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A compilation of physical
impossibilities & overlooked evidence |
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in the official explanations
for the destruction of the |
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World Trade Center Complex |
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by C. Thurston |
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updated 11/07 |
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This
report is divided into the following sections: |
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Dramatic Features of the Tower Destruction that are Ignored
by All the Official Theories |
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I feel
a sense of urgency over this issue because it involves the dangerous
influence of a powerful,
highly organized but factually incorrect set of beliefs that continues to
have a strong hold on the minds of many Americans and many others as well.
These beliefs inherently create an unconscious mental disconnect from factual
reality that has been exploited as the basis for drastic changes in law and
policy that would have been otherwise impossible. |
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I am
wary of any belief
whether it be mine or someone else's if it is promoted and accepted with
little or no substantial verification. I'm learning to consider the
possibility that a tempting new belief may have been engineered to serve the
purposes of others unknown to me. |
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My
independent research efforts into this matter are of a volunteer nature and
are motivated by a desire to learn the truth about these events. Even if you
disagree with my conclusions I hope you can at least share my intentions. This report
is primarily an information assist for others who may also be looking into
these questions on their own. |
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The information
presented here can be easily verified and/or expanded upon with simple
internet searches. Many good sources are available. Independent research is a
healthy exercise for anyone's critical and logical faculties it is also a
profound opportunity to reclaim control of your understanding and
perspective. How
can we hope to control the future if our beliefs about the past and the
present are the products of deliberate deception? |
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How
were three
steel frame high-rise structures completely destroyed on 9/11? Many conflicting theories are
being put forward, but unlike most of history's unanswered puzzles, the
destruction of the WTC Towers and the mysterious collapse of WTC7 are matters
of physics. We cannot even begin to define the crime of 9/11 until we have a
basic understanding of the physical events that we all witnessed. The
consideration of who had the means, motive and opportunity can only begin
once we know what actually happened! |
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Existing
photographic and video evidence that has undisputed authenticity and is a
part of the public record presents a number of striking problems with the belief that the
airplanes initiated a chain of events that ultimately destroyed the Towers,
and of course Building 7 was not hit by an airplane. To
clearly see these problems, it is helpful to first have a basic understanding of materials
behavior and the design of the Towers, and then become aware of the distinct
and remarkable features of the events themselves. This report includes a critical
evaluation of the leading "official" explanations, followed by an
examination of the compelling forensic evidence that is consistently either
ignored or misrepresented by these explanations. |
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Structural
steel has been
used in the construction of buildings, bridges, towers, etc., for well over
100 years and its characteristics and behavior under adverse conditions have
been well tested and analyzed over this long period of time. The greatest
risks to modern highrise buildings (apart from military attacks and severe
earthquakes) are fire, high winds and accidental airplane collisions.
Consequently, the engineering and design of tall buildings must guarantee that they can successfully withstand
these adversities. |
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The
World Trade Center Towers were the world's tallest buildings when they were
built. Historic innovations in high-rise design were conceived and implemented
in order to
safely reach such unprecedented heights. Structural steel buildings up to
this time were typically designed with the support columns arranged in a
grid-like configuration. This type of framework meant that the office space
was periodically interrupted by these evenly spaced columns. The
Towers, however, were designed according to a "tube" concept,
wherein load-bearing columns are moved to the perimeter of the structure and ALSO
concentrated in a central core. The office floors could then be suspended
between like large square donuts. This design provided a column-free office
environment and also produced a very strong, flexible and relatively
lightweight structure with tremendous sheer strength. The Towers could be 100
stories high and still withstand hurricane force winds and collisions from
large commercial jet aircraft. |
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Engineering
News-Record
reported in 1964 that the specially manufactured high strength steel
perimeter columns
had strength significantly greater than the 5 X load requirement of standard
building codes, stating that "live loads on these columns can be
increased more than 2000% before failure occurs." From the book City
in the Sky
(Times Books, Henry Hold and Company, LLC, 2003, page 133), we're told
that the calculations of the engineers working on the Tower design showed
that ALL the columns on one side could be cut, along with the two corners and
some of the columns on each adjacent side, and the building would still be
strong enough to withstand a 100-mile-per-hour wind! http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.html Post-9/11
assertions that the Towers were poorly designed or poorly built do not square
with the historic record. They were built to be incredibly strong and were
considered to be engineering marvels. John Skilling, the lead designer, won
prestigious awards for their design excellence. |
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Considerations
