Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
And while we are talking about fires..... Here's an interesting read from Wikipedia:
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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.
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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. |
If the planes' light, aluminum wings managed to cut through the aluminum cladding and steel perimeter columns (because of the added mass of fuel in their tanks and their velocity?), they would have smashed through concrete no problem. All the steel survived the crashes, and almost none of the cement escaped pulverization.
The fires didn't reach the WTC inner cores, btw.
That quote contradicts itself in what it describes is a space that had less combustible materials or fuel for the fires - less walls, closet, storage, shelves, etc...
A floor layout of this sort would make the fire propagate faster, consuming more of the fuel sooner - certainly creating an insane raging fire at first, but expending itself and needing to move on to more fuel, probably through the celings, vents or other communicating spaces between floors.
Much of it would probably die out fast unless they didn't design to prevent this from happening. But it seems like that quote actually backs up evidence the fires were going out when the buildings fell down.
According to video, photo and witness reports from survivors, recordings of victims trapped in the towers, and firemen who both made it out and didn't, the fires appeared to be dying just before collapse.
It seems the fires raged at first, as long as they had something to burn, and then the smouldering started - people were overcome by the thick smoke. Firefighters one or two stories below the collapse initiation point reported "isolated" fires they could easily "knock out". Survivors scrambled down out from above the impact zone and didn't report "raging infernos" but the opposite.
The NIST hypothesis doesn't concord with available evidence; they used only what they needed to establish a sequence of circumstance, and conjectured a series of possible scenarios, that backed up the official story, and discarded evidence that flew in the face of that.
Describing the massive support system and solidity of the buildings, for example, as "hollow" and "light" and "full of air" is so specious. The construction of the WTC was more economic than traditional buildings and actually pretty brilliant, but didn't make the buildings more fallible to fire, and certainly didn't make them prone to collapse.