Hi all,
I'm still doing research on the collapse for my next video. Read through the rest of the NIST report etc...
Out of curiosity I checked into the Landmark building demolition in Texas. Here's a bit of background:
At 380 feet (116 metres) tall this was the tallest building to be demolished in Texas and the 15th tallest building in the United States to be demolished at that time.
- The Landmark Tower was imploded on Saturday, March 18, 2006 at 7:42 am.
Ok, I got a copy of the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79sJ1bMR6VQ
Loaded it into Final Cut Pro, and proceeded to find the start of collapse - I chose the big explosions at the base (hey, the flashes are so easy to see, very convenient) preceding the collapse (T=0), following it as far as I could see things still dropping. There's a lot of dust obscuring the final moments. My final estimate is T=7 - 8 seconds
Freefall for 116 metres is 4.86 sec
Observed collapse was in the 7sec range.
a=4.73 m/s2 for the overall collapse. About 50% the rate of freefall.
So it isn't clear at all from this evidence that freefall collapse is proof of controlled demolition.
In fact it's exceedingly unclear to me how one could engineer 7 floors of WTC7 to simultaneously collapse without requiring large and very noticeable demolition charges. Since there is no evidence of such charges going off, logic dictates that the mechanism was something along the lines that NIST postulates.
Thermite also fails completely to explain a simultaneous global collapse, since it couldn't conceivably have acted in such an instantaneous fashion applied to PART of an already ongoing collapse.
Note: in both the WTC7 and WTC 1 and 2 cases global collapse - at whatever speed you like - was already underway without requiring explosives. As Leslie Robertson (head SE of the towers) pointed out, once the upper block of floors was falling, nothing could have stopped the towers from collapsing.
With WTC7, once column 79 failed, exposing Truss 1 to the impact of 30+ floors of collapsing debris, it would have taken a miracle to stop the rest of the E-W failure of trusses and columns. Perhaps the best-case scenario might have been the survival of Truss 3, holding up 1/4 of the building.
Is it surprising that the whole building went down given the events? No. Very, very unusual and rare, but then 9-11 was an extremely rare event, unlikely to happen again.
However, to the skeptical, non-paranoid mind, a rare occurrence is not proof of a government plot. Those who wish to blame George W. Bush ( a surprisingly incompetent leader, if you'll excuse my judgement) forget that he had been in office less than 8 months when the attacks occurred. Considering the immense effort to plan and execute an enormous conspiracy as the 'Truthers' allege, it would be equally necessary for the Clinton administration to have initiated the efforts - how else? Even the development and testing of special silent explosives, and nano-thermite horizontal cutting devices would surely have required multi-year efforts.
Why isn't Bill Clinton being vilified for this alleged war crime? He's as guilty as Bush is.
*runs away from the zombie thread*
