Quite a massive errial dumbardment of woogled copypasta to wade through on the last page. I am not even going to respond to most of it (check the archives, I am sure I've discussed the Silverstein and Standley 'shpills' years ago), but I'll rather just discuss the points that pertain to the topic that White Dove had raised. A few things to be noted in response to Prodigal Son:
- Anthony Lawson's "visual identification" video which you posted twice has already been refuted in my prior posts. He makes a basic syllogistic error (All members of set S have property φ, x has property φ, therefore x belongs to set S, ignoring the fact that property φ may define a larger set that includes S) that fails to acknowledge that a controlled demolition is a kind of progressive collapse, and so the properties that he believes identifies the WTC7 collapse specifically as a controlled demolition are really more general features of progressive collapses.
- I made the point that the entire video and audio record of the three WTC collapses lacks any visual or audio record of high explosive detonations. Your erudite response: "The first two videos you posted show buildings that are missing their facades.... well DUH!! Yeah I can see the flashes!! HAHAHA!!!!!" Ummm, no. First of all, a facade is not going to muffle the detonation of thousands of lbs. of high explosives (audible at 130-140 dB a half mile away), which would have been VERY OBVIOUS on any video recording near Ground Zero. I provided two of the WTC2 collapse; if you want a good one of the WTC7 collapse, check out the one with Ashleigh Banfield interviewing the woman holding her baby while the building collapsed behind them. The latter wasn't even aware of what was happening. Second, you ignore the fact that the majority of the columns of the Twin Towers were on the outside of the building so there wouldn't have been any facade hiding them anyway. It is ironic that immediately after making this statement, you link to a video called "911 Boom Boom Boom" which is all about what those men witnessed of the exterior of the building (even showing a video of the exterior of WTC2 collapsing). Where on any video of the collapse is there any explosive light flash from the detonation of explosives? You know that truthers for years have pointed to so-called "squibs" on the exterior of the building as proof of the use of explosives. Show me any "squib" that shows the kind of flash of light visible in any real building implosion. Third, I find it rather amusing that your point depends on a crucial difference between the WTC collapses and real controlled demolitions. You see, in the real world, when a demolition company like CDI prepares a building for implosion, they gut the hell out of it and sever secondary supports and cut holes into the main load-bearing beams to insert the explosive charges (your wootubed "WTC 7 9-11" video in your follow-up post even shows this). In the fantasy word of truthers, all of the requisite preparation took place invisibly, without anyone noticing, in occupied business offices. The only thing your point accomplishes is that it highlights how the WTC collapses are different from actual building implosions.
- The "911 Boom Boom Boom" video does not furnish any evidence of explosive detonation of demolition charges. The firemen are describing the progression of the collapse floor by floor (that's why it's called a 'progressive collapse'), and this is precisely what the clip of the WTC2 collapse in that video shows -- a floor-by-floor crushing and expulsion of concrete as the collapse progressed downward. In case you don't know, explosives are not used to blow each floor slab to smithereens; they are merely used to initiate and guide (that's the 'controlled' part) a progressive collapse. It is gravity that does the work of crushing the concrete floor into dust. What we see in the video is the expected gravity-driven crushing of each floor; there are no explosive blasts visible anywhere on this video. Of course the firemen compared the collapse to building implosions; the only videos of high-rise progressive collapse that most people would have seen before 9/11 were videos of building implosions.
- Your next video (supposedly showing the sound of an explosion in WTC7) is very weak. I hear no explosion, much less the report of detonating explosives. If the audio had to be already enhanced and if you still have to use earbuds to strain to hear something vaguely like an explosion, that pretty much demontrates that nothing as loud as 130-140 dB at a half-mile was produced. Again I refer you to the Ashleigh Banfield video.
