Whatever his other qualifications this guy might or might not have, he doesn't know the most basic principles of fire science.
Comments on Some of NIST's FAQs
by Charles Pegelow
...
9. If thick black smoke is characteristic of an oxygen-starved, lower temperature, less intense fire, why was thick black smoke exiting the WTC towers when the fires inside were supposed to be extremely hot?
Where is the smoke in all these videos and photographs of the towers on fire? Answer: Outside the building.
Where did the smoke come from? Answer: Inside the building, from the fire floors.
How much smoke is there? Answer: A lot.
Was the building airtight? Answer: No, it had large holes in it (in addition to normal ventilation).
So, when large amounts of smoke vent out of the fire floors, what else can we conclude? Answer: An equivalent volume of fresh air was entering the fire floors.
From this alone, we know for certain that the fire as a whole was not oxygen-starved, though it was clearly (as are almost all fires) oxygen-limited.
Open flames produce direct, radiant, and infrared heat.
Class, repeat after me:
conduction, convection, and radiation. Those are the three ways heat moves.
This is the most basic fact of fire science. Fire engineers know this from day one. The same way Christians know Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; the way eight-year-old boys know Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous; the way realtors know location, location, and location; fire engineers know conduction, convection, and radiation.
So what's this "direct, radiant, and infrared" nonsense? Infrared is a specific frequency range of radiant heat, and in most fires it's most of the radiant heat (making "radiant" and "infrared" mean almost the same thing in that context). "Direct" presumably refers to conduction. That leaves out convection, which is indirect heat transfer by fluid flow of heated gases (and liquids). Convection is enormously important in the mechanisms of fire propagation and the behavior of building fires.
Omitting convection is a really dumbass thing for a supposed expert to do.
Both radiant and infrared heat are blocked by smoke...
Dead wrong. When smoke is created by combustion it's hot, and in a confined or partially-confined fire it stays hot. Its movement therefore is a form of convective heat transfer. Furthermore, hot smoke radiates radiant (infrared, same thing) heat to any cooler surroundings very efficiently. In a normal room fire, an increasingly hot smoke layer accumulates from the ceiling downward until the thermal radiation from the smoke becomes sufficient to suddenly and rapidly ignite all the exposed fuel in the room, a well-known phenomenon called flashover. Yes, the smoke is
that hot. It doesn't block heat, it moves heat.
11. Why do some photographs show a yellow stream of molten metal pouring down the side of WTC2 that NIST claims was aluminum from the crashed plane although aluminum burns with a white glow?
Because burning is not the same as melting. An engineer doesn't know this?
Warning: the remainder of this post conjectures, based on my knowledge of how heat, smoke, and fire behave, especially in large structure fires, scenarios of what some of the 9/11 victims might likely have experienced. This is not pleasant material. Despite the passage of five+ years, tears were running down my face as I typed it. If you had friends or loved ones in the towers, you don't need to read this. You shouldn't read it. Really. Go away. Now. I can handle Mr. Fires-Weren't-Very-Hot "Engineer" by myself.
10. Why were people seen in the gaps left by the plane impacts if the heat from the fires behind them was so excessive?
Because, you miserable excuse for a human being, they were "lucky" enough to find gaps where the inrushing fresh air (remember how smoke pouring out = outside air coming in somewhere else?) kept
some of the smoke and convected heat from the fire at bay. And there they stayed, while the radiant heat from the "oxygen starved" "not very hot" fires behind them scorched their bodies until many of them jumped to their deaths rather than stand it for one moment more.
What alternatives do you think those people had? Do you think they were there at the gaps to enjoy the view? When you look at that burning tower, with dense hot (fast-rising = hot) smoke venting from every aperture near the top, many floors above where the visible flames are,
what do you imagine is going on inside? I'll tell you. With the exception of a few zones left clear by random accidents of airflow, those upper floors were solid cubes of opaque, toxic, searing hot smoke, smoke hot enough to set fire to whatever combustibles it touched. Most of that fire would burn invisibly, slowly, sheathed in the opaque smoke, adding yet more heat and smoke to the inferno. Any survivors not in intact stairwells or at windows would be trapped in a few relatively closed-off spaces, repreived for only a matter of minutes by a few centimeters of drywall, in pitch darkness because even if the power were on, the smoke layer at the ceiling is so opaque that the ceiling lights couldn't shine through.
"Oxygen starved?" Only in the sense that just about every fire (except for e.g. an oxy-acetylene torch or a rocket engine) is oxygen-limited: the overall rate of combusion was limited by the available oxygen. Without working sprinklers (broken water pipes) in a building full of paper with holes and interior damage that made it effectively a gigantic chimney, much of the interior was quickly aflame, smoldering, or above ignition temperature, making oxygen influx the limiting factor in how rapidly any given portion burned.
Do you know what happens when you have a fire in a box in which the oxygen inflow is reduced below the rate the burning fuel would normally use it? There's a technical term for this: it's called a
stove. You might have heard of them. If you've ever used one, you might already be aware that the interior of a stove can get much hotter than the same fuel burning in an open fireplace, because more of the heat is contained. The bigger the box, the more efficient that containment of heat becomes, and the hotter the interior can get.
At the time of the collapses, those fires had plenty of fuel left, plenty of oxygen flow (though not an unlimited amount), and were getting hotter by the second. Had the frame stayed standing, burn-through at the top floors and widespread window breakage would have eventually occurred, increasing the ventilation and accelerating the flames. At that point, there would likely have been explosions as pockets of accumulated superheated smoke containing flammable gases were suddenly exposed to fresh air. Only with that increased ventilation would the interior temperature begin decreasing again.
Fewer lives would have been lost (especially firefighters and police) if the buildings had not collapsed, but the event would have been hardly less traumatic. Few on the upper floors would have survived. The collapses meant that we didn't really have to think much about how most of the victims actually perished, which is a small blessing.
Respectfully,
Myriad
