Lanval wrote:Colin,
There are so many things wrong with your thinking here, it's hard to pin them down. Let's stick with the basics.
Downward force:
Once the upper stories begin to collapse, the downward force of the weight is many, many times the static force of the building. The structural supports were not intended to manage those kinds of forces. Period.
So it's the dynamic load of all those floors crashing vertically down that caused each successive floor to collapse? Then why don't we see a pancake of floors arranged around the central core? That central core was massive.
The steel wasn't melted. Perhaps you should read the Pop Mech article again; the jet fuel burned at a temp guaranteed to reduce the structural strength of the steel 50% or more. At that level, collapse is all but guaranteed. The jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, either; other stuff continued to burn. The NIST report, of which you are bizarrely dismissive, points out that following the impact of the jets, there were pockets of fire in excess of 1800 degrees, or 75% of the temperature necessary to melt steel,
The above paragraph begins with the statement that "The steel wasn't melted". OK, fine. Then what was that orange-yellow liquid pouring from the windows? What was that stuff dripping from the beams and laying in pools for weeks after? A reservoir of heat so large and intense that NASA commented on it.
What is your basis for stating the lower stories were "happily" supporting anything? On the contrary, they were experience increasing stress from the upper impact damage, changing weight distributions, increasing heat and so on. Is it your experience that failure is immediate and systemic in structural systems, or that failure begins in one point of impact and then radiates outward? Now imagine that we're not talking about impact, but a long term stress event.
The problem many people have is the completely symmetrical, vertical nature of the collapse. Neither the fires nor the points of impact were symmetrically distributed. Nothing in nature falls like that.
"According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. 'What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors,' Sunder notes, 'it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.'
So all of these buildings had an "unusual design" ? OK fine. I can see "a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down". But the entire
building collapsed, not just a section of it. Instantaneously, perfectly, all together. Again, that just doesn't happen. You have to
make it happen.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. There was no firefighting in WTC 7,' Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: 'Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time.'"
"current hypothesis". Now who's a theorist?
What was pressurizing the line? Pumps? If they were electrically powered, wouldn't someone have turned them OFF? They'd have to move a lot of diesel up five floors for quite a while to make a fire big enough to melt steel. Why didn't anyone see these raging, diesel-fuelled fires? We saw and firefighters reported small, cool fires, just like the ones in WTC 1 and 2. These were nothing like the raging infernos in other buildings referenced by Colin.
...You said before that there was no precedent for this event, building don't just collapse. Well, it turn out they do, especially if they have an "unusual design" which creates singular (as in not reproducible in other buildings with different designs) problems and failures...
Where? Show us another example of a symmetrical, vertical collapse due to fire or impact of a high-rise steel framed building anywhere, ever.
... can we agree that the answer to the original question must be "no"? I ask on the basis that if you don't have enough "Questions" to warrant a claim of conspiracy, then you must agree that the conspiracy theories themselves don't hold water.
Some of the conspiracy theories do not "hold water". Holographic aircraft, for example, or "there was no flight 83", or "remote-controlled aircraft". A lot of the stuff you see is obviously silly.
But many, many questions remain unanswered.
Where, for example, was the USAF?
