For the undying 9/11 MORONIC STEEL = AIR ARGUMENT

[JohnyCanuck]

13. It would have been a miracle if there were no molten steel at the WTC

Considering that Bechtel safety engineers who were on site to provide assistance in the recovery and clean up wrote in a report:

The debris pile at Ground Zero was always tremendously hot. Thermal measurements taken by helicopter each day showed underground temperatures ranging from 400ºF to more than 2,800ºF. The surface was so hot that standing too long in one spot softened (and even melted) the soles of our safety shoes. Steel toes would often heat up and become intolerable. This heat was also a concern for the search-and-rescue dogs used at the site. Many were not outfitted with protective booties (Photo 13). More than one suffered serious injuries and at least three died while working at Ground Zero. The underground fire burned for exactly 100 days and was finally declared “extinguished” on Dec. 19, 2001.

http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/wtc/analysis/asse_groundzero1.htm

More than 2800F, would presumably be enough to melt construction steel, and since these were underground temps measured in the debris pile after the initiating event, presumably the combustion process would now be oxygen starved meaning that initially the temperatures would have been way higher.

By the way, what do you think of Cole's opinion that even simply weakening of the steel on a few of the upper floors by jet fuel and office fires could not possibly have been enough to cause the entire building collapse in the manner observed on the numerous videos posted on Youtube etc.

I understand that NIST has postulated that about 5 or 6 or so floors collapsed around the level where the planes had hit and the fires had occurred, and this was the initiating event of the collapse sequence.

Interestingly enough the engineering and scientific geniuses at NIST, didn't seek to further explain the observed behaviour of the building from that point on (i.e. after collapse initiation), but weaseled out of providing any further explanation by simply referring interested persons to a paper written by a Dr. Zdenek Bazant.

Dr. Bazant's in his paper posited a bizarre "crush-down crush-up" collapse in which the upper portion of the building (largely undamaged and roughly 20 or so stories) falling through the damaged 5 or so stories (where the steel had been weakened by the jet fuel and office fires) then proceeded to act as a pile driver on the much larger and sturdier built lower portion of the building. (The constriction steal in the columns got significantly thicker and stronger the closer you got to ground level.) Once the top section had pile driven itself all the way to ground level, it then suffered a supposed "crush-up" collapse where it destroyed itself from the ground up, leaving just the smoking ruins.

Apparently Dr. Bazant for all his high falluting qualifications never took Physics 101 (or maybe it was so long he forgot the material covered in his "Intro to Basic Physics" course) and forgot about Newton's Laws of Motion and more specifically Newton's 3rd Law: "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." According to the 3rd law whatever forces were acting on the lower part of the building caused by the falling 20 story section, equal forces would have to have been acting on the falling section itself.

So, according to Newton, if the lower section of the building was being destroyed by the falling top section, the falling top section itself would also be destroyed in an "equal and opposite reaction" - only at an even quicker rate than the bottom section was being destroyed, since the steel in the top section was lighter and weaker than the steel used in the bottom section. So unless Newton had made a pretty fundamental mistake, which no scientist or engineer in the last 300 years has noticed, the pile driving top section should have demolished itself by the time it fell through and destroyed the lower 20 stories directly below the damaged section, and at that point the collapse process would have ground to a halt.

Talking about liars and frauds, the NIST engineers and their partner in obfuscastion and misdirection, Bazant, seem to fit the bill quite well themselves.

For a more detailed analysis of Bazant's theory see:

NIST AND DR. BAZANT - A SIMULTANEOUS FAILURE
The author of this work, Gordon Ross, was born in Dundee, Scotland. He holds degrees in both Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, graduating from Liverpool John Moores University, in 1984. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

INTRODUCTION
The NIST enquiry into the destruction of the WTC to wers purported to be an examination of the physical evidence. The final report includes commentary upon much of the physical evidence available from this examination but concentrates upon the time period prior to the onset of the collapse. The report does not go into much detail of the period of the collapse itself but instead relies upon the theoretical work of Dr. Bazant, to argue that once collapse was initiated then total collapse was inevitable.

SNIP

The columns of the upper section were manufactured from lighter material commensurate with their design requirements and the ability of these columns would likely be more affected by aircraft impact and subsequent fires, than columns at lower levels. This factor would suggest that deflections and thus energy demands are likely to occur preferentially in the upper section.

Thus we can see that, in reality, the energy of the falling upper section of the tower would not be utilised to crush only one storey of the tower, but would in fact be distributed throughout the upper section as well as storeys in the lower section. Energy would be absorbed over many more storeys than the first impacted storey of the lower section.

This is both obvious and intuitive. In a collision, energy is dissipated in both the impacting and impacted objects in proportion to their relative strengths, characteristics and construction. To give an easily visualised analogy, imagine a large truck parked with its rear end against a solid wall and a car accelerated headlong into the front of the truck. Many things may happen, but one possibility which can easily be ruled out is that the car will pass all of the way through the truck, suffering no damage as it totally destroys the truck, until such time as it strikes the wall, at which point it is itself destroyed. This
scenario is precisely what Dr. Bazant would have us believe with his "crush down - crush up" theory.

http://www.journalof911studies.com/volume/200704/NISTandDrBazant-SimultaneousFailure-WTCCollapseAnalysis2.pdf