Its still a subtle point by Dr. Q. since he is NOT saying that the collapses were caused by something other than fire, only that fire brought them down in a different fashion. He is saying that the NIST conclusions concerning the role of fire insulation is suspect, not that their conclusion about the fact that fire caused the collapses is. Mackey's characterization thus still stands.
Exactly. See, I told you he had nothing to contribute.
Regarding the allegation that Dr. Quintiere claims NIST's reports were not peer-reviewed, this is inaccurate, or perhaps another "subtlety" that will shortly turn into a semantic argument, replete with quote-mining.
The NCSTAR reports were peer-reviewed in many ways, including the invited conference I mentioned in response to the OP, some portions of the reports following ordinary review processes of engineering journals, and of course the open comment period.
What Dr. Quintiere actually remarked upon, and he is not the only one to do so, is the fact that much of the structural modeling work was contracted to LERA, i.e. Leslie Robertson (the original SE for the WTC towers), creating a possible conflict of interest. However, with some records of construction destroyed with the Towers, this was necessary in NIST's opinion as LERA would have the best chance of reconstructing critical details in their design. NIST did also contract out a third party to validate these model results to mitigate this potential issue.
Anyway, Dr. Quintiere's results are worth reading, but they actually take you even farther away from the Truthers. In order to support the Truthers, you have to find evidence that the Towers (or WTC 7) should not have collapsed from impact and fire. As I remarked upon in my whitepaper years ago, the NIST study is in fact
the most optimistic in terms of survival out of all the professional studies, public or private, American or abroad. Dr. Quintiere's own research estimates that the Towers were even more vulnerable to this attack mode than NIST believed, going so far as to hypothesize and support the claim that, even had the fireproofing remained intact after the aircraft collisions, total collapse was all but certain.
See, this is one of those "subtleties" that Truthers really do not understand, as the uneducated commentary in this thread amply demonstrates. The Truthers would have you believe that where there is any disagreement, there is unquantified doubt, and therefore one should accept any possibility, even one as hare-brained as theirs. In reality, while there is doubt it is of a much more specific nature, and there is no room at all to even consider Truther nonsense.
For the record, as I stated years ago, in my own opinion NIST's study is overly optimistic. There are good reasons for it to be so -- they were working towards only assumptions they could support, and they gave the benefit of the doubt to things they could not more thoroughly evaluate, such as the amount of combustibles on the affected floors and the post-impact state of welds and fasteners. In my personal opinion, the study that seems most accurate is the one from Purdue, which concluded that a fire of that scope would all but certainly doom the Towers even if the structural impact damage was relatively small. This result conflicts with NIST, but it gives no ammunition at all to the Truthers, not that they understand.
But this doesn't matter to them. The Truthers are counting on you not understanding either. Fortunately, it's pretty simple.
Anyway... to
Edx, did you get a good enough answer to your question? I can dig up more if needed.
