I want to respond to a bunch of different replies and most of them are scatterd out, so this will probably be a little sketchy
What contents would you typically find in an office building that would provide a heat source hot enough to burn through the spray on fireproofing then weaken the structural integrity of the main support beams in tower 7?
Other than the diesel and office contents reply, nobody else responded to this one. And even if a pool of diesel and a mountain plastics were wrapped around the main support beams they still wouldn't have created enough heat for the beams to suddenly fail the way they did. Since the entire building falls at an equal and level rate, wouldn't the majority of the main support beams have to had fail at the same exact time?
If one or two beams became heated enough to fail then it could have possibly created a domino effect, but from ALL of the video's available for viewing... it certainly doesn't appear that way.
You are missing one important piece of the puzzle. It was not ONLY fire that brought the building down. The building also suffered damage from two of the world's tallest buildings falling in close proximity. That cannot be ignored, and must be taken into consideration when analyzing the failure mechanism(s) of WTC7
According to this picture:
none of this damage would have played a role in destroying the structural steel foundation of the building.
I cant speak for a typical office. But Tower 7 contained some 30,000 gallons of diesel fuel
Supposedly, 20,000 gallons where recovered intact from the two 12,000-gallon tanks, so only 4,000 gallons could contributed to the heat , if by some chance the tanks were completely full.
The only people claiming controlled demo are idiots analyzing crappy footage from YouTube.
It's already been explained, ad nauseum, how planted explosives would NOT HAVE SURVIVED the fire that raged on numerous floors of building number 7 for a good part of the afternoon.
Drop it!
I've done a little more than look at YOUTUBE and I don't appreciate being called an idiot.
I haven't seen where anybody describes or claims that fire appeared on the ground or basement floors, and since that's where the they would have been placed considering the descent of the structure.. the WOULD have survived since there was no fires reported on those floors.
I believe most of the fireproofing was rated for only two to three hours: the building burned for considerably longer.
There were relatively small fires throughout the building during the 7 hours prior to it's collapse, but none of the images I've seen show more than one or two floors burning on any side of the building at the same time.
The building didn't burn, according to the images and reports a very small portion of the buildings contents burned.
What's your basis for choosing 2000 degrees as the minimum temperature where this could happen?
I think we can all agree that the structural integrity of the steel beams failed "suddenly". Non heat treated steel loses about half of it's strength at about 600C. Let's say that there were 12 magicians at the base of each beam with a oxycetylene torch, that still wouldn't have caused the building to collapse the way it did. According to ALL of the video's available, the entire foundation of the structure basically "vanished" simultaneously.
Only the CTers say every beam needed to fail simultaneously: it's a straw man, nothing more.
I didn't say every beam, I said the majority of the beams. 2/3rds AT LEAST for it to fall like that.
What would you expect to see as a result of the collapse of the penthouses and structures within the building, for instance?
Thick clouds of dust and debris flying out the side windows of the building. It's not as if the contents of the roof had enough time to travel to the ground. And if you say that the structural contents underneath the penthouse were falling and caused the cloud , then the structure would have folded inward as it collapsed, IF by some miracle all of the surrounding support beams failed at the same exact time.
The official reports haven't been completed yet. However, we might speculate what caused the enormous amounts of black smoke seen pouring from WTC7 during the day
I guess I should have said FLAMES instead of "signs of fire" in my question. Have you seen or can you produce any video footage that show any FLAMES in the seconds prior to and as the building collapsed?
The video you are showing is taken from the back and from a distance you cannot tell what way the building fell on the damaged side
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3664073116607499063&q=tower+7+collapse&hl=en
Better ?
This is NIST's most recently published thinking on how the collapse progressed:
I'm sure they will go into more detail as they release the interim and then the final report.
AFAIK, the entire NIST can kiss a sick cat in the ass.
Anything that would burn for more than the 3 hours that the best fire-retardant is rated for. In a normal office building, paper, furniture, in WTC7 add a large diesel storage (for the UPS system).
None of those contents combined generate enough heat to melt steel.
Yes, apart from the fact that it didn't fall horizontally (that kink is several storeys deep), it almost fell horizontally.
I said "the structure appears to fall
almost perfectly horizontal.
A steel beam softens much before (50% loss of strenght at appr. 900 deg C), and only enough supports need to fail to overload the rest. Then the failure avalanches.
When an avalanche occures the snow flows down the side of the mountain, all of the snow doesn't drop off the face of the mountain at the same time.
A building like that is 80-90% air. Once the building collapses, that air has to go out. Since lots of dust is created in the collapse, it is blown out with the air. An explosion does not create a dust cloud, it creates a shockwave.
80-90% air? Not quite.
No signs of fire? What would YOU call a 500ft wide column of black smoke? A sign of fire, perhaps?
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fema/wtc-7-small.gif
GREY smoke indicates a low heat smoldering fire, a fire hot enough to melt steel would generally produce very little smoke.. like a torch. Black smoke indicates a fire that has an abundance of fuel that isn't burning hot enough to vaporize the exhausted fumes.
From an unfueled fire? Certainly! Such things don't even exist, afaik. But there was plenty of fuel in WTC7
Back to my first question, what contents of an office building could have provided enough fuel to maintain the heat required to melt steel?
So if we take the example from the 9 storey building and roughly alter it to suit a 50 storey building. We have an utterly ridiculous scenario.
