by sammielee24 217 Replies latest members politics
Anyway - aside from arguing how hot the fire was - what are the 9/11 truthers trying to say on this?
Are you really trying to say that bombs, explosives, or something else were actually planted in the buildings first, and then that the jets were crashed into them, and THEN after that the buildings were blown up? And that all this was down without a single leak and covered up completely?
It simply makes no credible sense.
Parsing the evidence on 9-11 is like interpreting scripture. Each person finds what he wishes and damns the rest.
The problem comes not with the interpretation of evidence; it comes with the premise. If you are willing to accept the premise you don't really need to stick around for evidence.
George Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq so he and Cheney and the rest were willing to ..........(fill in the blank)
If you can wrap your mind around that and accept it----enough damage has already taken place in your central nervous system to permit
you to conclude whatever comes next.
When the Bush administration went to war with Iraq THE FIRST TIME they could have taken out Sadaam easily. President Bush chose not to.
The immediate aftermath of 9-11 was actually not a rush to judgement at all. It was a long pause and a clueless casting about for what to do on the part of the administration. It was not Iraq which was targeted. It was Afghanistan. Iraq came much later.
Conspiratorial thinking is not sound mental health, in my opinion.
"Well, most materials people are familiar with burning."
Yes most people are familiar but aren't always acquainted with the chemistry behind combustion. I'm not arguing for a conspiracy theory, in fact the temperatures I'm using agree with what I found in the FEMA and NIST reports. The jet fuel burned around 500F and the carpet and office furniture burned around 560F. The initial temperatures from the explosion would have been in the neighborhood of 1500-2000F (for a few minutes max) which could have melted the planes aluminum fuselage but not steel.
These temperatures are associated with a "dirty burn" most often found in uncontrolled situations in nature. The combustion is largely incomplete and is evidenced by the large amounts of black smoke associated with carbon that does not form CO2 as it would in a complete combustion process. As evidenced by the tremendous amounts of black smoke during the fires, the WTC almost certainly didn't behave as a bellows. The temperatures found in these common fires are much less than the temperatures found in controlled equipment such as combustion engines, gas turbines, or acetylene torches where air-fuel ratios and often pressure or volume is strictly controlled.
There is a term called Adiabatic Flame Temperature which describes the temperature at the hottest part of a blue flame where complete combustion theoretically occurs and there is no heat transfer to the outside environment. The AFT of wood and butane both is 3600F, a temperature hot enough to melt both carbon and stainless steel. Common cigarette lighters use butane and produce a blue flame but in reality can't produce temperatures hot enough to even begin to heat treat steel let alone melt it.
There are things we can do to increase the temperature towards AFT, such as forced induction and forced convection. Using a bellows is a form of forced induction, and increases the oxygen available for complete combustion. Increasing the pressure or the specific volume is another way, increasing temperature by way of the ideal gas law, pv=RT. Forced induction also increases pv on a micro scale allowing temperature to increase. We've used these principles for thousands of years (even if we didn't understand them) in the cases of furnaces and blacksmiths, etc.
But these things don't generally happen without human manipulation (and were not present in the case of WTC unless you believe in conspiracy theories), not to the extent that the fire is raised by a thousand degrees or more. The only instance I'm aware of where combustion temperatures can naturally get this hot are in some forest fires that are stoked by large sustained winds over a wide area.
After looking last night at summaries of the NIST report I'm in general agreement with their version of events. The tube-in-tube design of the WTC incorporated a hat truss to redistribute dynamic loading between the outside beams and the inner columns. The outside beams of each building experienced severe structural damage on the side of impact. The wide open tube-in-tube floor design allowed much of the kinetic energy of the planes to be absorbed by the inner columns, severely damaging them and taking out the elevators and stairwells in the process.
The heat from the fires, though not hot enough to severely impact the structural steel, was hot enough to allow thermal deformation causing the floors to "sag". This sagging changed the static loading on the outer beams from an axial load, normal (perpendicular) to the beams, to an offset load, creating a moment (torque) on the beams they were not designed to handle, causing them to be pulled inward, and the floors above to slightly lean outwards towards the face of impact (as witnessed in videos immediately prior to collapse).
The hat truss redistributed this load to the heavily damaged central columns, causing them to fail. When they failed, the whole thing came down.
As an aside, I'm a mechanical engineer, not a civil or structural engineer. However, I have worked in conjunction with civil engineers and actively designed trusses and supports for bridges, so I understand the analytics of static and dynamic loading very well. From that standpoint, the explanation provided in the NIST report is completely logical to me from an analytical viewpoint.
I agree with JWoods that a conspiracy is highly unbelievable because of the amount of people who would have to be involved.
I agree with Terry that the aftermath of 9-11 was not a rush to judgement. But I feel that in the interim before investigations were completed, a minority but vocal group of individuals offered early theories that were given air-time by the media that resulted in a lot of misinformation to the public, such as the view that the fire was hot enough to melt the structural steel beams or the floor joists, and the opposite conspiratorial view that if the fire wasn't hot enough, something else must have caused it.
Both views were based off of early opinions unsubstantiated by investigation but sensationalized by the media and initially inscribed on the minds of the public who were less inclinded to read the findings of investigations that were concluded years after the fact.
I've been trying to explain how the fire was not hot enough to melt steel (agreed upon by NIST findings), and if that plays into the hands of conspiracy theorists, I'm sorry, that was not my intention.
As another aside, I've really got to stop drinking alcohol during the day, I make too many grammatical errors. I just accepted a new job in Houston, and have two weeks off, so I've been treating this like a vacation and getting an early start on the joy juice. Terry, I live about a little over an hour from you, we should have a drink before I leave!
As another aside, I've really got to stop drinking alcohol during the day
Good decision.
Terry, I live about a little over an hour from you, we should have a drink before I leave!
Razzie---I sent you a PM!
I thought this was an interesting statement...
American history is, of course, born out of conspiracy. The Founding Fathers who penned the Declaration of Independence were, of course, acting in conspiracy against the British King. Had they been caught, they would have been charged with conspiracy (and treason).
Conspiracy simply means multiple people working in secret to achieve a common goal. This describes the executive boardroom of virtually every major drug company, and it certainly describes the actions of the FDA and the way it works in secret to destroy natural health remedies.
Conspiracies may be positive in nature — as in “We are conspiring to teach the world about nutrition” — or negative in nature. Conspiracies are so commonplace that probably nothing would ever get done in Washington or Wall Street without conspiracies (which might actually be a good thing, come to think of it).
(Ventura)
