Debunk Alert: New Ryan/Jones Article in Peer Reviewed Journal

[DGM]

:
What is a normal level of Benzene present in an office bldg fire?

I'm not sure this question is even valid. You would need to scale the levels to the area of the site to the square footage of the buildings (and contents) involved. No attempt to do this was made. You can't compare this to any other site because the WTC site was unusually small for the square footage of office space present.

Any comparison is a "red herring" in my opinion.

ETA: I think this aplies to anything found there.

 

[pomeroo]

Noticed how Redibis has ignored Mackey's post?

RedIbis's deterioration is comical to behold. He doesn't have the slightest idea of what he's alleging.

 

[Pardalis]

I'm telling you guys, after you respond to this benzene thingy, he's just gonna move on to another chemical and he won't even acknowledge your point.

 

[RedIbis]

No, I'm suggesting you help the discussion along by explaining why the levels are so important.



Well, if you know already, why don't you identify the figures... and then explain why they are so important?

This thread has become a strange example of what so often happens here. Posters, besides Mackey and others who quote specifically from the paper, are beginning to argue with me, instead of discussing the paper.

I fully admit I'm no chemical engineer, but I do have the ability to read and discuss, if even in layman's terms, the findings and hypotheses presented in the article. As well, I find Mackey's comments very helpful, and not necessarily because I agree, but I am very interested to see how such findings can be explained by means other than suggested by Ryan/Jones.

I understand the debunking strategy here. You want me to make a connection between elevated levels of VOCs and thermite. I don't make that connection. If you disagree with Ryan/Jones, please provide a hypothesis to explain the extreme spikes in levels of VOCs such as benzene.

 

[Stellafane]

Noticed how Redibis has ignored Mackey's post?

Yes, I've noticed that too. Red, could you care to offer any reason at all why I should give Mr. Ryan's article any credibility whatsoever after reading Mr. Mackay's post?

 

[chillzero]

This thread has become a strange example of what so often happens here. Posters, besides Mackey and others who quote specifically from the paper, are beginning to argue with me, instead of discussing the paper.

I agree, and I suspect there will be moderator intervention should people continue to personalise the thread (Rule 12, people).

I understand the debunking strategy here. You want me to make a connection between elevated levels of VOCs and thermite. I don't make that connection. If you disagree with Ryan/Jones, please provide a hypothesis to explain the extreme spikes in levels of VOCs such as benzene.

I never mentioned thermite. I have no preconceptions at all, nor any hidden agenda. I'm trying to help you further this discussion. You felt the levels were important enough to discuss for some reason, so why not explain that reason? You are far more likely to get answers that way.

 

[HyJinX]

So you're suggesting that people don't read the article. The answers to each of those questions, including the significance of such findings is clearly stated in this rather short article.

As you can see, the standard retort is to suggest the presence of Benzene is normal and expected. This is true, but what is being ignored, is the levels of Benzene. No one seems to want to touch this.

If it's really that difficult to find in the article, I'd be happy to answer them for myself.

Please do.

 

[RedIbis]

I agree, and I suspect there will be moderator intervention should people continue to personalise the thread (Rule 12, people).



I never mentioned thermite. I have no preconceptions at all, nor any hidden agenda. I'm trying to help you further this discussion. You felt the levels were important enough to discuss for some reason, so why not explain that reason? You are far more likely to get answers that way.

According to Ryan/Jones,

"Finally, the spikes in VOCs, detected by EPA on specific dates, are more readily explained as a result of short-lived, violent fires caused by
energetic materials."

These spikes were nothing to sneeze at. According to a source quoted in the article, in office bldg fire where plastics are abundant, benzene was recorded at levels as much as 26ppm.

In Nov 01, benzene was measured at 180,000ppm. The daily avg at GZ for benzene was 18,000ppm.

Ryan/Jones present the following hypothesis based on this observation:

"The occurrence of such extreme, sharp spikes in VOCs in air at GZ indicate something other than the behavior of a typical structure fire. Oxygen influx as a result of shifting of materials within the pile might have created an increase in combustion of material in localized areas. But these spikes in VOCs, at levels thousands of times higher than seen in other structure fires, suggest extremely violent but short-lived fire events.