Regarding Fire: |
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1)
In order for structural steel to literally melt and change state into a flowing
liquid, its internal temperature (as opposed to the surrounding temperature)
must be raised to 1538˚C (2800˚F). |
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2) The
strength of steel
is correlated to its internal temperature at a given moment. While internal
temperature will gradually rise during prolonged exposure to constant high
temperature. If the temperature stabilizes, the steel will not continue to
weaken as a cumulative effect. As its temperature changes either up or down
its strength also changes accordingly. |
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3) At high internal temperatures below the melting point, steel
can lose its load bearing strength and rigidity and become subject to
bending, sagging, etc. Much well documented testing has been done over the
years to determine these temperatures in order to predict the behavior of
steel structures in intense fire scenarios. To summarize the significant
consensus of these tests, the strength of steel is reduced to 20% of
normal when it
reaches an internal temperature of around 720˚C (1328˚F). |
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This is
significant because, as mentioned, standard building design specifications
require that structures be able to bear five times their maximum
theoretical load
(20% = 1/5). This means that even if all the steel in a building reached an
internal temp of 720˚C, the building would still be able to carry its
maximum load. Since maximum theoretical loads rarely occur, the steel
temperature in a typical situation could probably go significantly higher
before failure would occur. |
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For
example, fire tests carried out in the 1990's at the Building Research
Establishment
test facility at Cardington in Bedfordshire, UK showed that the performance
of whole buildings can exceed the performance of its parts. An 8-story closed
test structure was subjected to atmospheric temperatures of 1200˚C
(2192˚F), causing unprotected steel beams to eventually reach internal
temperatures over 1100˚C (2012˚F). This caused deformations in some
of the steel, but the structure did not collapse. Keep in mind that real
fires in closed spaces cannot be sustained due to oxygen starvation. |
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4) In addition to being relatively
lightweight in proportion to its strength, one of steel's best qualities and
a major reason it is used in building construction is its ability to
dissipate heat quickly and stand up unscathed in even the worst "towering inferno"
conflagrations on record. Open test structures were subjected to
prolonged and intense fires of up to 1200˚C (2192˚F) in an
international study of structural steel car parks, but internal steel temperatures never
reached higher than 360˚C (680˚F). Fire temperature and internal
steel temperature are NOT the same. This is why meat thermometers were
invented. Remember
360˚C for
later when we look at the various theories and claims based on the unproven
assumption that the Towers "collapsed". |
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5) The Towers were designed to
withstand impacts from the largest commercial aircraft that were in use at
the time they were built. Contrary to initial reports, the airplanes on 9/11
were not significantly larger than this, and the jet aircraft of those
days carried jet fuel just like they do now. Building survival is accomplished through
redundancy and dynamic redistribution of loads to the surviving parts of the
structure. |
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According
to John Skilling, the lead designer of the Towers (from a Seattle Times interview
from February 27, 1993), an impact from a Boeing 707 travelling at 600 mph
"would result in only local damage" and that our analysis
indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the
airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A
lot of people would be killed. But, he says, The building structure
would still be there. |
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6)
Prior to 9/11 (or since) no steel-frame highrise has ever collapsed from
fire. There
have been numerous cases of high-rise fires far more severe than those
observed on 9/11. Here's a few examples: |
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Caracas, Venezuela, Oct, 2004, 56 story building burned for 17 hours over 26
floors |
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LA,
May 1988, 1st Interstate Bank 62 stories, 5 floors burned for 3.5 hours |
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Philadelphia, Feb, 1991, Meridian Plaza. 38 stories, 8 floors burned for 18
hours |
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New
York, Aug, 1970, New York Plaza, 50 stories, burned for six hours |
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Madrid, February 2005, Windsor Bldg, 32 stories, burned for 24 hours, total
loss |
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All of these
fires were true "towering infernos" with dramatic, raging emergent
flames bursting out from entire floors of the building through shattered
windows. None of these buildings collapsed. |
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Jet
fuel (refined kerosene) is a hydrocarbon and burns at a known maximum temperature in an
open fire when supplied with unlimited amounts of air (as opposed to pure
oxygen) of approx 1000˚C (1832˚F). Temperatures are lower if the
fire is oxygen-starved, as evidenced by black smoke. Significantly higher
temperatures are possible only with forced mixing of pure oxygen. Early
reports wildly overestimated the amount of jet fuel involved based on tank
capacity. The planes had capacity for intercontinental flight, but carried
only the fuel needed for domestic flight plans. |
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It is
now acknowledged that most of the jet fuel, which is highly volatile, was
consumed in the first few minutes by the huge fireballs at the time of impact. The idea
that large pools of jet fuel could be burning for the entire 1-2 hours
preceding the Towers' destruction is not consistent with the behavior of a
volatile and highly flammable liquid in a high temperature environment. It
would have either ignited, or if inadequate oxygen was available to support
combustion it would have left the building as a vapor along with the smoke.
