David Lynch asks a WTC 7 related question (Quicktime). Go David!
Click it today* because it's his daily report and the question probably won't be up tomorrow.
*("Friday, June 23. Here in LA we have blue skies, golden sunshine...")
Update, Jun 26: Here's what he asked on Friday: "An interesting question for the blog page: Do you think all high rise buildings should be condemned? Because as was proven with for instance the WTC 7 building in New York, if a few floors catch on fire, the whole building falls down. Do you therefore think all high rise buildings should be condemned?"
So sweet to see the daily report again. I think about 6 months ago it seemed to have disappeared, and of course, I never looked for it after that.
Didn't he also comment on WTC 7 issues several months ago? It seems like I remember you posting a link to that. If I remember correctly the other comment was a little bit oblique. This one seems more pointed.
This is the first time I've heard him express any sentiment in the Daily Report other than what the weather's like in Los Angeles. I hadn't looked in a while so could easily have missed an earlier "Lynch political moment." I'm glad he's thinking about the central crime of our era--everyone should be. According to Ron Suskind's new book the bargain Bush struck with Tenet was "I won't fire you for screwing up on 9/11 if you'll give me cover on Iraq."
I think it was back in April he mentioned "Loose Change" or something like that.
Actually, it was a bit smoggy in LA. The skies were blue if you looked up, but depressing if you looked at the horizon.
My take on the events is that the criminal negligence is bad enough.
Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book's opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush's Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president's attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You've covered your ass, now." Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department's counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan's army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton's message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we're going to lose our prey if we're not careful."
WaPo review of "One Percent Doctrine"
Yeah, but why did Larry Silverstein, the owner of WTC 7 say they did a controlled demolition on the building ("pulled it") when the official explanation is fire? The NY Times says fuel for the Mayor's bunker caught fire and caused the collapse--but again, the official explanation is burning debris from WTC 1 and 2 hit WTC 7 and started a fire and that brought the building down, even though fire on a few floors have never collapsed a steel skyscraper before or since. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to want to know what happened that day.
It's not a very good bunker if it catches fire and collapses on your head so easily
Putting it on the 23rd floor wasn't the brightest idea America's Mayor ever had.
WTC7 is a puzzle. One that I don't know much about.
Why WTC 1 and 2 went down is clear to me from looking at the ASCE report. Why the jet that hit the Pentagon put such a small hole in a reinforced concrete building is not a mystery to me. I have personal experience smacking metal into concrete. Relatively speaking, metal is really soft.
Isn't it the traditonal standard to put a bunker underground or at least partially underground, built into a hill or mountain, encased in feet of concrete? Like those bunkers on the D-Day beaches and the Maginot Line (proof that bunkers often don't work out for other reasons), and as far as "command center" type bunkers go even the big NORAD center or that "Shadow Government" bunker are underground. It seems kind of dumb to put a bunker up in a skyscraper.
I hate to keep rehashing this, but the ASCE report isn't very comforting.
* Much of the jet fuel on board the hijacked planes that plowed into the Towers burned off in fireballs outside the buildings. Instead of causing the fires to burn at extremely high temperatures, as was widely speculated,the role of the jet fuel was to ignite other combustible materials over several floors simultaneously. Those fires eventually weakened the structural steel, leading to the Towers' collapse. [This is guesswork because the steel was hauled off to China and melted before investigators could study it.]
* WTC Building 7, which sustained no significant structural damage, collapsed on September 11 after burning uncontrolled for seven hours, was the first protected steel structure ever known to collapse solely due to fire. [WTF?]
* The team found that some connections between the structural steel beams failed in the fires. This was most apparent in WTC 5, where the fireproofing did not protect the connections, leading to a partial collapse. The design and construction of WTC 5 is typical of many steel-framed high rises. WTC 5 is the first major collapse caused by failure of connections due to fire damage. [WTF? 2 in one day, one block apart? 4 in one day if you count WTC 1 and 2?]
It stinks to high heaven.
Put another way, the biggest coincidence in the history of architecture happens on the same day as the biggest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. C'mon. As for the Pentagon missile, you'd have to believe the actual plane with Barbara Olson, et al, was ditched in the Atlantic. I can't go that far.
I think a lot of the wackier theories are delliberate disinfo making any kind of questioning or skepticism seem like tinfoil-hat looniness by association, serious people then have to waste time infighting trying to debunk nonsense.
