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Can Physics Rewrite History? |
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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 02/08 |
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This
report is divided into the following sections: |
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Dramatic Features of the Destruction that are Ignored by 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 and highly organized, but factually incorrect, set of beliefs that continues
to have a strong hold on the minds of many Americans, as well as others around
the world. These beliefs inherently create an unconscious mental disconnect
from reality, while provoking misdirected feelings of fear and anger. This result
has unfortunately been exploited as an opportunity for drastic changes in law
and policy that would have been impossible otherwise. |
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I am
wary of any important belief whether it is mine or someone else's if it
is promoted and accepted with little or no substantial verification. I am
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 intended as 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. I have provided many relevant links to good sources
of data and analysis on both sides of the issues. Independent research is a
healthy exercise for anyone's critical and logical faculties it is also a
profound opportunity to reclaim possession of our understanding and
perspective.
How can we hope
to control our 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 have
been put forward, but unlike most of history's unanswered puzzles, the
destruction of the WTC Towers and the mysterious collapse of WTC Building 7
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
airplane impacts initiated a chain of events that ultimately destroyed the
Towers, and of course WTC 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 officially
dedicated on April 4th, 1973. 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 had typically been designed with vertical columns
evenly spaced in a grid-like arrangement in order to support the horizontal beams that
would carry the floor above. This would be repeated from one floor to the
next to create a tall building. One undesirable consequence of this type of
design is that the interior office spaces in these buildings are periodically
interrupted by the support columns. The
Towers were designed using a type of architecture that was relatively new at
the time and is referred to as a "tube within a tube." Closely-spaced columns are positioned
around the perimeter of the structure while other columns are concentrated in
a heavily reinforced central core. The photos below show the dense spacing of
the columns that make up the perimeter walls and the relative size of the
core structure, which also contained the elevator shafts.
The
office floors were suspended in between with no other vertical support. This 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 multiple high-speed 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 either 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 determined by its internal temperature (regardless of fire 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 this temperature threshold. The ability to predict the
behavior of steel during intense fires is fundamental to its use as a
construction material. 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 above, 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
reaches an internal temp of 720˚C, the building will still be able to
carry its maximum load. Since maximum theoretical loads rarely occur (extremely
large crowds of people or concentrations of heavy equipment, for example),
the steel temperature in a typical situation could probably go significantly
higher before failure would occur. |
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4) 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, when tested separately. 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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5) In addition to being relatively
lightweight in proportion to its strength, one of steel's best qualities and
a major reason why it is used so commonly in building construction is its
ability to dissipate heat quickly and stand up unscathed in even the worst "towering
inferno" conflagrations on record. The steel at the location of a
fire within a building will be constantly cooled as the heat is drawn away
into the surrounding framework. 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). http://www.corusconstruction.com/ 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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6) 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 Twin 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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7)
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. 8) In 1975, an arson fire burned
for three hours in the North Tower, eventually spreading to portions of six
floors. 132 firefighters were involved in the effort to bring it under
control and the fire captain reported that it was "like fighting a blow
torch." The fire began in a wiring closet in the central core area and
grew until the flames burst out through the windows on the 11th floor. The
steel structure was not damaged by this fire, which was longer lasting and
arguably more severe than the fires in the South Tower on 9/11. |
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Jet
fuel (refined kerosene) is a hydrocarbon and will burn at a maximum temperature of approximately
1000˚C (1832˚F) in an open fire when supplied with unlimited
amounts of air (as opposed to pure oxygen). This information is easily
available from any physics desk reference. 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 on 9/11 wildly overestimated the amount of jet fuel involved based on
tank capacity. The planes were designed for intercontinental flight, but
carried only the fuel needed for their domestic flight plans. |
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It is
now acknowledged, even by the government's theories, that most of the jet
fuel 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. The smell of jet fuel was indeed 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 carried 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 were quite
dramatic, with the huge fireballs that we all saw over and over again on TV.
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 sometimes 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. The
thickness of their aluminum skin is only 2 mm. |
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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 airplane 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 sudden 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 this apparently did little damage to the structural core (in spite of
speculations to the contrary from the NIST report). Less fuel was taken
inside the building compared to the North Tower, and 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 its destruction occurred first, 56 minutes after impact.