Indeed, the smell of jet fuel was reported over a wide area. |
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The
burning jet fuel did of course start the fires inside the buildings, which
were more severe in the North Tower where more of the jet fuel was taken
inside the building. But the jet fuel could not have been a significant
ongoing fuel for
the fires. Known combustible materials within the buildings (carpets, desks,
paper, plastics, etc.) are also mostly hydrocarbon in nature and can produce
combustion temperatures no higher than jet fuel. House fires typically
produce temperatures in the 500 - 650˚C range. |
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1) The airplane impacts into the
WTC were quite dramatic with the huge fireballs. After the first few minutes,
however, we simply had office building fires with some amount of
structural damage.
Interior damage is hard to determine based on visual evidence. The investigative
report released by NIST in 2005 claims that 14-15% of the core columns in each Tower
were severed. While often repeated as fact, this is an estimate derived from
questionable computer simulations. Even if true, this amount of damage would
leave the buildings well-within their load-bearing redundancy. More on the
NIST Report later. |
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2) Airplanes are made of aluminum
which is a much lighter and weaker material compared to structural steel.
Airplanes may look big and substantial, but they are actually made to be as lightweight
as possible.
Their aluminum skin is only 2 mm in thickness. |
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3) Both buildings quickly
re-stabilized after impact and showed no observable signs of instability or
the beginnings of structural failure prior to the sudden onset of their destruction. |
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4)
The North Tower,
unlike the South Tower, took a direct hit with the plane completely
disappearing inside the building. If the load bearing central core of the building
(see construction photos, above) had been severed by the impact of the plane,
structural distress would have been evident almost immediately. Apart from
the fires, the North Tower remained stable until the onset of destruction, almost
two hours after impact. |
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5)
The South Tower
took a glancing blow at the corner, which created a very dramatic fireball
but apparently had little significant impact on the structural core, and less
fuel was carried inside the building. People were evacuating from the upper
floors through the impact zone via stairwells in the central core area prior
to the onset of destruction. The fires were smaller in this Tower, but it was
destroyed first, 56 minutes after impact. |
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The
destruction of the buildings has been attributed by official investigators
and various "experts" promoted by the mainstream media primarily to
fire causing one form or another of structural failure leading to "total
progressive collapse". While most of these theories allow that impact damage
was probably a contributing factor, few have suggested that this damage alone
caused the total destruction of the buildings. While
we look at these so-called "collapse" theories, it is very
important to keep in mind that the use of the word "collapse" is
a misnomer.
What these theories are REALLY saying is that the upper part of the building
above the impact zone CRUSHED the lower undamaged portion of the building.