There's way too much fighting among the people who are troubled by this, too many egos wanting to be the author of the ultimate theory. I hate the idea that this is going to be marginalized into a parlor game like JFK. But that also happened because so much evidence got delberately "screwed up" to protect the various bungling agencies.
The investigation was sloppy.
However, I do find the official explanations for WTC 1 and 2 plausible. (I include Nova as one of my references for official explanations.) The structrural design of these buildings was hideously poor for this type of attack. Building like the Sears Tower and Empire State Building would have fared much better.
A large amount of the support was compromised in the initial impact since that support was located on the perimeter. It was located there to maximize available working $pace. A building with a less radical structure would have better absorbed the impact, and would have better distributed the load around the damaged area.
The core structural supports (and fire escapes) were exposed to the fire because they were protected with sheet rock (that shattered), rather than concrete. That was hideous design mistake two.
The stressed members in the floors had faulty connections to the core and to the external skin. The connections weren't designed to support the tension load of a sagging, damaged floor. They were designed primarily for compression strength, to withstand wind load.
Based on this explanation, I have to say that this was a fucked up design. Never should have been built. Twice.
Sometimes it's stupidity and incompetence, not cleverness and evil, that do us in. Bad engineering happens, and in civil engineering the consequences are ugly. That's all I'm saying.
WTC7 and 5? I don't know enough to comment. But I'll do some reading.
-----
Okay one more thing. Found this on a page about NIST's post 9/11 recommendations for building safety ...
The procedures and practices used in the design of structures for fire resistance should be enhanced by requiring an objective that uncontrolled fires result in burnout without local or global collapse.
WTF? That;s like saying cars should have seat belts, and fire doors should be fire resistant. These standards don't already exist? I have a new-found fear of high rises. To answer the original question: yes, unless flaws are corrected.
And to give you an idea about the what's going on the world of civil engineering, another snippet of the recommendations ...
Improving the century-old standard for fire-resistance testing of building components, assemblies and systems.
Yes siree, might want to freshen those up a bit.
(Snarky anecdotal aside: During my undergrad career, I was a "lab support" guy, available to help non-EE engineers in the electical engineering lab when they got stuck. The CE's were the worst. ME's and ChemE's were at least in the right century.)
off topic mark. do you know primo levi's book the monkey wrench? levi was a CE by trade and wrote some great tech inspired fiction. also the periodic table was good.
on topic : i worked in #1 wtc on 83rd floor for 10 years. there was an incredible amount of lateral sway in the building. when a nor easter blew through you knew it. the whole think started creaking and squeaking. you cold see the interior sheet rock rubbing the structural wall. i dont know how they could have made a rigid concrete stairwell with all that sway engineered in. im ok with official version of #1 and 2. i watched from my window in jc both buildings fall. i am sceptical of the official version of #7. would enjoy hearing your take after looking into it.
I'm familiar with the official explanation. (Not to be unappreciative of your recap.) Amazing that what you described, though, happened exactly the same way in two buildings with different impact scenarios (where the planes hit, what angle, etc). It's amazing to me, anyway. Like, holy shit amazing. Add in two other buildings in the same complex falling in a way that basically has never happened before or since in the history of building buildings with steel, a ton of other suspicious shit happening around the same time (no fighter jets scrambled, etc) and accident/incompetence seems like the most farfetched scenario. There doesn't have to be some central, clever, evil conspiracy for this to stink.
I have a Primo Levi book somewhere, that I got from an ex-coworker. I haven't read Monkey's Wrench.
Tom, I agree that there are some weird coincidences and shoddy investigation that leaves much unanswered. And it's well documented that powerful people were hoping for a second "Pearl Harbor" to justify a wave of neo-colonialism. There is a certain reek around the whole thing.
My personal belief is that the neocons in power were willing to let a spectacular hijacking to happen in order to provide a tangible external threat that would serve as a foundation for their New American Century. They might have expected something like the Dawson's Field hijackings, or in Rice's words "ordinary" hijackings. But they (and we) got oh so much more.
I guess that's a compromise position for us since we don't agree about this. I think you have the harder job here. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable having to use the words "sloppy" and "coincidence" when talking about the major casus belli of our era.
I would rather be a conspiracy theorist than a coincidence theorist. History has proven over and over and over again that quite often assholes actually do get together, sometimes even in secret, and then they come up with some kind of asshole plan. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
"They might have expected something like the Dawson's Field hijackings" or they might have expected something like flying planes into buildings.
