Debate Rebuttal Part Four: Freefall destruction + Tilted Top
Near free-fall destruction
Hi gang, Here's part four of my rebuttal video. I have a time next week to videotape all this so we'll be wrapping up before too long here.
Thanks,
Chris
Face: I have a lot of disagreements with Richard Gage’s video Blueprint For Truth. So far I have listed 1000000000000 of them. Next is his claim that the Twin Towers came down at near free-fall acceleration and that this is evidence of controlled demolition. Unfortunately for me, he has support from NIST, who says the first exterior panels hit the ground in 9 to 11 seconds. They say a precise calculation of the collapse timing ofo the building itself can’t be precisely determined because of all the dust. So all NIST tells us is that the exterior panels, the ones that were not slowed down by the building structure underneath, fell at near-freefall. But the NIST Report really only goes to the moment of the initiation of the collapse, what they call the point of inevitability. That’s because they were studying the cause of the collapse so they could make safety recommendations. The effect of the collapse initiation was, to them, just a very fast collapse. “Gravity takes care of it from there,” they told me. They also told me that there are plenty of peer-reviewed papers available to anyone who wants to study the collapse itself.
Richard Gage condemns the NIST Report for stopping at the initiation of collapse. “There is no model of the collapse. Why didn’t they do it? Could it be because they knew darn well it could not have collapsed at all?” Quite the opposite.
SLIDE Reasons: In fact, researchers in the 911 Truth movement itself have stated that the collapse time for the Towers was around 15 seconds. In addition, MIT professor Thomas Eagar said most of the building fell at 2/3 free fall in around 15 seconds. So researchers on both sides seem to agree on that rough figure. And I submit that the slower collapse rate shows significant resistance to the momentum of the collapse and is yet another reason to believe the natural collapse theory.
The towers did not fall at almost free fall speed. As NIST told me personally, “the momentum (which equals mass times velocity) of the 12 or 28 stories falling on the supporting structure below so greatly exceeded the strength capacity of the structure below that it couldn’t stop... the falling mass. The downward momentum felt by each successive lower floor was even larger due to the increasing mass.”
So reason #19 is that the two towers did provide structural resistance, and the stronger core came to the ground last, standing for up to 25 seconds after the start of the initial collapse before they too collapsed. Core columns broke mostly at the welded connections every 36 ft.. In Blueprint for Truth, Richard says, “To bring a building symmetrically down, what we have to do is remove the core columns.” But the stronger core columns came down last!
So, Reason #20 if it were any kind of controlled demolition, then detonating the core structure and causing its collapse first would always be the priority or the demolition won’t work right at all.
Slide of Core Collapsing Last: If I said I was earning almost $100K/yr when I was earning only $67K, you’d think I was exaggerating, so Richard can’t say the towers fell at almost free fall speed when it was only 2/3 free fall. There’s a very big difference.
So the $100,000 question for Richard Gage and me is which force wins in the monumental battle between gravitational momentum and structural strength. I say gravity won, but it had to fight and overcome the strong steel structure of the building floor by floor. Richard says the strong structure should have won, and could have lost only with the help of controlled demolition knocking out the support. Here’s the simple formula that shows why gravity won:
SLIDE OF F=MA Reason #21 In two seconds, free-fall descent speed is 45 miles per hour.
At 9.8 meters/second a 10,000,000-pound floor would slam into the floor below at 98,000,000 pounds’ worth of force.
VIDEO OF SCALE 40 seconds
I made a little video demonstrating the power of gravity. The scale can measure 300 pounds and it has a 25 pound weight on it. I’ll drop that weight from about half a story so we can see if we can get a measurement. The formula is force equals mass times acceleration, so gravity increases the force almost tenfold in the first second alone.
F. R. Greening says the towers weighed over a billion pounds, had stupendous gravitational momentum with 14 or 29 floors above the collapse (180,000,000 pounds) traveling at over 100 mph. With each successive floor, add more momentum and millions of additional pounds, overwhelming the resistance of the support structure. The scale has been destroyed before it can even measure the weight of this falling object!
That’s 7 to 14 times the structural load of the buildings during the collapse. Eduardo Kausel, in September 2001, wrote: “As they gained momentum, their crushing descent became unstoppable...The fall... down the height of a single floor must have caused dynamic forces exceeding the design loads by [more than 10 times]....”
The scale was destroyed before it even gave us a weight. I’m sure you can make this into a repeatable experiment of sorts. Richard is just not giving gravity enough respect!
