And while we are talking about fires..... Here's an
interesting read from Wikipedia:
Quote:
|
The light construction and hollow nature of the structures allowed the jet fuel to penetrate far inside the towers, igniting many large fires simultaneously over a wide area of the impacted floors. The fuel from the planes burned at most for a few minutes, but the contents of the buildings burned over the next hour or hour and a half. It has been suggested that the fires might not have been as centrally positioned, nor as intense, had traditionally heavy high-rise construction been standing in the way of the aircraft. Debris and fuel would likely have remained mostly outside the buildings or concentrated in more peripheral areas away from the building cores, which would then not have become unique failure points. In this scenario, the towers might have stood far longer, perhaps indefinitely. The fires were hot enough to weaken the columns and cause floors to sag, pulling perimeter columns inward and reducing their ability to support the mass of the building above.
|
Basically what I get from this is... The towers did not have traditional heavy construction inside, were basically empty from the outer walls to the inner core - nothing was there to stop or isolate the fires. In other words, in a more traditional skyscraper (i.e. Empire State Building [I'm guessing]) the fires would have been prevented from reaching the inner core because there would have been concrete walls, etc, stopping them.