sure that the metal in question IS steel. It very well could be aluminum from the cladding of the Towers or from the airplane.
 
Here's the relevant quote again:

Underground fires raged for months. O'Toole remembers in February seeing a crane lift a steel beam vertically from deep within the catacombs of Ground Zero. "It was dripping from the molten steel," he said.
Click to expand...
source*: http://www.fallenbrothers.com/community/showthread.php?p=2948

The first thing to note is that the beam is intact and solid enough to be pulled out of a pit by a crane (I suspect that crane may mean digger here - or at least something with jaws to clamp the girder). So the girder was hot but it wasn't liquid. If thermite was involved, how would it heat a girder evenly? Thermite gets very hot, but it tends to burn through metals before having much of a chance to conduct its heat into them. Likewise because the thermite reaction is over so quickly it's hardly sustained heat anyway.

The next thing to notice is this happened in February 2002 which is around 5 months after the buildings collapsed. Now a thermite reaction will release all its heat energy in a few seconds, so you're going to need some pretty efficient insulation to trap that heat for 5 months, especially when you consider that the thermite starts burning in a big airy building, according to the demolition hypothesis. So if the rubble pile can trap the heat from the dying seconds of a thermite reaction, isn't it equally plausible that it would contain pockets of instense heat resulting from smouldering hydrocarbon fires?

As far as the dripping is concerned, we've already established that the girder wasn't liquid so it's possible that the dripping was another metal (copper or aluminium perhaps) or even molten glass dripping off the steel as it was lifted out of the rubble. Also it is possible that the surface of part of the steel steel was hot enough to be partially melted (there's no reason to assume even heating like is a steel mill), possibly because its melting point was lowered due to a reaction with another substance, such as sulfur:

Rapid deterioration of the steel was a result of heating with oxidation in combination with intergranular melting due to the presence of sulfur. The formation of the eutectic mixture of iron oxide and iron sulfide lowers the temperature at which liquid can form in this steel.
Click to expand...
From an analysis of a steel beam from WTC7 here: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Biederman/Biederman-0112.html

Whatever the reason for the "dripping steel" really is (and, to be honest I think we can only guess) I think thermite/thermate ranks as one of the least likely explanations.

Edited to Add: In the absence of a verified transcript or an audio recording of what Mr O'Toole said we shouldn't assume that his words have been accurately reported. Many people who have been interviewed by newspapers can vouch for the inaccuracies that can creep into journalism. Even if Mr O'Neil is being reported accurately, we cannot necessarily trust his perception of the event - although it is interesting to note that he doesn't mention the girder as being suspicious or unexpected.


*I think it's worth reading the whole of this article to be reminded of how terrible that day and its aftermath were.
 
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If you go to http://nl.newsbank.com and do a search for "recovery worker", narrowing down the search to the Philadelphia Enquirer and the year to 2002, it's the 2nd article on the list (you'd have to sunscribe to get the whole article, but it shows the first paragraph).

This link may also do the same thing.

Edited to add: I'm assuming that the Philadelphia Inquirer syndicated the article to the (Kentucky) Messenger-Inquirer - this seems to be quite common practice between regional newspapers in the US. The 911research.wtc7.net version has obviously been grabbed from the Google cache, but the article is too old to still be there.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, Cause I was having a devil of a time connecting the two news papers. In Australia when it is syndicated, the information usually appears in the bi-line
 
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