 

[DavidJames]

...but I do have the ability to read and discuss...

That may be true, but it's not evidenced by this thread. Here, you've only asked questions. Others have tried to engage you in discussion, but you've refused.

 

[Jonnyclueless]

This thread has become a strange example of what so often happens here. Posters, besides Mackey and others who quote specifically from the paper, are beginning to argue with me, instead of discussing the paper.

I fully admit I'm no chemical engineer, but I do have the ability to read and discuss, if even in layman's terms, the findings and hypotheses presented in the article. As well, I find Mackey's comments very helpful, and not necessarily because I agree, but I am very interested to see how such findings can be explained by means other than suggested by Ryan/Jones.

I understand the debunking strategy here. You want me to make a connection between elevated levels of VOCs and thermite. I don't make that connection. If you disagree with Ryan/Jones, please provide a hypothesis to explain the extreme spikes in levels of VOCs such as benzene.

Yes, it's another example of YOU pretending no one is discussing or addressing anything while YOU ignore everyone's questions to you. And you wonder why you and people like Jones aren't taken seriously. If you kids would come out of your imaginary world and actually participate in the one everyone else here is in, then you might not have so much trouble noticing the world around you.

But please, go on continuing to ignore all the questions and posts addressed to you while you're too busy pretending they don't exist and that because people aren't giving you the answers you were hoping to guild them into providing you, that they must not have read anything.

 

[Myriad]

The "normal level of benzene present" in an office fire is irrelevant because after the collapses, the fires at GZ were no longer office fires, and no longer resembled office fires in any respect other than, arguably, the fuel mixture. It became a hot smoldering fire under conditions of oxygen-limited combustion and very high heat retention, similar to an underground coal fire (but with very different fuels).

High temperature and limited oxygen are exactly the conditions in which pyrolysis, the high-temperature chemical decomposition of organic materials into smaller molecules without burning, occurs. Benzene is a normal product of the pyrolysis of hydrocarbons and other organic materials (see, for instance, steam cracking -- any guesses where steam might have come from at Ground Zero?). In an office fire, by contrast, most of the benzene outgassed from plastics and other organic materials heated to high temperatures in the fire burns in the flames. So, higher than "normal office fire" levels in the fume from the underground fires should be entirely expected.

Spikes were most likely caused by the venting of spaces in which the fumes had accumulated, as a side effect of rescue, recovery, and firefighting efforts.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Pardalis]

As well, I find Mackey's comments very helpful, and not necessarily because I agree,

How do you disagree, exactly?

 

[chillzero]

According to Ryan/Jones,


These spikes were nothing to sneeze at. According to a source quoted in the article, in office bldg fire where plastics are abundant, benzene was recorded at levels as much as 26ppm.

In Nov 01, benzene was measured at 180,000ppm. The daily avg at GZ for benzene was 18,000ppm.

Ryan/Jones present the following hypothesis based on this observation:

And ... given the size of the buildings and the amount of .... stuff ... in them, why is that significant?

 

[ElMondoHummus]

I agree, and I suspect there will be moderator intervention should people continue to personalise the thread (Rule 12, people).



I never mentioned thermite. I have no preconceptions at all, nor any hidden agenda. I'm trying to help you further this discussion. You felt the levels were important enough to discuss for some reason, so why not explain that reason? You are far more likely to get answers that way.

Chillzero, I think it's necessary to understand that thermite is indeed what Ryan and Jones are trying to point at. First of all, they come out and list it:

Therefore, the extreme spikes in air concentrations of the five VOCs noted above, particularly on 3rd, 8th November, and 9th February, point not to other sources of typical combustible materials but to other forms of combustion. Such forms of combustion appear to be violent and short-lived, and thus similar to the effects of energetic materials, like thermite.​

So they're trying to say that it takes an "energetic material" like thermite to account for the increases in the various compounds. Secondly, they keep referring to "nanocomposites" as a code word for such "energetic material", which as we know from previous works from Jones refers to "nanothermite".