Remember that the structural integrity of the Towers was undiminished below
the impact zones and much heavier and stronger materials were used in the
lower parts of the building in order to support the much lighter upper
floors. |
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1) One of the first explanations
was put forward by the American Society of Civil Engineers in an article titled "Why
Did the World Trade Center Collapse? A Simple Analysis", by Zdenek Bazant and Yong
Zhou. Their theory depends on the simultaneous failure of the majority of the
columns on a given floor, which they say would allow the upper part of the
building to fall freely onto the lower part, thus allegedly triggering a
sequence of events that would "doom" the entire tower. They
acknowledge that this "triggering" condition would require more
than half of the column steel on a given floor to reach temperatures exceeding
800˚C
(1472˚F), but they fail to distinguish between fire temperature and
internal steel temperature and offer no explanation for how this could
possibly occur. |
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An obvious
fallacy with
theories of this type is that column strength and heat conductivity were NOT segmented
by the vertical spacing of the office floors. Load-bearing strength was
vertically continuous over many "floors" for any given region of
the building. The columns in the core structure were specially fabricated to
be multiple stories in height and were joined together by welded connections.
Dense cross-bracing between columns created a monolithic entity that was
structurally independent of the office floor attachment locations. Heat
produced by burning material on a particular office floor would also be vertically
dissipated over
a multi-story region of the building. It really makes no sense to talk about
about column behavior on a "given floor". The columns didn't have
"floors". |
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We've
already seen that high internal steel temperatures are very difficult to
achieve over a
large area in a large structure. Not only is Bazant and Zhou's so-called
triggering condition clearly impossible given the test data presented
earlier, but the results of the examination of steel recovered from the fire
zones, as reported by NIST in 8/04, showed no evidence of temperatures over 625˚C
(1157˚F) and only rare instances of temperatures over 250˚C
(482˚F)! This is consistent with the international fire test results
mentioned earlier. |
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2) Another theory was put forward
by Thomas Eager,
a professor of materials engineering from MIT, that appeared in JOM, the
journal for the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and was also
presented in a NOVA interview that many people have seen. The transcript is
available online. Eager apparently believes that these buildings were not
designed to withstand a fire covering an entire single floor! (He doesn't
say where he gets this idea, but we know that Skilling certainly allowed
for this possibility.)
Because the spilling of the jet fuel may have caused this to happen, he
suggests that the heat from this type of fire scenario caused the floor slab
truss connections ("clips" he calls them) to fail
"unzipping" almost simultaneously around an entire floor causing
a pancaking sequence that also somehow pulled down the vertical support
structures. http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/experts/articles/eagar_nova/nova_eagar1.html |
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"Pancaking"
collapses are
sometimes seen in Third World countries where badly designed and poorly built
concrete structures are subjected to earthquakes. Modern American buildings
(including the WTC towers) are designed and built according to robust
specifications that require structural unification of horizontal and
vertical members.
This is done specifically to prevent pancaking floor collapses. Eager
also ignores the continuous vertical strength of the core structure and its
heavily cross-braced and unified design. Even if some of the floors had
somehow broken loose, the more heavily built column structures would have remained
standing. The floors did interconnect the core with the perimeter and they
added strength to the structure as a whole, but they were also designed to be
as lightweight as possible. |
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3) Two highly produced,
made-for-television specials have been particularly influential in
determining many people's beliefs about the destruction of the WTC Towers. Below
are two graphics used in the NOVA program "Why the Towers Fell". The one on the left
misrepresents the structural core of the building to look like mysterious
floating horizontal slabs with no vertical support! The one on the right is
from an animated sequence of falling floor trusses that is also very
misleading. Missing
from this animation
are at least three major components that would have prevented this behavior:
1) the perpendicular cross trusses, 2) the welded-plate wall connections, and
3) the steel floor pan that is connected to the trusses, onto which the
concrete slab is poured. The floor pan interconnects the trusses and provides
stiffness and strength to the entire floor system. |
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Another
TV special titled "Anatomy of the Collapse" was produced for the Discovery
Channel and also appeared shortly after 9/11. These two programs are similar
and include numerous fraudulent statements. We are told, for example, that
jet fuel had not been considered in the design of the Towers, that it had
saturated the buildings and that steel temperatures had reached 2000ΊF. None
of these statements are true. |
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We are
also told that the buildings would collapse without the floor trusses, that
the floor trusses were connected by only two bolts, that the perimeter walls
were comparable to sheets of cardboard and that the columns were like
free-standing wobbly sticks. The perimeter and core column structures were,
in fact, highly robust and independent structures unto themselves, each fully capable of standing
on its own. And the biggest lie of all? We are told that total destruction
was inevitable.