Or crashing into the White House. Is a puzzlement.
"Nobody imagined planes being used as weapons" - Condisleeza Lies
(may not be exact quote)
"Lone Gunmen" pilot episode, March 4, 2001
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQyYuWXp3E8
that's an exerpt of the juicy parts, by the way
Cree--e-epy. It would be Fox. And of course the government saves the passengers at the last minute with a "manual override" (and a computer that says "Octium Inside").
oh well, at least there are happy endings on TV ... drool
Creepy indeed.
As you can see in the visuals accompanying a recent lecture by engineer Jeff King (available on YouTube ), that Nova report that Mark mentioned on the WTC tower collapses fudged its graphics. In order to show the "pancaking effect," the Nova drawings omitted the building's substantial steel core from the representation. They make it look like the weight of each floor was being held up by the sides of the building, and depict the floors bowing in in the center and then breaking, falling into the floors below. If the drawings accurately showed the solid mass of the core's steel girders, the "pancaking" would not be nearly as intuitive or believable.
I'm not sure what the "core column" critique is about. At least in this diagram the core columns are depicted.
My understanding is not that the floors broke, but that the joints connecting the floors to the core and perimeter columns failed. What I've read is that these joints were designed for compression loads, as would be experienced with a wind load on the building, not tension loads, as would be experienced if the floors began to sag due to the steel softening during a sustained fire.
While there are gaps in the official explanations, and the destruction of evidence is disturbing, I still find the "alternate" views to be less plausible.
This is what we're talking about, right?
Why didn't Nova show a graphic that looked like that? Maybe because it gives the impression that the steel core was too solid to be knocked down by the "pancaking" effect, whereas the FEMA graphic, viewed quickly on TV, creates the impression that the building was hollow. And as for the steel "softening"--in forty five minutes? When it's never happened in buildings that have burned for much longer? And it happened in three buildings, all within blocks of each other, on the same day? It seems more like voodoo, or faith in the miraculous, to believe that explanation.
- Yes, that diagram is much better. It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, PBS had a 3D version of that sans the core. Shite work in a documentary.
- The steel near the impact site lost its insulation, making it more susceptable to heat damage. All metal flexes under load. Hot metal flexes more, and is more susceptible to failue under load.
- WTC7 I don't know about, but WTC1 and WTC2 are examples of bad engineering. A unique design -- that sucked in dealing with a predictable hazard.
- Off topic, but the flooding of New Orleans was also a massive engineering failure. That disaster illustrates the point that when civil engineers screw up, people die.
The local weekly has a feature article about David Griffin, who wrote The New Pearl Harbor. I'll post a link when the on-line edition appears.
 Unquestioned Answers
Here's a discussion from Popular Mechanics of WTC7 collapse. I'd like to see more detail, but the summary is: odd design, significant structural damage, long-burning fire.
On page 17 of this document, NIST hypothesis and evidence cited by Popular Mechanics. Final report due in '07.
South view of WTC7, where NIST claims damage was present. Somewhere behind smoke?
The film shows the fire clearly burning hard in 2 windows.
The light plane crash yesterday looked like that--how come that building didn't fall?
I'm kidding, sort of.
I skimmed that Pop Mechanics article a while back, and didn't find it very conclusive. Apparently the mag owner is a winger.
Its language on WTC7 is full of qualifications: "might have...", "possible," "the investigators believe..."
The whole PopMech article was like that. It left me with the impression that the authors just wanted to project their own politics into the murk of non-evidence, the same way many Bush Did It theorists do.
Why can't they say at the outset that the destruction of evidence smells?
TWA Flight 808 was laid out in a hanger piece by piece after being recovered from the ocean floor.
Where was the hanger for all the WTC building debris?
Get to the bottom of that, and then figure out what we can still prove. Instead, they set out to debunk the debunkers with a clear agenda of what appears to be backing up the status quo by any means.
All I'm saying is--they need to give the "conspiracy theorists" some props for being alarmed.
