I believe there was already one engineering analysis done which blamed the fire from diesel fuel stored in the building for the collapse but concluded that the likelihood of it actually being the cause of the collapse was very small.

I guess there's more than one study afoot?

B

The study I referred to was done by FEMA.

In the past you were questioning the Pentagon crash as well. I have a friend that picked charred bodies and jet aircraft parts from the building for a month I should put you guys together to have a little debate.

BYU, is funded by the students that go there, is there a class at Berkley that discusses the merits of George W Bush's policy in the Middle East?

Posted Sunday, Sep. 3, 2006
A lack of identifiable plane wreckage, among other anomalies, has helped fuel skepticism about the official explanation of Sept. 11 damage to the Pentagon, left. Here's more on that debate and a few other Internet-fueled conspiracy theories that still thrive

THE TOWERS' COLLAPSE

• THE CLAIM: Explosives brought down the Twin Towers. Critics of the official explanation point to such clues as the pattern and timing of dust and debris blown out from the floors, the vertical fall of the towers and two seismic tremors that coincided with their collapse.

• THE FACTS: The impact of the Boeing 767s damaged support columns and steel floor trusses, causing the inward collapse of perimeter columns, which pulled floors straight down. A misquote of a demolition expert propagated the explosives theory. Seismic spikes, caused by debris hitting the ground, were recorded 10 sec. after each tower started to fall.

THE MYSTERY OF WTC 7

• THE CLAIM: WTC 7 also contained explosives since fire alone has never felled a modern skyscraper. Authorities have delayed releasing a WTC 7 report to hide the truth.

• THE FACTS: A few critical elements--including damage on the south face, unusual structural design to accommodate a Con Edison substation, extreme weight bearing on floors, and long-burning diesel fuel leaked from large emergency generators--compromised WTC 7's structural integrity. The draft report is expected in early 2007.

HOLES IN THE PENTAGON

• THE CLAIM: A missile or smaller plane--not Flight 77--struck the Pentagon because the size of two holes (in Ring C and Ring E) were too small to have been made by a 757, which has a wingspan of nearly 125 ft.

• THE FACTS: Witnesses saw the 757 hit the Pentagon. The plane lost its wings when one hit the ground and the other slammed into the building's west wall before the Boeing's fuselage tore a 75-ft. hole in the outermost Ring E. The jet's landing gear caused the 12-ft. hole in inner Ring C. But to question Flight 77's demise is to question the fate of the 64 people onboard; the remains of all but one have been identified.

SCRAMBLE

• THE CLAIM: Fighter jets within range of the hijacked planes must have been under orders to stand down, since none from the 28 Air Force bases in the area was scrambled.

• THE FACTS: There are seven alert sites on the U.S. mainland, each with two active aircraft, that can scramble fighters. The 9/11 commission concluded that F-15s were scrambled within 6 min. of notification of the hijacking of Boston's Flight 11. Because hijackers had dismantled the planes' transponders, the F-15s could not identify the endangered aircraft. Details of the intercepts' performance are now being questioned.
From the Sep. 11, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

His comments, as I recall, were that the 1-1.5" of cementacious monokote (sp?) fire retardent applied during construction to protect the structural support beams and vertical floor struts from fire was probably damaged and/or shaken off by the impact. In the absence of this monocoat the structural steel was exposed. The steel 'frame' was designed with a specific geometry and tensile strength. The fires from the jet fuel were enough to heat the steel and welds enough to cause it to start loosing tensile strength. That, and the fact that some vertical struts suspending the floors were probably damaged by the impact of the plane, caused the structural integrity of that floor to be damaged and start to deform. The deformation put additional stress on other beams and struts, far exceeding their load factor safety margins, causing further deformation and stresses, eventually leading to failure of the struts and/or beams on the floor where the fire occured. Once one floor fails, the rest of the floors above pancake down in a domino effect, massivly exceeding the load factor on the lower floors, causing them to pancake as well. This is the essence of what I remember from the conversation, and I hope I am not mis-stating his comments. He also said that the fire (and probably the police) personnel were usually aware of this potential for failure in this type of situation, and were even more brave than the media portrayed, as they knew the building could/would collapse!

I also asked him why the Empire state building did not collapse when hit by a B25 during WW2. As I recall, he said the B25 was several hundred mph slower and therefore hit with much less energy (KE=1/2 mV^2, with the energy going up as the square of the velocity). He also said that the B25 contained avgas instead of jet fuel with different burn properties, and that the Empire state building was a rivited steel structure instead of welded, and therefore stronger in his opinion.

Bldg 7 was not truck by a plane. It was 40 story skyscraper that completely collapsed on itself at 5pm on 9/11.

I think there was also something about different design of superstructure, in which the Empire State's "Old-fashioned" construction had load bearing walls both external and internal while the WTC was strictly internal. The ESB thus had weight distributed evenly over more members from the outter walls to the inner. In contrast, all of the load-bearing in the WTC was shifted from the outter walls to the inner core. The load-bearing members were thus not distributed over the entire area of each floor. The cetral core carried the full burden so that anything affecting the inner core's structural integrity would threaten the entire building.

Why didn't the earlier fertilizer bomb bring down the building? Wasn't parked among the inncer core beams? The beams didn't get hot enough for long enough?

B

OK, sorry, I wasn't aware of Building 7 and we didn't discuss it. I was in the Cardiac Care Unit at the time, and only remember the discussion on the WTC. I should have read your question more carefully - what are the published reason(s) for the collapse of bldg 7?

From memory, the FEMA report says there were large diesel tanks in the building for emergency generators. Somehow one of the fuel lines from the tank ruptured, started a fire which brought down the whole building. The report concedes that the likelihood of this actually happening is extremely small. The fact that the 9/11 commission report did not address the collapse of Bldg 7 fuels the speculation and alternative hypotheses.

Here's a link that should show the collapse of Bldg 7:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=SCH20060826&articleId=3075

I think I'll wait for the engineering report that Time says is the official report.

The link you provided failed for me.

Have you a link to the FEMA report?

B

My problem with conspiracy theorists is that they take a small truth and turn it into a fake orgasm of conspiracy and brainiac mind games. They don't realize that they do more harm than good because the cloud the issue so much that the potential truth will never be believed. I think much of it has to do with ego's and book sales.

I am with you on that, brother.

B

Here's a link to a copy of the FEMA report on bldg 7. It has the flaw of being interspersed with commentary but I couldn't find the clean copy I read a long time ago:

http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/wtc/WTC_ch5.htm

The link didn't work for me on my old computer but did on my wife's new Mac.

I have a hard time reconciling the fact the second plane's fuel spewed out the other side of the building in a big fireball and yet that was the tower that dropped first, after the fires were subsiding.

I also have an issue with either of these tower strikes taking out the central core. There was nothing standing higher than about 10 stories afterwards. What happened to the cores?

Tower 7 is a complete anomaly to me. It had conventional contruction, completely different than towers 1 & 2, and yet managed to crumble in the same manner without being impacted with a plane or any serious debris.