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3) The government report issued by
FEMA uses misleading
diagrams (below) to make it look to the casual, non-technical reader like
there was no central core at all! |
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A
careful reading of the fine print says the vertical members on the right side
of the diagrams are core columns and we are only looking at a detail of the
structure, but this is not obvious at a glance. There is also no indication
of the immense strength and dense cross bracing of the structural core of the
building. Many people seem to believe that the Towers were supported only
by the perimeter walls. It's easy to imagine a building collapsing if it were built to look
like this diagram! http://www.fema.gov/rebuild/mat/wtcstudy.shtm http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/official/fema.html Even
the 9/11 Commission Report, on page 558, claims that: "The interior core of
the buildings was a hollow steel shaft
" This is a blatantly false
statement with
no conceivable explanation other than the desire to intentionally deceive the
American public. The 9/11 Commission Report includes many other outright
lies, distortions and critical ommissions. See David Ray Griffin's book, The 9/11 Commission Report:
Ommissions and Distortions, for a comprehensive and thoroughly documented
examination of over one hundred of its deliberately deceptive failings. |
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Below is
another view of one of the Towers during construction. Compare it to the
diagrams above and the statement by the 9/11 Commission. This gives a good
look at how much of the footprint of the building was taken up by the core
structure and its massive design. |
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America,
who used to be so proud of her expertise and execution on every level, is now
it seems pleading incompetence in new creative ways every day, including projecting
that incompetence back into the past. Forgetting about the jet fuel and the
possibility that an entire floor might catch fire was bad enough but now
there's this: |
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4)
Hyman Brown, construction
manager of the WTC and University of Colorado civil engineering professor
said this in 2004 (quoting from the Boulder Weekly): |
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"It
is correct that the towers did not collapse because of the airliners hitting
it. But we do know how it collapsed and it has nothing to do with
conspiracy," says Brown. "What caused the building to collapse is
the airplane fuel and the fire-suppression system that we now have, which
basically blocks off five-floor blocks, so the fire cant go up and the fire
cant go down. You now have a fire confined to a five-floor area, burning at
2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The steel in that five-floor area melts. All the
tonnage above the five-floor area comes straight down when the steel melts.
That broke all the connections, and that caused the building to
collapse." |
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http://archive.boulderweekly.com/102104/coverstory.html |
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Who
could have guessed
that the fire suppression system, instead of causing the fires to die down
from lack of oxygen and depletion of flammable material like everybody
expected, actually caused the fires to become hotter! So hot that they melted
all the steel in a five floor area of the building! To fuel this fire, Mr.
Brown apparently assumes that unlimited quantities of jet fuel (and oxygen)
were available on all five floors of both buildings for up to two hours in a
1093˚C (2000˚F) environment. The behavior of volatile flammable liquids
in a high temperature environment would not allow this. |
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When Mr
Brown says that steel "melted", I think he means to say that it
failed the melting point of steel, as we've seen, is 1538˚C
(2800˚F). But failure is also a clear impossibility. Remember those open
steel test structures? They were subjected for a longer time to fire even
hotter than the one he imagines, but the highest recorded steel temperature never
went higher than 360C (680F) far below the temperature where failure could occur.
Mr. Brown's fire may have been confined to a five story region, but the steel
was still free to dissipate heat throughout the entire building framework. |
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Also,
to match his own description, this fire would have to fully engulf all five floors,
with large emergent flames bursting from every window on all sides of the
building. From photographic evidence we see only lots of black smoke with
flames here and there. And the "tonnage" he's speaking of is simply the upper
part of the structure that the lower part was designed to support. |
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I
wouldn't spend so much effort examining Mr. Brown's highly improbable theory,
except that he has been connected informally by the media to findings
reported by NIST,
the US government science agency that has recently completed a $20,000,000
investigation into the destruction of the WTC Towers. It was said in 2004 by
the media that Mr. Brown's views were supported by the preliminary findings
of the NIST investigation! |
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