I agree with Tom. If they had just kept the metal debris in some secure area at Fresh Kills instead of shipping it off to China to get melted down ASAP, then none of the "conspiracy theorists" would have a leg to stand on. Well, either that or they'd be proven correct. But the government didn't do that. And in every other plane crash they do these painstaking recreations of the aircraft layed out on hanger floors. Why not on 9/11? Is there a single reasonable answer to that other than the obvious? I can't think of one. They didn't even recover all the engines! But they found Atta's passport, intact, within a couple hours. I mean, that might be how it happened - strange shit happens all the time - but why destroy all the evidence?
I just think the need to offer a reasonable explanation falls on them, given that they destroyed the evidence, and falling back on calling people "conspiracy theorists" is not a valid explanation. But still, I understand that it's possible it happened like they say. Just like it's possible it didn't. Too bad we can't find out now.
Digging up the WTC7 stuff on line was motivated by a "9/11 CT" diary I ran across at DailyKos. There's some pretty vociferous reactions against anyone who asks questions about 9/11 at that site.
I agree that the investigation has been inadequate. The NIST "preliminary report" on WTC7 is little more than hypothesis. I think it's a plausible hypothesis, but taking 6 years to produce a definitive report is really strange.
Assuming it was defective design practices that caused the building to have increased vulnerability, it seems like learning the lessons quickly would have some value. After the Loma Prieta quake, CalTrans was pretty quick about fixing a common design flaw in freeway support pillars that was uncovered in the collapses on 880 and 480. (E.g., here's a 260 page report written within about 7 months.) I also found a 1996 text book that covered new information from the '89 Loma Prieta, '94 Northridge and '95 Kobe quakes.
What is it about this collapse that warrants such a lackadaisical pace?
|
David Lynch asks a WTC 7 related question (Quicktime). Go David!
Click it today* because it's his daily report and the question probably won't be up tomorrow.
*("Friday, June 23. Here in LA we have blue skies, golden sunshine...")
Update, Jun 26: Here's what he asked on Friday: "An interesting question for the blog page: Do you think all high rise buildings should be condemned? Because as was proven with for instance the WTC 7 building in New York, if a few floors catch on fire, the whole building falls down. Do you therefore think all high rise buildings should be condemned?"
- tom moody 6-24-2006 5:40 am
So sweet to see the daily report again. I think about 6 months ago it seemed to have disappeared, and of course, I never looked for it after that.
- Robert Huffmann (guest) 6-24-2006 10:21 am
Didn't he also comment on WTC 7 issues several months ago? It seems like I remember you posting a link to that. If I remember correctly the other comment was a little bit oblique. This one seems more pointed.
- Thor Johnson 6-24-2006 6:44 pm
This is the first time I've heard him express any sentiment in the Daily Report other than what the weather's like in Los Angeles. I hadn't looked in a while so could easily have missed an earlier "Lynch political moment." I'm glad he's thinking about the central crime of our era--everyone should be. According to Ron Suskind's new book the bargain Bush struck with Tenet was "I won't fire you for screwing up on 9/11 if you'll give me cover on Iraq."
- tom moody 6-24-2006 6:52 pm
I think it was back in April he mentioned "Loose Change" or something like that.
- Thor Johnson 6-24-2006 7:08 pm
Actually, it was a bit smoggy in LA. The skies were blue if you looked up, but depressing if you looked at the horizon.
My take on the events is that the criminal negligence is bad enough.
- mark 6-24-2006 7:21 pm
Yeah, but why did Larry Silverstein, the owner of WTC 7 say they did a controlled demolition on the building ("pulled it") when the official explanation is fire? The NY Times says fuel for the Mayor's bunker caught fire and caused the collapse--but again, the official explanation is burning debris from WTC 1 and 2 hit WTC 7 and started a fire and that brought the building down, even though fire on a few floors have never collapsed a steel skyscraper before or since. You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to want to know what happened that day.
- tom moody 6-24-2006 7:55 pm
It's not a very good bunker if it catches fire and collapses on your head so easily
- Thor Johnson 6-24-2006 8:22 pm
Putting it on the 23rd floor wasn't the brightest idea America's Mayor ever had.
- tom moody 6-24-2006 8:28 pm
WTC7 is a puzzle. One that I don't know much about.
Why WTC 1 and 2 went down is clear to me from looking at the ASCE report. Why the jet that hit the Pentagon put such a small hole in a reinforced concrete building is not a mystery to me. I have personal experience smacking metal into concrete. Relatively speaking, metal is really soft.
