Gravy,
Do you find it even remotely odd that 3 buildings collapsed in their own footprints on 911? That is, WTC1,2 and 7.
No steel framed building in history has ever collapsed as a result of fire. What are the odds that 3 buildings, in the same location, collapsed as a result of fire within 8 hours of each other?
See below for the "footprint issue"
Now Quest, are you being coy? You act as though the WTC collapses were unrelated to each other, rather than being the result of history's biggest terrorist attack. Those other steel frame buildings you speak of were not hit by airliners at 500 mph and did not sustain structural damage from other buildings hitting them and did not have giant tanks of diesel fuel inside and did not have totally helpless fire crews.
Steven E. Jones loves to show the shots of the northeast side of WTC7. Here are some quotes from his video (With the times they can be seen. Times may be off by a few secs):
7:33: It's not an inferno, certainly.
11:25: Building 7 was not hit by a plane. There ws no jet fuel. Fires were random, not particularly large, and certainly not an inferno.
12:10: Here in this photo you see the fires in building 7. A closeup and you see a little bit of fire in there. Not much.
14:15: Now here are photos seen in the late afternoon. Not a lot of fire here, or damage
Watch this video to see what's really happening, on the south side
WTC7 south side
Later, after he's been saying that steel buildings can't fall down from fire, he says of #7, "What you'd expect also from uncontrolled fires, something like this, you'd expect it to topple, twist, bend, and cause much more damage than it did (to other buildings)" So in Jones's own words the fire went from "Little bit of fire in there. Not much," to "uncontrolled" and something that can "topple" "twist" and "bend" a steel building.
Jones LOVES to bring up the fire in the 32-story Madrid Windsor Building which was destroyed but did not collapse. He doesn't mention that the Windsor Building was a
concrete core, curtain wall building, not at al like the WTC buildings. Jones also neglects to remind us that the Windsor Building was not damaged by airplanes or falling buildings, nor were there large fuel tanks inside. The fire was started by a cigarette and was worst on the top 10 stories.
Here's an eyewitness quote about the damage (from a CT website, no less).
With morning light, the damage from the spectacular blaze that lit up the night and attracted thousands of onlookers was evident. The top floors were little more than charred steel twisted into destroyed shapes. Everything else was burned away. (Source
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/spain_fire_2005.html)
Arup, a major fire safety engineering company, weighs in on the Madrid fire:
The steel perimeter columns, even if they had been protected, or even concrete columns, would not necessarily be expected to survive the effects of such a 10-storey blaze.
The central concrete core appeared to perform well in the fire and on initial observations seems to have played a major role in ensuring the stability of the building throughout the incident. The role of cores in multiple floor fires is now an immediate area of study required for the industry, and Arup have commenced investigating this issue. (Source
http://www.arup.com/fire/feature.cfm?pageid=6150)
CDists frequently cite Jones as an suthority. You be the judge: is he telling the truth about these building fires? Five minutes of Googling was all it took to get this info.
I'm baffled why CDists are so receptive of this transparent phoney. As I've said before, Jones is the CDists worst nightmare. He's the physicist whose definitiion of "entropy" is, "Things topple over." I brought that up at JREF and it was declared "The worst misinterpretation of a science term, ever." But I'm just getting warmed up. You don't want to get me started on this guy.
As for the buildings falling neatly into their footprints, who put that idea into your heads? Tell that to all the buildings that were destroyed and damaged by debris, next to the falling buildings, AND far away from them. Just because a building doesn't fall over sideways, doesn't mean its collapse wasnt an enormous, widespread mess. Remember, we're talking about nearly a billion pounds coming down in a few seconds. You can see the 15-story gash in the Deutsche Bank building to this day, and the Wiinter Garden was destroyed by debris (aluminum) from 600 feet away.
The idea that this was a "controlled demolition" in the commercial sense is laughable, which is why the folks at CDI say it's ludicrous. The collapses are controlled by the laws of physics. The good thing is that because the towers were constructed as a tube-within-a-tube they fell as vertically as possible.
And that reminds me, I didn't address this issue this morning because it was off topic, but people were bringing up the whole "At or near freefall" issue, trying to use seismic data and papers from dental engineers to prove timing. Here's a photo that shows what's at or near freefall: the debris that's falling several hundred feet ahead of the collapsing building. (The photo is also a nice refutation of the idea that these buildings plopped neatly into their holes. Quite the contrary. They destroyed everything around them.
Wow, feels good to actually address some relevant issues after dealing with Alek!