Such novel nanostructured materials are known to have been the focus of intense research in the past 10 years, particularly with regard to energetic nanocomposites. Energetic nanocomposites are hybrid sol–gel materials, often made with a silica base, that have been combined with metal oxides and nano-scale aluminum powder to form superthermite materials. Much of this work has been done at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories...​

It is disingenuous RedIbis to suggest that thermite is not the concern here. The argument as put forth by Jones and Ryan is that the spikes in certain pyrolisis products such as benzene indicates an unusually energetic fire, one that supposedly cannot be explained by the normal combustion of office products and building material, therefore "nanocomposites" (i.e. nanothermite) are necessary to explain the spikes.

They even go out of their way to lead readers into concluding thermite, as evidence by the paragraph quoted above.

In short, while it's true that Jones and Ryan's paper appears to center around the spike in aromatic and other volatile compounds, the central argument they're building towards is that some sort of accelerant (in the form of their "energetic" i.e. "nanocomposite" compounds) must have been present. And those compounds were identified in multiple paragraphs as thermite. So yes, it is indeed accurate to discuss the linkage of benzene with the proposal of thermite. That is the crux of the paper in question.

 

[Horatius]

In Nov 01, benzene was measured at 180,000ppm. The daily avg at GZ for benzene was 18,000ppm.

Ryan/Jones present the following hypothesis based on this observation:

Or, there's the hypothesis that these reported values for benzene were in error.

180,000ppm? "ppm" is "Parts per million", so this apparently means that benzene was 18% of the sample. That's a lot. Even the "daily average" level quoted is 1.8%.

Let's ask the question: if these values are accurate, what results would we expect to see?

From the Materials Safety Data Sheet for benzene, we find:

Toxicity data
(The meaning of any abbreviations which appear in this section is given here.)
ORL-MAN LDLO 50 mg kg-1
IHL-HMN LCLO 2000 ppm/5h
ORL-RAT LD50 930 mg kg-1
IHL-MUS LC50 9980 ppm

The "IHL-HMN LCLO 2000 ppm/5h" is probably the most relevant value. Looking at the links for the abbreviations provided, we see that this is the lowest published lethal concentration for humans inhaling benzene. It's also 1/9th the amount cited as the daily average. If the daily average figure is accurate, we'd expect to see some people dying of benzene inhalation.

The "IHL-MUS LC50 9980 ppm" value is the lethal concentration that will kill 50 percent of mice inhaling benzene. It's about half the above daily average, so if it's accurate, we'd expect a lot of dead mice, far more than 50% of those in the area.

Multiply these effects by a factor of 10 for the reported "spikes", and one wonders why there weren't reports of massive deaths of New Yorkers due to benzene inhalation.

And these are only for short-term exposure to massive quantities of benzene. There are long-term chronic problems that arise from doses in the 10's to 100' of ppm, so we'd expect, at a minimum, to see some increase in those effects as well.

Or, perhaps the reported figures are a tad bit off?


There also could be other effects that explain this. Without knowing exactly where the sensors were placed, and how many there were, we also cannot tell how much benzene was actually present. Perhaps a single sensor located near a pocket of material prone to releasing benzene when ignited was overwhelmed by a purely local increase in concentration for a brief period of time. Such transient events really can't tell us much about what was going on in the pile over the long term.

To latch onto such figures without giving any consideration to their reliability and/or to how representative they are, in order to support yet another theory with questionable support, is disingenuous at best.

 

[chillzero]

Chillzero, I think it's necessary to understand that thermite is indeed what Ryan and Jones are trying to point at.

OK, thanks for that. I am not the tiniest bit scientific, but was interested in moving the discussion on a little.

 

[Pardalis]

Originally Posted by RedIbis
As well, I find Mackey's comments very helpful, and not necessarily because I agree,

How do you disagree, exactly?

Well?

 

[beachnut]

According to Ryan/Jones,


These spikes were nothing to sneeze at. According to a source quoted in the article, in office bldg fire where plastics are abundant, benzene was recorded at levels as much as 26ppm.