- mark 6-24-2006 8:42 pm
Isn't it the traditonal standard to put a bunker underground or at least partially underground, built into a hill or mountain, encased in feet of concrete? Like those bunkers on the D-Day beaches and the Maginot Line (proof that bunkers often don't work out for other reasons), and as far as "command center" type bunkers go even the big NORAD center or that "Shadow Government" bunker are underground. It seems kind of dumb to put a bunker up in a skyscraper.
- Thor Johnson 6-24-2006 8:43 pm
I hate to keep rehashing this, but the ASCE report isn't very comforting.
* Much of the jet fuel on board the hijacked planes that plowed into the Towers burned off in fireballs outside the buildings. Instead of causing the fires to burn at extremely high temperatures, as was widely speculated,the role of the jet fuel was to ignite other combustible materials over several floors simultaneously. Those fires eventually weakened the structural steel, leading to the Towers' collapse. [This is guesswork because the steel was hauled off to China and melted before investigators could study it.]
* WTC Building 7, which sustained no significant structural damage, collapsed on September 11 after burning uncontrolled for seven hours, was the first protected steel structure ever known to collapse solely due to fire. [WTF?]
* The team found that some connections between the structural steel beams failed in the fires. This was most apparent in WTC 5, where the fireproofing did not protect the connections, leading to a partial collapse. The design and construction of WTC 5 is typical of many steel-framed high rises. WTC 5 is the first major collapse caused by failure of connections due to fire damage. [WTF? 2 in one day, one block apart? 4 in one day if you count WTC 1 and 2?]
It stinks to high heaven.
- tom moody 6-24-2006 8:55 pm
Put another way, the biggest coincidence in the history of architecture happens on the same day as the biggest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. C'mon. As for the Pentagon missile, you'd have to believe the actual plane with Barbara Olson, et al, was ditched in the Atlantic. I can't go that far.
- tom moody 6-24-2006 9:03 pm
I think a lot of the wackier theories are delliberate disinfo making any kind of questioning or skepticism seem like tinfoil-hat looniness by association, serious people then have to waste time infighting trying to debunk nonsense.
- Thor Johnson 6-24-2006 9:15 pm
There's way too much fighting among the people who are troubled by this, too many egos wanting to be the author of the ultimate theory. I hate the idea that this is going to be marginalized into a parlor game like JFK. But that also happened because so much evidence got delberately "screwed up" to protect the various bungling agencies.
- tom moody 6-24-2006 9:23 pm
The investigation was sloppy.
However, I do find the official explanations for WTC 1 and 2 plausible. (I include Nova as one of my references for official explanations.) The structrural design of these buildings was hideously poor for this type of attack. Building like the Sears Tower and Empire State Building would have fared much better.
A large amount of the support was compromised in the initial impact since that support was located on the perimeter. It was located there to maximize available working $pace. A building with a less radical structure would have better absorbed the impact, and would have better distributed the load around the damaged area.
The core structural supports (and fire escapes) were exposed to the fire because they were protected with sheet rock (that shattered), rather than concrete. That was hideous design mistake two.
The stressed members in the floors had faulty connections to the core and to the external skin. The connections weren't designed to support the tension load of a sagging, damaged floor. They were designed primarily for compression strength, to withstand wind load.
Based on this explanation, I have to say that this was a fucked up design. Never should have been built. Twice.
Sometimes it's stupidity and incompetence, not cleverness and evil, that do us in. Bad engineering happens, and in civil engineering the consequences are ugly. That's all I'm saying.
WTC7 and 5? I don't know enough to comment. But I'll do some reading.
-----
Okay one more thing. Found this on a page about NIST's post 9/11 recommendations for building safety ...
WTF? That;s like saying cars should have seat belts, and fire doors should be fire resistant. These standards don't already exist? I have a new-found fear of high rises. To answer the original question: yes, unless flaws are corrected.
And to give you an idea about the what's going on the world of civil engineering, another snippet of the recommendations ...
Yes siree, might want to freshen those up a bit.
(Snarky anecdotal aside: During my undergrad career, I was a "lab support" guy, available to help non-EE engineers in the electical engineering lab when they got stuck. The CE's were the worst. ME's and ChemE's were at least in the right century.)
