Thursday, November 1, 2007
George Washington Blog
The government has been forced to admit that the fires in World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7 were not hot enough to melt steel.
That's because maximum temperatures reached by burning jet fuel, diesel, office supplies and equipment, and the other flammable material which could possibly have burned in the World Trade Centers are far below the melting point of steel.
But two pieces of evidence prove that temperatures within some parts of the Trade Centers were higher than the melting point of steel:
- Dr. Steven Jones found iron spheres in samples of dust from the World Trade Center which were collected by ground zero resident Janette MacKinlay.
The existence of iron spheres in the WTC dust was independently verified by the government's U.S. Geological Survey itself.
Because iron melts at about the same temperature as steel. Indeed, the temperature needed to melt iron is almost twice the maximum temperature that can be generated by the fuel available in the Trade Center fires.
What, other than explosives producing enormous heat, could have produced temperatures hot enough to form the iron spheres?
- An expert stated about World Trade Center building 7, "A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures" (pay-per-view).
Steel evaporates at a temperature approximately twice as high as the melting points of iron and steel, and almost three-and-a-half times the maximum temperature that can be reached by fuel available in the Trade Center fires.
Therefore, it is beyond dispute that the temperatures actually present as the Twin Towers and Building 7 collapsed were simply much too hot to have been caused by fires ignited by exploding jet fuel.
What could have caused such high temperatures?
Certain high-explosives put out extremely high temperatures.There is substantial evidence of high-explosives in the Trade Centers. I will cite just two examples:
- The government itself describes an official photograph of molten metal pouring out of one of the Twin Towers rights before it collapsed (p. 48):
An unusual flame is visible within this fire. In the upper photograph {Fig 9-44} a very bright flame, as opposed to the typical yellow or orange surrounding flames, which is generating a plume of white smoke, stands out. The intensity of this flame is considerably brigther than normal flames.
- A paramedic captain stated "somewhere around the middle of the world trade center there was this orange and red flash coming out initially it was just one flash then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode the popping sound and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as could see these popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger going both up and down and then all around the building".
Whatever caused the "very bright flame" and orange and red flashes was apparently hot enough to melt iron and to vaporize steel, even though burning jet fuel, office supplies and the other flammable materials present in the World Trade Centers could not have done so.
There was also molten metal under ground zero for months after 9/11. What caused that?
There were battery rooms in those buildings. These were to provide uninterrupted power supply to the critical computers in case of power outages. Batteries use lead and acid. Lead is a metal with a low melting temperature. Acid attacks steel you might say 'evaporating it' if in contact long enough. There were buried fires burning for months in the debris pile. This heat could easily have melted some of the tons of lead present in the piles accounting for the sightings of running metal seen by many. The ‘evaporated’ steel beam found in the pile could have been attacked by the sulfuric acid from the batteries. Why is it that the most wild ideas are created for any evidence which can’t be immediately explained.The flashes of light may have been from transformers shorting out from surges created by shorting wires during beginning stages of collapse.
ReplyDeleteBuilding 7 had all the same deficiencies present in the Towers except that the bar joist, trusses were replaced with long span I beams. There were large growing fires on several floors as well as damage from the exterior wall columns of Tower 1 which pealed away during its collapse and hit the southwest corner and the middle of the south side of building 7, gouging out large sections. In addition to this damage, there were problems with water supply and the Fire Department decided not to fight these fires and ordered every one out of the building and out of the collapse zone (which was a large area including buildings around building 7) as is the procedure when discontinuing interior firefighting operations before fire control in a building that might collapse from the thermal effects. The anticipation of collapse was a brilliant conclusion and no lives were lost when the 47 story building collapsed about an hour and a half after the evacuation order was given. The BBC somehow misheard the orders to evacuate the collapse zone and reported the building had collapsed well before it actually did.
If you want to know how and why the WTC buildings collapsed read my book "Fire in the Skyscraper"
Arthur Scheuerman,
Retired Battalion Chief, FDNY