FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength — and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
I did say I was leaving this thread, but I couldn't help but respond to that last post. I'll try to keep my tone neutral from now on.
My point was there are always little exceptions that, without the neccessary training, you don't take into consideration. It's not as simple as "fire melts steel". As you can see, it can also be "fire weakens steel".
On August 04 2008 09:27 Juicyfruit wrote: You don’t need to believe in anything. Whether or not the conspiracy theory is true does not change the fact that the American public don’t even try to accept anything other than what they want to believe. Their mentality does not go beyond trying to cover their own eyes and ears and live in their own fantasy world. When you present evidence of corruption, they dismiss you as a nut because they don’t want anything to sway them of the notion that all is good. They’ll find one or two loosely concocted arguments to justify their own biased beliefs and end discussion, as though they’ve actually proven something.
Face it, people don’t like unhappy thoughts; they prefer to be blissfully ignorant, and that’s exactly what makes them a bunch of tools.
WOW, YOU'RE EXACTLY THE KIND OF PRICK ADVOCATING THESE THEORIES THAT I HATE.
More than one third of americans dude. Stop crying as if you're the minority.
you're the tool for thinking you're better than the rest of the american public for believing in a bloody conspiracy theory. look at how easy it is to play on your intellectually fragile ego. obviously anyone who disagrees is living in a fantasy world. clearly we have to live our lives open to each and every possibility. maybe george bush really is a repetilian. NO you fucktard. If I'm a biologist and I'm familiar with the evidence of evolution, I'm not going to be open to the possibility of intelligent design. I find it funny that al ot of the people like you are the same ones who are ready to rail against creationism, but when you come into threads like this anyone who disagrees with you is being close minded.
NO YOU DONT GET TO BE THE SOLE ARBITER OF WHAT COUNTS AS CLOSE MINDED. SOME PEOPLE THINK WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS RIDICULOUS. YOU THINK THEY'RE RIDICULOUS.
welcome to life. check in at the front desk you mindless twit.
Did you even read what I said? Did I advocate the theory? Where in my post did I say that? Take your own bias and stick it in your ass if you must, but don’t put words into my mouth.
Plus, last I check, anything less than half constitutes as a minority.
Now let’s talk about that poll. The poll says “third of Americans SUSPECT 9-11 government conspiracy”. SUSPECT. Do you know the difference between suspect and conviction?
Let me quote you: Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "
All this says is that there’s a portion of the Americans who consider the POSSIBILITY that the theory COULD be true. It DOESN”T mean 36% of the public firmly believes that’s what actually happened. Are you honestly telling me it’s better for people to not consider the possibility of governmental corruption at all?
But anyways, thanks for demonstrating a prime example of loosely concocted argument. Between your post and mine, which one demonstrated more bias? Guess what, bias and close-mindedness are not that different, buuuuuuddy.
On August 04 2008 10:13 yubee wrote: don't say you're leaving the thread if you're gonna post 10 minutes later, it makes you look like a drama queen and weakens your argument
deal with it
the only person i said I was going to leave this thread to was travis, and that was because we had a chat about not getting frustrated. i think it's only respectful to at least respond to his last argument.
On August 04 2008 06:01 travis wrote: I can't wait until it all comes out, it's going to happen soon now. I can't wait for all the people who said the government being involved in 9/11 was impossible. I can't wait for those people to get slapped the fuck back into reality.
I can't help but keep making posts about this stuff. It blows my mind how people can just shut theirselves off to new possibility. WAAAAAAAKE UUUUP
American people thought that Iraq had connections with terrorists and now they think that 9/11 was planned by their own government, this is hilarious.
A conspiracy isnt needed to manipulate ignorant and retarded people. If people are so stupid that they believe Fox news crap they will also believe those retarded conspiracy theories later.
Maybe it is just too hard to admit that nobody in the US was enought smart and honest to say the truth in 2001 - 2002: Saddam had no connection with terrorists period. Now people find excuses for their mistakes and their own stupidity " zomfg it was a conspiracy ! governement lied ! 9/11 was planned ! "
Every American journalist active during this period should be put in jail because they cant use mental retardation as an excuse.
I'm going to have to side against you here travis. They are right that you are not qualified to form your own opinion on the actual mechanics of 9/11 because you are not an engineer with access to the full details of both the buildings and the attack. That said, what you are qualified to do is apply your own judgement to the opinions of others who may or may not be qualified. The problem here is that there are many people claiming polar opposites of what happened. You'll have some people saying there's no way it fell down in a fire and others saying it's expected that it did. Both make sense logically because both will cite a bunch of sources and facts to back them up. The problem is that only one can be true. So the question is, at it's core, one of credibility. Which makes sense to you is not a basis for an argument because if you read only one half of the argument that'll be the one that makes sense. Faced will two well argued and seemingly logical cases you can either opt for the "I don't know" or you can consider the number of experts involved in each case, their level of expertise, their motives and the quality of their sources. It is because of the latter that I'm one of the "some planes hit some buildings and they fell down" camp. For every amateur movie maker posting their opinion on the structural integrity of skyscrapers on youtube there are a dozen engineers with a contrasting opinion. I know who I find more credible.
On August 04 2008 11:21 MeriaDoKk wrote: i totally agree with you travis.
Me too.
Even if people don't want to agree with a lot of things, for whatever reason, it should be pretty apparent to everyone that our government now completely breaks any laws it feels like and is accountable to no one.
Just the fact that the president can effectively make is own laws with executive orders is illegal. The fact that they aren't in prison for ordering torture has no excuses. The fact that they clearly are out of line with the constitution and no one does anything about it tells me that whether 911 is true or not doesn't make a difference, because people have shown that they don't care.
OH TRAVIS, ASCENDED ONE, PLEASE BLESS US WITH YOUR WISDOM
You come off really pretentious in some of these blogs (rated it 1/5 btw! Don't kill me). Not everybody thinks the way you do, and telling them they're ignorant won't change that. Atheists have been trying to do it to Christians for years.
EPT
