Prove Me Wrong (9/11 WTC Collapse FAQ)
Posted by kozmicstu on Friday, 02 February 2007 16:13:32
I'm posting this here because I'm tired of repeating myself in multiple threads and saying exactly the same thing over and over again. I will attempt to be concise, illustrative and exact in what I say, and put everything into laymans terms for you. As the title suggests, the aim of the thread is for somebody to prove me wrong, if I am. Please, resposes ONLY to the points made in THIS posting - attempts to deviate, change subject or confuse the issues at hand will not be dignified with responses. This thread is about buildings WTC1 and WTC2. WTC7 is entirely different and needs to be tackled seperately. Please do not respond to the thread with questions/info about WTC7, OR the Pentagon attack.
I have, in fact, said this four times now on seperate threads, and nobody seems to grasp what I am saying, so I'm going to put this forward step by step with as little room for confusion as possible. I'd appreciate it if you could do me the honour of genuinely and carefully reading what I say, and then you may commence proving me wrong. I promise you, I come not from a point of ignorance, but from having heard all of the questions and accusations and given them due thought. Please don't just throw insults at me.
How did the Twin Towers fall down in 11 and 9 seconds?!
Several people keep asking exactly the same questions, and I can easily assume they've all at least been told that the fastest you can fall from 417m is 9 seconds, and are amazed because the NIST says that the towers collapsed in apporximately 9 seconds. Considering that there was a large amount of material in the way of their descent, providing resistance, this doesn't seem to make sense.
1. The NIST says that a complete collapse took place in 11 seconds
No, they don't. NIST never said that. Nowehere is it stated that the entire building collapsed in 11 seconds. This point is the one that seems to be catching most people out. The NIST does not say that the buildings collapsed in 11 or 9 seconds. There is no video showing the collapse of the buildings in 11 seconds. There is simply no way to tell how long it took for the top section of the building to reach the ground, nor how long it took for a 'total collapse' to take place. This is because of the amount of smoke and dust obscuring the bottom of the building. When the smoke begins to clear in the videos, you can quite clearly see large sections of building that have not yet collapsed.
2. So where did 11 seconds come from? Are you saying the NIST are wrong?
"NIST estimated the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground after the collapse initiated in each of the towers to be approximately 11 seconds for WTC 1 and approximately 9 seconds for WTC 2" Now, read through that sentence again carefully, particularly noting the bit where it says "the elapsed times for the first exterior panels to strike the ground". The exterior panels, as the observant ones may have already noticed, are not part of the central column of the building, and would not necessarily be slowed down by impacts and resistance on the way down. Therefore, you could expect the time it would take for these panels to hit the ground would be quite close to 'free fall' speeds. They were.
EDIT: I have added a video of the collapse in which you can clearly see debris falling fatser than the collapse of the tower. If the collapse is happening at speeds indicative of free fall, the debris could not be falling faster. That WOULD be impossible.
3. So how long did the buildings take to completely collapse?
Even NIST do not speculate. I have not heard a single conspiracy theorist speculate. You quite simply cannot tell, because of the smoke. What the NIST do say is that "significant portions of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation before they, too, began to collapse." This suggests a total collapse time of 25-35 seconds. I have watched the collapse videos, and I definitely can see large portions of building still standing behind the smoke during the collapses.
It is important to remember that no timings can be guaranteed OR accurate, as there is always going to be considerable margin for error amid the calculations. An error of only 1 or 2 seconds can also make a huge difference.
4. But the steel could not have melted at the temperatures inside the towers
No, they could not. Again, nobody ever said they could have, except for those who are creating straw men for the purposes of their arguments (and possibly some people who didn't know any better, but they can be safely ignored). What is entirely plausible is that the steel may have weakened under the increasing temperature. When you consider the pressure that the steel was under, it is plausible that part of the support structure buckled. There is another important and subtle point to be made here, and I'm going to devote the entirety of question 5 to it.