REASON # TOUGHNESS SLIDE It appears to me that some of the calculations of the strength of the Twin Towers don’t take into account what happens to the static strength of steel columns under the stress of a collapse. A steel column or beam will resist at full power only until it deforms by about 1%, and then it fractures, and its strength goes to near zero. The average strength, during the collapse, is a tiny fraction of its static strength. In solid mechanics they speak of a parameter called "toughness," the work required to fracture or otherwise destroy a piece of material. This is the quantity one needs to estimate, and it is a great deal less than the static strength of each member times its length.
453.) C Tilting Building top south tower
Face
Richard Gage claims that the collapse of the three WTC Buildings was nearly symmetrical into its own footprint and says this is further evidence of controlled demolition because a natural collapse would have been messier.
Slide of Tilting Top Here is the most dramatic proof that there was nothing symmetrical about the collapse of the South Tower. This is yet another example of how, as Richard said in his video, the collapse shows all the characteristics of a classic controlled demolition, except when it doesn’t.
But Richard tries to turn this 22-degree tilt in the South Tower to his advantage by claiming that only controlled demolition could have stopped the building top from falling over once the angular momentum of the tipping began. Let’s see if this is true, and add some more reasons for natural collapse to our collection.
SLIDE of more reasons
Reason 18: All three of the buildings began their collapses into their weakest points. The top of the south building tilted 22 degrees into the hole left behind by the plane crash. COLLAPSE BEGAN JUST ABOVE JET CRASH POINT. Richard Gage said that if you were to have a deceptive controlled demolition, “you’d start the explosions at the point of jet plane impact.” But Former Ctd demolition employee Tom Sullivan, who believes in ctl demo of these buildings, says you couldn’t have ctl demo in a fire zone. he conjectures the plane crashes would have to be precisely planned with the demolition starting away from fires, but these collapses started right in the fires, as Richard admits.
Reason 19: If explosives were placed, then they would have been destroyed and damaged by the planes and the fires. Shaped charges are extremely sensitive to geometry. Explosives burn, detonate or chemically degrade in high heat. Detonators, radio receivers, wiring, and connections between explosives are sensitive components.
Reason 19: controlled demolition crews definitely could not instantly right the 180,000,000 pound building top collapsing at high speeds on the floors with the worst fires in mid-course.
SLIDE OF PARTIAL LATERAL FORCE IN EARTHQUAKE. The lateral force or angular momentum of the towers were overcome by the greater force of gravity... DEMO: Two boxes duct taped together tilted 22 degrees, Angular momentum pushing it over, gravity gravity gravity trumps the angular momentum, pushing it back down.
Reason 20: and my 14 experts, all but one of them immediately said that because of the fast descent of the whole building, it would have collapsed to the ground before having time to tip over much further. SLIDE OF MORE REASONS
SLIDE OF THESE REASONS And remember, the entire towers rotated a few degrees at the onset of the collapse, which is precisely what we expect in a gradual collapse mechanism. If all the supports had failed simultaneously in a controlled demolition, as Richard Gage insists, neither Towers would have rotated.
The toppling collapse theory requires crushing to be asymmetric, occurring on only one side, which is implausible – as the leading edge of the rotating block crushes the structure below, the crushed structure resists, and this reactive force will tend to keep the upper block centered, causing either a downward collapse or no collapse at all.
Richard doesn’t seem to take gravity fully into account here. It comes up in other places too. Does he really think there’s not enough gravity in a 180,000,000 pound building section to overcome angular momentum and right the structure? He actually tries to eliminate the weight of the upper blocks of the towers, saying that after four seconds it was all dust and had no mass. And while some mass was lost to dust pulverization, the top block had plenty of unpulverized mass that made it all the way to the debris pile. Plus, 10,000,00 pounds of mass was added with each collapsing floor, more than making up for the loss of mass due to gradual pulverization. And let’s remember the 2008 Delft University high speed collapse of a 13-story concrete-reinforced steel tower straight down into its own footprint.
If you are familiar with the issues around 911, you are probably asking yourself, OK, the Twin Towers fell at 2/3 of freefall, but what about Building 7? Even NIST says it came down at around freefall. And you are right. For most of the collapse, the perimeter wall of Building 7 came down at around 2/3 of freefall, but for eight stories out of 47, Building 7 did come down at or even slightly faster than freefall. Now there’s a 911 mystery for both Richard Gage and for me! I’ll explain how a faster than freefall acceleration is possible and may have occurred in Building 7's natural collapse during a later section of this rebuttal.
Keep telling yourself that. 