Firefighters who reached the 78th floor sky lobby reported only "two pockets
of fire." http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/fires/severity.html |
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The
destruction of the WTC Towers 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 failure of the buildings. While
we look at these so-called "collapse" theories, it must be clearly
understood 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 only two days after 9/11 (on September 13, 2001) by the American
Society of Civil Engineers in an paper titled "Why Did the World Trade
Center Collapse? A Simple Analysis", by Zdenek Bazant and Yong Zhou. One might
wonder how they were able to come up with such a seemingly confident and
fully developed theoretical explanation for a shocking, unprecedented and inexplicable
occurrence within such a short period of time. Like the voluminous and
complex "USA Patriot Act," which appeared full blown in October
2001, it almost
seems to have been prepared ahead of time. In any
case, their theory depends on the simultaneous failure of at least half the
support 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.
http://www-math.mit.edu/~bazant/WTC/ They
claim that this "triggering" condition would be achieved if more
than half of the column steel on a "given floor" reached
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. This assertion (based on the
failure of only half the support strength) also reveals that they are either
unaware of or are ignoring the 5 X maximum load strength requirement for
building design. This is surprising, considering that they are
representing the American Society of Civil Engineers. |
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An obvious
fallacy with
theories of this type is that column strength and heat conductivity in the
Towers were NOT segmented by the vertical spacing of the office floors. During
a fire, the heat produced by burning material on a particular office floor
would be dissipated by the steel framework over a multi-story region of the building. Also,
the load-bearing strength of the columns was vertically continuous over many "floors" for
any 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 interconnected the core columns and
created a monolithic entity that was structurally independent of the office floor attachment
locations, which were on the outer perimeter of the core structure. Therefore,
it really makes no sense to talk about about column behavior on a "given
floor." The columns didn't have "floors." The
clustering of the core columns in the center of the building also places most
of them at a significant distance away from the vicinity of any conceivable office fire.
Bazant and Zhou's theory apparently assumes that the Towers were built according
to the old-fashioned "post and beam" column grid arrangement. Like
others to follow, they use complicated equations and obscure concepts to
create an intimidating aura of authority, while overlooking or
misrepresenting the fundamental features of the scenario. |
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In
addition to these theoretical fallacies, we've already seen that high
internal steel temperatures are very difficult to achieve over a wide 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,
shows 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. (See the section
below for more on the NIST report.) |
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A more
detailed critique of Bazant and Zhou's paper can be found by following links from
here: http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/experts/comments/bazantzhou.html 2) Another theory was put forward
by Thomas Eager,
a professor of materials engineering from MIT. It 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 claims to believe that the Towers were not designed
to withstand a fire covering an entire single floor! He doesn't say where he
gets this idea, but we know from the comments presented earlier that Skilling
certainly DID allow for this possibility. Because
the spilling of the jet fuel may have caused this to happen, Eager 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://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html |
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"Pancaking"
collapses are
sometimes seen in Third World countries where badly designed and poorly reinforced
structures with heavy concrete floors are subjected to earthquakes. Modern
American buildings (including the WTC Towers) are designed and built
according to robust standards and specifications that require structural
unification of horizontal and vertical assemblies. This is done specifically to
prevent pancaking floor collapses under any circumstances.
Eager
also ignores the continuous vertical strength of the core structure and its
heavily cross-braced and unified design. Even if some of the floor
connections had somehow broken loose, the more heavily built and potentially
free-standing column structures would have remained in place. While the floor
assemblies interconnected the core with the perimeter columns and added
strength and flexibility to the structure as a whole, they were also designed
to be as lightweight as possible. A
detailed evaluation of Thomas Eager's analysis can be found here: http://911research.wtc7.net/disinfo/experts/articles/eagar_nova/nova_eagar1.html |
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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. Unfortunately,
the non-commercial reputation and credibility of PBS and NOVA have been exploited as a
vehicle for the presentation of deliberately false information and analysis. To
a traumatized television audience in 2001 this was not so apparent. But now,
in the sober light of a better understanding, the fraudulent nature of these
presentations is painfully obvious. 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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This
diagram shows a more truthful view of a typical truss assembly:
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 entire 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 first major government
report was issued by FEMA, and it uses these misleading diagrams to make it look to
the casual, non-technical reader like there was no central core at all! |
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