- Your photos of intact partially collapsed structures are completely irrelevant. Those buildings differ from the WTC towers in three important respects: they were built with concrete-steel frames, they were much smaller structures (with only 12-13 floors remaining intact), and the collapses were initiated at the base of the structures and not near the top. Framed structures (with horizontal I-beams and vertical columns throughout the floor spaces) would naturally hold together much better than Twin Towers which moved all the vertical supporting columns to the perimeter (with no columns at all in the open floor space) and whose floors were supported only by lightweight trusses bolted to the exterior and core columns. With sections of perimeter columns pealing outward by the force of the falling upper block of WTC1 and WTC2, there was nothing to support the weight of the floors. Second, the Twin Towers were 110-story buildings, among the tallest buildings in the world. There is only so much a building that tall could tilt before gravity brings it straight down. IIRC the upper block of WTC2 tilted a maximum of 8° before gravity brought it straight down; there was no way the building had the kind of integrity to have it tilt further intact against the force of gravity. Third, all those examples have the collapsed portion at or near the base. The collapses of WTC1 and WTC2 started at near the top, with the entire lower structure failing to support the mass of the accelerating falling block. The collapse of WTC2 initiated around the 78th Floor; that means that the 77th Floor had the equivalent of a 33 story building slamming into it. The upper blocks of both towers, meanwhile, disintegrated on the way down. It is rather amusing that on the basis of these examples you conclude that each tower "should have remained at least partially intact or leaned over on its side".
- The copypasta in the second post is so over-the-top, it doesn't even merit a response.
Very interesting that you introduced something that I hadn't heard of before which makes the explanation of how WTC1 and 2 fell (for me anyway) much simpler. Your last videos show some buildings being demolished using the verinage method, which involves removing structural support of one or several floors, leaving enough mass above to allow gravity to do the rest.
badseed...That's essentially the concept. As I said above, WTC2 essentially had to support the mass of a 33-floor building slamming into it and picking up momentum. That is something the building was not designed to handle.
I don't know if the planes themselves could have caused enough damage to the floors to accomplish this, but if they did, you're right no need for explosives, once those damaged floors had received enough stress, the buildings were coming down. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, lol.
Exactly.
Now the planes did two things. One, they removed a good number of perimeter columns on one particular side of the building -- there was a substantial loss of load carrying capacity on the south side of WTC2 and on the north side of WTC1; this required the building to redistribute loads to the remaining sides and this also introduces asymmetricity (which is a source of instability). The crash also started fires simultaneously on multiple floors; the jet fuel only got the fires started, it was the building contents that kept the fires going and allowed them to expand and intensify. The fires were asymmetric as well on each floor (if you look at photos and video of WTC2 the fires and smoke were far worse on the east side -- the same side where the collapse began -- than on the other sides of the building).
The strength and thickness of the perimeter and core steel columns are irrelevant to the presumed cause of the collapse because these were not the structural members that were critically weakened by fire (and as you know, a connection is only as strong as its weakest link). Instead it was the light-gauge truss decks (which were used rather than higher-gauge girders), which had relatively thin components like the one-inch truss web diagonals between the two plates, that NIST determined would sag at temperatures higher than 400C. It was not necessary to melt the steel (so truther arguments about the melting point of steel are beside the point), the relevant fact is that it loses much of its strength in fire when it begins to sag. As the trusses sagged, they exerted an inward pull on the exterior columns primarily on one side of the building (the east side for the South Tower and the south side for the North Tower), increasing the asymmetricity. Photos of the towers before they collapsed clearly show sagging floors at these locations, as well as inward bowing of the perimeter columns that got worse over time (as can be seen in comparing a 9:21 photo of the South Tower east face with 9:53 and 9:59 photos). In the case of WTC1, about 5 minutes before the collapse the perimeter columns had been pulled inward a maximum of 4 1/2 feet. Video of the WTC2 collapse shows that failure occurred when the inward pull on the east side columns increased to the point that they snapped. With the failure of the east face, loads were again redistributed to the other sides and the inner core (through the hat truss). The perimeter columns on the other faces can be seen buckling under the strain about a second or two later in the videos; you can actually see the fracture move across the south face of WTC2 from east to west. Once it reached the west face, the top portion of WTC2 was no longer supported by the perimeter columns and now was an independent block tilting in the direction of the east side where the collapse had initiated. Collapse of the entire structure at that point was inevitable.