- mark 6-25-2006 12:01 am
off topic mark. do you know primo levi's book the monkey wrench? levi was a CE by trade and wrote some great tech inspired fiction. also the periodic table was good.
on topic : i worked in #1 wtc on 83rd floor for 10 years. there was an incredible amount of lateral sway in the building. when a nor easter blew through you knew it. the whole think started creaking and squeaking. you cold see the interior sheet rock rubbing the structural wall. i dont know how they could have made a rigid concrete stairwell with all that sway engineered in. im ok with official version of #1 and 2. i watched from my window in jc both buildings fall. i am sceptical of the official version of #7. would enjoy hearing your take after looking into it.
- bill 6-25-2006 12:38 am
I'm familiar with the official explanation. (Not to be unappreciative of your recap.) Amazing that what you described, though, happened exactly the same way in two buildings with different impact scenarios (where the planes hit, what angle, etc). It's amazing to me, anyway. Like, holy shit amazing. Add in two other buildings in the same complex falling in a way that basically has never happened before or since in the history of building buildings with steel, a ton of other suspicious shit happening around the same time (no fighter jets scrambled, etc) and accident/incompetence seems like the most farfetched scenario. There doesn't have to be some central, clever, evil conspiracy for this to stink.
- tom moody 6-25-2006 4:08 am
I have a Primo Levi book somewhere, that I got from an ex-coworker. I haven't read Monkey's Wrench.
Tom, I agree that there are some weird coincidences and shoddy investigation that leaves much unanswered. And it's well documented that powerful people were hoping for a second "Pearl Harbor" to justify a wave of neo-colonialism. There is a certain reek around the whole thing.
My personal belief is that the neocons in power were willing to let a spectacular hijacking to happen in order to provide a tangible external threat that would serve as a foundation for their New American Century. They might have expected something like the Dawson's Field hijackings, or in Rice's words "ordinary" hijackings. But they (and we) got oh so much more.
- mark 6-25-2006 9:33 pm
I guess that's a compromise position for us since we don't agree about this. I think you have the harder job here. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable having to use the words "sloppy" and "coincidence" when talking about the major casus belli of our era.
- tom moody 6-26-2006 12:57 am
I would rather be a conspiracy theorist than a coincidence theorist. History has proven over and over and over again that quite often assholes actually do get together, sometimes even in secret, and then they come up with some kind of asshole plan. Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
- Thor Johnson 6-26-2006 4:39 am
"They might have expected something like the Dawson's Field hijackings" or they might have expected something like flying planes into buildings.
- adrien 6-28-2006 1:34 am
Or crashing into the White House. Is a puzzlement.
- mark 6-28-2006 5:03 am
"Nobody imagined planes being used as weapons" - Condisleeza Lies
(may not be exact quote)
"Lone Gunmen" pilot episode, March 4, 2001
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQyYuWXp3E8
- Thor Johnson 6-28-2006 7:34 am
that's an exerpt of the juicy parts, by the way
- Thor Johnson 6-28-2006 7:35 am
Cree--e-epy. It would be Fox. And of course the government saves the passengers at the last minute with a "manual override" (and a computer that says "Octium Inside").
- tom moody 6-28-2006 8:08 am
oh well, at least there are happy endings on TV ... drool
- Thor Johnson 6-28-2006 9:09 am
Creepy indeed.
- mark 6-28-2006 7:46 pm
As you can see in the visuals accompanying a recent lecture by engineer Jeff King (available on YouTube ), that Nova report that Mark mentioned on the WTC tower collapses fudged its graphics. In order to show the "pancaking effect," the Nova drawings omitted the building's substantial steel core from the representation. They make it look like the weight of each floor was being held up by the sides of the building, and depict the floors bowing in in the center and then breaking, falling into the floors below. If the drawings accurately showed the solid mass of the core's steel girders, the "pancaking" would not be nearly as intuitive or believable.
- tom moody 9-05-2006 3:14 am
I'm not sure what the "core column" critique is about. At least in this diagram the core columns are depicted.
My understanding is not that the floors broke, but that the joints connecting the floors to the core and perimeter columns failed. What I've read is that these joints were designed for compression loads, as would be experienced with a wind load on the building, not tension loads, as would be experienced if the floors began to sag due to the steel softening during a sustained fire.
While there are gaps in the official explanations, and the destruction of evidence is disturbing, I still find the "alternate" views to be less plausible.
- mark 9-05-2006 9:20 am
This is what we're talking about, right?
