Chris, photos of the gash on the SW corner of WTC 7 is mostly viewed from the west and it is low in the building. I would say there is a possibility that thermite from the North Tower could explain the fires on floors 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, and 13. However, there were also fires on floors 19, 22, 29, and 30 that the gash on the SW corner can't explain.
Additionally, there were not 6 to 7 fully engulfed one acre floors in the North Tower when it collapsed and much of what there was happened to be on the opposite side of the building from WTC 7 when it collapsed. Proof of that is the famous photo of Edna Citron standing in the big hole in the north face before the collapse.
The natural fires in the North Tower would have been doused by gypsum, photos of major debris show it fairly close to the building, and WTC 7 was 350 feet away from the North Tower (that is a long way to go for anything major). There is little chance debris from the natural fires in it caused the fires in WTC 7. It is a serious stretch with no basis to say otherwise.
Thermite from the Towers is very likely to have been the cause for the vehicle fires. Do you have a different answer for that issue?
Tony,
Have you seen the satellite images of 9/11 smoke visible from outer space? The plume of smoke coming out of the Towers looked like about the length of Manhattan. I did say six acres worth of fire and
embers (I know this was a rapidly moving and burning fire), and at least six floors of one acre each had fire damage by the time the buildings collapsed. The amount of unfought fire was tremendous (one hose on the bottom burning floor that firefighters could get to, everything else an uninterrupted inferno), I think maybe the fastest-gowing in building fire history. Yes, parts of the fire were burning out, but I can't take seriously your efforts to minimize the size of that natural fire.
As for the cars... are you saying that there is no possibility that cars parked next to a raging fire would not have any flaming debris hit them? Or more importantly, what evidence do you have that thermite burned those cars? Do the cars have the kind of damage you see here, where thermite burned all the way through an engine block? And then when the thermite burned through the back of the car and burned right into the gas tank, the whole car exploded!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdCsbZf1_Ng Notice too, that there's blobs of elemental iron left behind. Did someone collect the residue from the cars near WTC to find evidence of thermite? Are there pictures of gaping holes in the cars where each piece of thermite burned all the way through the cars? Or maybe, just maybe, one of the biggest office fires in history dropped some burning debris on cars, not causing holes from top to bottom as thermite eats through an entire engine block, or blowing up car after car.
Asfor Building 7, I go with the hypothesis that with over seven hours of unfought fires in Building Seven, the fires had plenty of time to spread to multiple floors. Since I hired Jim Millette to test for thermite in the red-grey chips and he found none, and there is no post-thermite debris at WTC, no evidence of thermite damage at the end of the broken columns, and no satellite images of temperatures above 1400F in the debris. Also, there are no water explosions from the millions of gallons of water the firefighters poured onto the hot debris pile. Here's what happens when you mix water and a relatively small amount of molten steel: it explodes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_HvLvcTMUQ. That did NOT happen when the firefighters poured all that water on the fires. They were worried it might, but it didn't happen. I just can't see evidence of thermite. This is why NIST didn't look for it. Because they followed the evidence, and the evidence did NOT point to thermite in any way. With literally hundreds of experiencced controlled demolition people scouring through the debris (hired because they knew how to navigate a debris pile of a collapsed building), not ONE of these experienced experts or blue-collar workers in the field found one shred of evidence for thermite. The one positive piece of evidence you had was the thermitic dust study, which is why I focused on that to see if the test for thermite was for real. It's not. The rest--thermitic arson, cars burnbed by thermite instead of plain old flaming debris, etc. is speculation with no evidence at all.
And both Crazy Chainsaw and I have said that gypsum dust floating in the the air can't smother a fire. You say it can. Would you agree that in regular office fires, there is lots of gypsum dust from the drywall and cubicles on every floor? Based on your theory, firefighters would have nothing to worry about. Gypsum dust would just put the fires out for them.