In Nov 01, benzene was measured at 180,000ppm. The daily avg at GZ for benzene was 18,000ppm.

Ryan/Jones present the following hypothesis based on this observation:

You meant to say 180,000 ppb, not ppm. NO the daily avg at GZ for benzene was not 18,000 ppm! Try again.
Ryan and Jones are full of junk!
Benzene is in gasoline, were there cars buried in the WTC? (just one source, did you know there are tons of sources of benzene at ground zero!

The real stupid part of the Jones/Ryan paper is, what does Benzene have to do with 9/11. The terrorist brought benzene to the WTC in the jet fuel and parts of the aircraft and luggage. The workers who parked their cars under the WTC, or that were buried in the WTC brought benzene to the WTC. The only idiots in the whole world who think benzene is a smoking gun are Jones/Ryan, what did they do inhale, massive amounts.

Benzene, alone is a smoking gun for the insanity of Jones and Ryan. They can't tie their shoes let alone tie benzene to a coherent plot for 9/11.

A major source of benzene exposure is tobacco smoke. (what if someone smoking was next to the sensor! OOPS)

Outdoor air contains low levels of benzene from tobacco smoke, gas stations, motor vehicle exhaust, and industrial emissions. This is true. Stay away from that sensor.

The benzene in indoor air comes from products that contain benzene such as glues, paints, furniture wax, and detergents. Wonder if the 110 floor of the WTC had glue, paints, furniture wax and detergents. 110 acres of junk in one small hole.

The air around hazardous waste sites or gas stations can contain higher levels of benzene than in other areas. Gee I wonder if the WTC was considered a hazardous waste site? OMG, are Jones and Ryan just stupid or what?

Don’t forget tire fires!
Benzene – released from styrene-butadiene rubber during smoldering combustion.

During clean up!
Benzene– released during salvage tasks performed during and after a fire; released during overhaul tasks, including pulling apart walls, ceilings and floors, and removing furniture to find and extinguish hidden fires; and released during delayed off-gassing after chemicals adsorbed onto masonry and concrete.

I wonder if there was Smoldering Combustion at the WTC? - Benzene – generated from epoxy resins, and the decomposition of polyester foam and fiberfill found in bedding and upholstery. Generated from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used as coating on wire and cables, in electrical equipment, and in window treatments (drapes and blinds) and wall coverings.

Benzene – detected in smoke from house and municipal fires. Generated from thermal decomposition of polypropylene plastics used in housings of small kitchen, bathroom and office appliances; from polyester found in bed sheets, mattresses, carpeting and clothing; and from polyvinylchloride (PVC) used as a coating for wires and cabling, in plastic switches, wallpaper, and window treatments (drapes and blinds), and PVC plumbing.

Oh noes, was there a fire in the ground at the WTC; I wonder where the benzene came from!

Now please explain what this means. Your numbers come from this!!!
EPA maximum daily detection of benzene in air at GZ, September through November 2001 (what was the reading for the rest of the day?)

Data from routine monitoring sites in New York City collected prior to September 11 find some 24-hour average samples ranging up to approximately 4 parts per billion (ppb). In response to these urban area levels, EPA has adopted several programs to reduce benzene emissions from large urban sources such as motor vehicles. More information on these programs can be found at www.epa.gov/otaq.
Measurements of benzene from World Trade Center smoke and associated cleanup activities (vehicles and equipment) include background levels from other more routine sources such as city traffic. Nearly all of these measurements were "grab" samples, lasting but a few minutes; they are intended to quickly compare levels at the work site with those found in the surrounding streets.
To protect workers at the site, EPA attempts to identify the highest concentration levels of benzene by taking grab samples where smoke plumes have been sighted at the work site. Some of the results have been dramatically higher (up to 4000 times) than those taken in the surrounding streets. EPA has urged workers to wear respirators and other protective gear, which the Agency and others have provided. Used properly, respirators can protect workers from exposure to benzene and other contaminants at the levels we have found.
Benzene dissipates quickly and grab samples outside the work zone have been drastically lower, indicating dramatic drop-offs in levels as you move away from the debris pile. Full day air samples have also been taken at eight sites, mainly along the outer edge of the work zone. These measurements, which are comparable to levels seen prior to September 11 in New York City, confirm the rapid dissipation of benzene as you move away from the debris pile and illustrate that over a full day, average levels are much lower than many of the levels captured in the few minute grab samples. These full day air samples are all below EPA's screening level which was set to be protective against significantly increased risks of cancer and other adverse health effects. This screening level assumes continuous exposure for a year to an average concentration of 20 ppb.