5. The steel should not have buckled at the temperatures inside the tower
Now, this all comes down to who you want to believe. Nobody knows for certain what the temperatures WERE inside the tower. Nobody is exactly certain how high a temperature is needed to buckle the steel. Nobody knows how much damage had been done to the steel by the aircraft impact. What can be said is that it is PLAUSIBLE that the impact of the aircraft damaged the fireproofing. With the fireproofing damaged, it is again PLAUSIBLE that the steel could have reached temperatures up to and exceeding 1000C. At those temperatures, the steel would be seriously weakened, and could easily have been weakened enough to cause buckling under the not negligable force of the top section of the building. Notice, the most important thing about this section is that it is emphatically not impossible for this to have happened. Those who claim it is impossible are, simply put, wrong. Note, I am not saying that the steel melted, nor am I saying that there were temperatures high enough to melt the steel. I had an analogy using a spoon and a Zippo lighter. You can weaken a steel spoon to the point where it will bend and eventually snap using just a Zippo lighter, whose flame never reaches the melting point of the steel. You are not melting the steel in the spoon, just as the fires did not melt the steel girders in WTC, but you are significantly weakening it to the point where it becomes strucurally unsound.
6. The top section of the building should have broken off and fallen sideways
It would require some considerable force from the side for this to have happened. The only forces acting on the building were wind and gravity. The top section of the builing had a massive amount of inertia, and so the wind would have little effect, not to mention that it was still connected to the bottom section of the building, keeping it centred. Gravity, on the other hand, would be acting directly downwards on the top section of the building with a huge amount of force, pulling it in a straight trajectory through the rest of the building. The building would collapse roughly onto it's own footprint, with the central column leading the outside by a small distance, due to the fact that the center was the first part to start falling. As it falls, it would gain momentum and velocity, as more weight and more gravitational acceleration take effect. Due to the aforementioned massive (and increasing) inertia, each successive floor would cause less deceleration to the falling section than the one before it. Thus, the falling objects velocity would increase exponentially.
7. But WTC7 fell at free fall speeds!
Yes, yes it did. I know I said I wasn't going to talk about WTC7, but I'll just quickly answer this. I hope sincerely it doesn't distract from the main point of this post. the top floors of WTC7 fell at free fall speed, or near enough. This is because there were no resistive forcs to their motion. If you look at the video, you see that all the floors of WTC7 are falling in parallel. Because of this, no one floor is resisting the downward motion of those above it. This is the exact opposite of how the WTC1&2 buildings collpased: with them, the top part of the building fell and would have hit the bottom part as it came down. This is why it is important to remember that those buildings DID NOT fall at 'free fall' speeds. WTC7, however, started falling from near the bottom. You can clearly see this in the videos. Collapsing from the bottom means that there is no upward forces to resist the downward motion, besides the contact force of the ground. As you can again see quite clearly in the video, the ground is pulverising each floor as they hit it, as you would expect. Since there is little or no time when the building is travelling through air, there is no air resistance. As to why it started collapsing from the bottom, I can't adequetly answer as there is not any information to go on. There was a large fire on floor 5, though. Another thing that is important to note is that the collapse of WTC7 was not unexpected - because of creaking sounds and parts of the wall leaning outwards in a dangerous fashion, the building had been evacuate for fear of a collapse
8. Will this post ever end?
I hope to see people replying sensibly - remember, if you deviate from the topics in this post, be prepared to be ignored. I'd like somebody to tell me exactly why the above is entirely 'impossible' as claimed by many of the theorists. I'm not interested in links to other sites or stories of professors or engineers who believe otherwise, or letters people have sent to important figures. I want you to actually explain, in exact, clear, precise detail, why the above is IMPOSSIBLE. Nothing less will do. When you have ruled out all impossibilities, as Sherlock Holmes said, the possible - however unlikely, is undoubtedly true. If it is not impossible, then it is the explanation that makes the most logical sense.
An open challenge, then. Convince me.
This video shows the collapse of the North Tower. Note in particular that there is debris falling to the sides of the building that are falling considerably faster than the rest of the building, thus showing that the top section of the building is not in free fall
This image shows a huge amount the debris from the North Tower collapse hitting WTC7
Here is a picture taken from the South-West of WTC7, showing the damage to the structure and the smoke from large firescoming from a large proportion of the building. It may not have been hit by a plane, but it was definitely severly damaged, and clearly was quite seriously ablaze.
Post edited by kozmicstu on Saturday, 03 February 2007 23:33:49
911, collapse FAQ