Not if they used thermite.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1837033714967622806&q=tower+7&hl=en
ALL went undetected during detonation* and beforehand?
I remember hearing something about mandatory evacuations of WTC 1&2 in the weeks leading up to 9/11, where workers employed by GWB's brother spent quite a bit of time working inside the buildings. Supposedly the towers were never completely evacuated before for any kind of "maintenance" work.
Who knows what could have taken place beforehand in tower 7 ?
They problem with YOUR story is that you can't now say that the fire attributed because you've denied it existed. You've ruled out the possibility of structural failure so you can't now claim that damage attributed to the collapse.
I didn't deny that fire existed in the building. My question wasn't properly worded and I should have asked about the absence of FLAMES in the building instead of "signs of fire". I also didn't rule out the possibility of structural failure, but you nor anybody else can explain what contents would have existed in this structure that would have generated the heat necessary to MELT steel.
So tell me in the name of christ how could such an operation go un-noticed!
Probably the same way 80% of this nations dairy supply has been contaminated with a freak amino acid.
How did the explosives resist the fire for so long?
They were located in the basement and there was no fire on the lower floors.
The FDNY stopped searching for survivors in the area around WTC7 several hours before the building collapsed. Why would they do this if they didn't believe the building was going to collapse at some point?
What would cause them to believe that this building would collapse at ANY point. Obviously there wasn't enough fire present ANYWHERE in the building to cause it to fall like tower 1&2, and an airplane full of jet fuel didn't hit this building either.
Considering the amount of time it took the FDNY to put out the fire in an apartment building that was struck by a small airplane a month or so ago, why didn't they attempt to extinguish ANY of the fires in tower 7?
I haven't found any reports that explain where they attempted to extinguish any of the fires that were scattered throughout the structure. Also, considering that a properly constructed steel structured building has NEVER collapsed due to fire, why would the FDNY even consider that this building was going to fall ?
I agree there was a bunch of smoke rolling up and out of one side of the structure, but all of the images of flames indicate very small fires compared to the size of this building. It's about like saying the FDNY would pull out of a house fire because the linen closet was burning, and they believed the roof was going to collapse.
Add to this that FDNY did not fight the fire - had no water pressure from collapse of towers which cut mains which with lack of equipment (FF on
scene when initially told to go into WTC7 had to scrounge for air packs,
hose and tools from destroyed/damaged apparatus). Fire chiefs considered
structural damage to building (read accounts from FF and chiefs on scene
in FIREHOUSE magazine
WWW.FIREHOUSE.COM in their 9/11 archives) and
realized lacked resources to adequately fight the fire without risking more
death/injury to personnel - 343 were already dead and many more injured.
That's what a fireman does every day of his life, risk it ! I don't know if it's ever been reported but I would guess that less than 5% of FDNY's apparatus was destroyed when tower 1&2 collapsed. Also the did have water pressure on the scene provided by their fire boats. If it would have been a priority to extinguish the fire in tower 7, like they have responded to every other fire in history.. they would have assigned enough resources to put out the relatively small fires. It's not as if half of the dept was parked outside of tower 1&2 when the buildings fell, but more than likely every unit on the island was within' 3 or 4 blocks of the scene with plenty of resources.
WTC 7 was abandoned early afternoon after building was searched and nobody remained. Collapse can 5:20pm some 7 hours after being damaged by debris shower from collapsing towers.
I guess it's just ironic that tower 3 4 & 5 sustained 10x as much damage as tower 7 and neither one of them burned or collapsed.
Please see pages 72-77 of my WTC 7 paper, linked in my signature. There you go.
What are you talking about?
The image on page 72 is a drawing, the image on page 73 shows an opening in the top of the building with no fire present, the image on page 74 shows an opening towards the center of the building with no fire present, the image on page 75 shows the damage to the SW corner with no fire present, and I don't see any fire in the other images in either tower 7 or 6.
So how does this explain how the majority of the lower structural supports were heated above 600C at the same time?
Also your report states that 1.6 billion pounds of debris was meticuously sorted through by the FBI and NYPD, but all of it was recycled/destroyed in less than six month from the time the buildings collapsed. And yet you incorrectly state that it took 8 months to remove the debris from the scene.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.ph...ce_from_Ground_Zero_at_the_World_Trade_Center
The Destruction of Evidence from Ground Zero at the World Trade Center following the events of September 11, 2001, occurred, even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis. FEMA had steel recovered from the building rubble destroyed or shipped overseas before a serious investigation could take place.
However, the Associated Press reported in a February 26, 2004, update that not only did the FBI ban the removal of crime scene evidence "after 13 agents stole WTC rubble," but also stated that "'All relevant evidence connected with the WTC crime scene was properly retrieved, catalogued and maintained.'"
If the evidence was handled properly, would a pile bones still be on the scene 5 years later?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,1929043,00.html
I know your the forum "expert" on this subject Gravy, but have you read and debunked all of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories
What page in your report explains this ?
"Conspiracy theorists have often cited the alleged “flash” just as the plane hit the tower as “proof” that there was a missile launched from the underside of the plane. 911 IPS claims that the flash could not be a reflection, as it was caught on camera from four different angles, and it is their theory that an object cannot reflect light to more than one direction. In addition, they said that “sparks” or “static discharge” “have been ruled out by every airline pilot we have spoken with”.
OUCH !