Quote:
Originally Posted by ZNPaaneah
You have a force that is directional -- an airplane traveling at 200-300 mph. You have a fire and explosion that could not have taken place in a uniform controlled environment.
With those two factors the odds of the building imploding upon itself without tipping in any direction is a million to one. The odds of two buildings doing it is 1,000,000,000,000 to 1. But what about 3 buildings, where the third building isn't even hit by anything more than debris?
In the entire human history there have only been 3 steel frame high rise buildings that completely imploded upon themselves due to fire. There have been many horrific fires in high rise, steel framed buildings, but only 3 imploded. All three collapsed on 9/11 at the World Trade Center. We have had fires that raged for 24 hours without them collapsing, yet the two towers both collapse after little more than an hour, and building 7 collapses about 8 hours after the attack.
Any forensic investigation of this fire would look at the steel. However, in this case the forensic investigators were not given access to the steel, it was guarded by the US military and shipped to China to be recycled.
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I've heard conspiracists question about the third building, and I'm not sure about that, and for that matter whether a plane actually hit the pentagon or not.
The other two building were more simple to explain. The explosion damages the fire retardant that covers the steel, which heats up and buckles under the weight. Fire protection systems were all destroyed. I'd like to study it more, because structural steel should not be bearing the compressive loads, concrete should be.
I watched both buildings go down. The collapse of each building was shocking, though predictable to me, and did not seem out of the ordinary. We would have to compare the momentum of the airplane (mass times velocity) to the building mass to determine its expected lateral movement. The explosion is a different phenomena, as was the heat produced by burning fuel. So each of the three events should be examined individually (crash, explosion, fire.)
The rising temperature within the structural posts determined the diminishing yield strength of the steel (concrete would not be so vulnerable to heat) to uphold the weight above the damaged area. The 2nd tower was hit on a lower floor, hence more weight to uphold, and that building failed in a shorter time.