Originally Posted by XVNRacer

The steel in the World Trade Center acted like an enormous heat sink. Any heat that was applied to a given area of the steel frame was soaked up by the immense mass of steel in the entire structure. There wasn't enough heat to warm up the steel frame more than a few degrees overall. Infrared analysis of the many video tapes of the fires taken before the collapse give a pretty good indication of how much heat the structure was subjected to, where, and for how long. The data are consistent with what you'd get from burning jet fuel (which is basically kerosene, much less volatile and cooler burning than ordinary gasoline) and the burning contents of the building. No way the fires could have heated up the steel to anything like what would have been necessary to cause a catastrophic failure of the whole building.

RACER