Why didn't Nova show a graphic that looked like that? Maybe because it gives the impression that the steel core was too solid to be knocked down by the "pancaking" effect, whereas the FEMA graphic, viewed quickly on TV, creates the impression that the building was hollow. And as for the steel "softening"--in forty five minutes? When it's never happened in buildings that have burned for much longer? And it happened in three buildings, all within blocks of each other, on the same day? It seems more like voodoo, or faith in the miraculous, to believe that explanation.
- tom moody 9-05-2006 10:34 am
- Yes, that diagram is much better. It's been a while, but if I recall correctly, PBS had a 3D version of that sans the core. Shite work in a documentary.
- The steel near the impact site lost its insulation, making it more susceptable to heat damage. All metal flexes under load. Hot metal flexes more, and is more susceptible to failue under load.
- WTC7 I don't know about, but WTC1 and WTC2 are examples of bad engineering. A unique design -- that sucked in dealing with a predictable hazard.
- Off topic, but the flooding of New Orleans was also a massive engineering failure. That disaster illustrates the point that when civil engineers screw up, people die.
- mark 9-05-2006 11:25 am
The local weekly has a feature article about David Griffin, who wrote The New Pearl Harbor. I'll post a link when the on-line edition appears.
- mark 9-07-2006 1:55 am
- mark 9-07-2006 9:32 pm
Here's a discussion from Popular Mechanics of WTC7 collapse. I'd like to see more detail, but the summary is: odd design, significant structural damage, long-burning fire. On page 17 of this document, NIST hypothesis and evidence cited by Popular Mechanics. Final report due in '07. South view of WTC7, where NIST claims damage was present. Somewhere behind smoke?
- mark 10-12-2006 11:35 am
The film shows the fire clearly burning hard in 2 windows.
The light plane crash yesterday looked like that--how come that building didn't fall?
I'm kidding, sort of.
I skimmed that Pop Mechanics article a while back, and didn't find it very conclusive. Apparently the mag owner is a winger.
Its language on WTC7 is full of qualifications: "might have...", "possible," "the investigators believe..."
The whole PopMech article was like that. It left me with the impression that the authors just wanted to project their own politics into the murk of non-evidence, the same way many Bush Did It theorists do.
Why can't they say at the outset that the destruction of evidence smells?
TWA Flight 808 was laid out in a hanger piece by piece after being recovered from the ocean floor.
Where was the hanger for all the WTC building debris?
Get to the bottom of that, and then figure out what we can still prove. Instead, they set out to debunk the debunkers with a clear agenda of what appears to be backing up the status quo by any means.
All I'm saying is--they need to give the "conspiracy theorists" some props for being alarmed.
- tom moody 10-12-2006 10:07 pm
I agree with Tom. If they had just kept the metal debris in some secure area at Fresh Kills instead of shipping it off to China to get melted down ASAP, then none of the "conspiracy theorists" would have a leg to stand on. Well, either that or they'd be proven correct. But the government didn't do that. And in every other plane crash they do these painstaking recreations of the aircraft layed out on hanger floors. Why not on 9/11? Is there a single reasonable answer to that other than the obvious? I can't think of one. They didn't even recover all the engines! But they found Atta's passport, intact, within a couple hours. I mean, that might be how it happened - strange shit happens all the time - but why destroy all the evidence?
I just think the need to offer a reasonable explanation falls on them, given that they destroyed the evidence, and falling back on calling people "conspiracy theorists" is not a valid explanation. But still, I understand that it's possible it happened like they say. Just like it's possible it didn't. Too bad we can't find out now.
- jim 10-13-2006 12:10 am
Digging up the WTC7 stuff on line was motivated by a "9/11 CT" diary I ran across at DailyKos. There's some pretty vociferous reactions against anyone who asks questions about 9/11 at that site.
I agree that the investigation has been inadequate. The NIST "preliminary report" on WTC7 is little more than hypothesis. I think it's a plausible hypothesis, but taking 6 years to produce a definitive report is really strange.
Assuming it was defective design practices that caused the building to have increased vulnerability, it seems like learning the lessons quickly would have some value. After the Loma Prieta quake, CalTrans was pretty quick about fixing a common design flaw in freeway support pillars that was uncovered in the collapses on 880 and 480. (E.g., here's a 260 page report written within about 7 months.) I also found a 1996 text book that covered new information from the '89 Loma Prieta, '94 Northridge and '95 Kobe quakes.
What is it about this collapse that warrants such a lackadaisical pace?
- mark 10-13-2006 1:35 am