It would take a few more hours to nail down where they got their data, but it was max levels, not average daily levels. As if a grab sample was in a big plume of smoke! It was!

The truth is, not with Jones and Ryan, but you have to dig deeper to figure out 9/11. Jones and Ryan are bad at research, they are twisting the work of others. It would take a few days (about 40 to 60 hours of research to understand all the benzene junk, and see how Jones et al are not saying much, just going for the, "SEE WE BE PUBLISHED" stink!

 

[Newtons Bit]

Or, there's the hypothesis that these reported values for benzene were in error.

180,000ppm? "ppm" is "Parts per million", so this apparently means that benzene was 18% of the sample. That's a lot. Even the "daily average" level quoted is 1.8%.

Let's ask the question: if these values are accurate, what results would we expect to see?

From the Materials Safety Data Sheet for benzene, we find:






The "IHL-HMN LCLO 2000 ppm/5h" is probably the most relevant value. Looking at the links for the abbreviations provided, we see that this is the lowest published lethal concentration for humans inhaling benzene. It's also 1/9th the amount cited as the daily average. If the daily average figure is accurate, we'd expect to see some people dying of benzene inhalation.

The "IHL-MUS LC50 9980 ppm" value is the lethal concentration that will kill 50 percent of mice inhaling benzene. It's about half the above daily average, so if it's accurate, we'd expect a lot of dead mice, far more than 50% of those in the area.

Multiply these effects by a factor of 10 for the reported "spikes", and one wonders why there weren't reports of massive deaths of New Yorkers due to benzene inhalation.

And these are only for short-term exposure to massive quantities of benzene. There are long-term chronic problems that arise from doses in the 10's to 100' of ppm, so we'd expect, at a minimum, to see some increase in those effects as well.

Or, perhaps the reported figures are a tad bit off?


There also could be other effects that explain this. Without knowing exactly where the sensors were placed, and how many there were, we also cannot tell how much benzene was actually present. Perhaps a single sensor located near a pocket of material prone to releasing benzene when ignited was overwhelmed by a purely local increase in concentration for a brief period of time. Such transient events really can't tell us much about what was going on in the pile over the long term.

To latch onto such figures without giving any consideration to their reliability and/or to how representative they are, in order to support yet another theory with questionable support, is disingenuous at best.

I saw the 180,000ppm and call BS as well. That 18%. Nothing could live in that. Though it would probably be a very pleasant smelling death (benzene used to be used in perfumes as I recall).

Was this sample taken directly over a pit of burning fuel or something?

 

[jaydeehess]

In the 1980's I was on a weather station in the high arctic. One of our weekly taks was to drive accross the sea ice or tundra about 2 miles upwind from the station and collect air samples. To accomplish this we had to turn off the Bombardier engine, set up the collection station on the ice and then everyone except the person opening the collection valve had to walk 100 feet downwind. The person opening the collection valve then held his breath and while standing downwind turned the stopcock and joined us. After a couple of minutes that one person would again go up and turn the stopcock off. then we would gather up everything and leave.

So, where did the benzene spikes come from?
How about from a piece of heavy equipment that passed upwind of the collection site? How about the underground fires that moved through the pile over the months hitting a spot where several cars were crushed and had up to then not been involved in the fires? How about a cutting torch being used to sever heavy, insulated electrical cables?

Now has RI explained just what significance could be attributed to higher than background levels of benzene? That is if the levels recorded are in fact higher than normal background level excursions.