Friday, March 30, 2007
Melted Steel And Other
Debunked Falsehoods
When does idiotic propaganda finally meet its well-deserved death in favor of truth and reality? Maybe it never does and that's unfortunate. All of us know of urban legends repeated as hardcore facts by the group of uninformed troglodytes. One of the troglodytes who proudly displays her ignorance every time she opens her Dolly Madison Hole is Rosie O'Moo. During some point in her life O'Moo decided - just like every good uber-Liberal - to not let facts confuse her with her misinformed beliefs.
On Thursday's ABC's "The Spew", O'Moo repeated one of the patently false urban legends of 9/11; that of steel being "melted" by jet fuel. Now I'd like to think O'Moo looks at all sides of an issue in attempting to reach the truth or at the very least to dismiss the falsehoods of an issue - especially those as significant as an event of September 11. I must be wrong - she only looks for information that supports her erroneous beliefs.
Has O'Moo every heard of Popular Mechanics, because PM debunked the insane conspiracy theories advanced by the Lefties on circumstances surrounding 9/11.
PM sought out some of the very best people who actually know something about structural engineering and building collapse, image analysis, air crash analysis, air defense and aviation.
Here is what the EXPERTS say about "melting steel" (bolding mine):
"Melted" Steel
CLAIM: "We have been lied to," announces the Web site AttackOnAmerica.net. "The first lie was that the load of fuel from the aircraft was the cause of structural failure. No kerosene fire can burn hot enough to melt steel." The posting is entitled "Proof Of Controlled Demolition At The WTC."
FACT: Jet fuel burns at 800° to 1500°F, not hot enough to melt steel (2750°F). However, experts agree that for the towers to collapse, their steel frames didn't need to melt, they just had to lose some of their structural strength--and that required exposure to much less heat. "I have never seen melted steel in a building fire," says retired New York deputy fire chief Vincent Dunn, author of 'The Collapse Of Burning Buildings: A Guide To Fireground Safety'. "But I've seen a lot of twisted, warped, bent and sagging steel. What happens is that the steel tries to expand at both ends, but when it can no longer expand, it sags and the surrounding concrete cracks."
"Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F," notes senior engineer Farid Alfawak-hiri of the American Institute of Steel Construction. "And at 1800° it is probably at less than 10 percent." NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) also believes that a great deal of the spray-on fireproofing insulation was likely knocked off the steel beams that were in the path of the crashing jets, leaving the metal more vulnerable to the heat.
But jet fuel wasn't the only thing burning, notes Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and one of seven structural engineers and fire experts that PM consulted. He says that while the jet fuel was the catalyst for the WTC fires, the resulting inferno was intensified by the combustible material inside the buildings, including rugs, curtains, furniture and paper. NIST reports that pockets of fire hit 1832°F.
"The jet fuel was the ignition source," Williams tells PM. "It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and [the towers] were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down."
Other blatant falsehoods and Liberal Propaganda debunked by the EXPERTS contributing to the PM article and book includes the absurd claim by Liberals that "Seismic Spikes" caused by explosives felled the Twin Towers:
FACT: "There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that explosions brought down the towers," Lerner-Lam* tells PM. "That representation of our work is categorically incorrect and not in context."
CLAIM: That the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 was caused by "controlled demolition":
FACT: NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse."
[...]
Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
[...]
There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
FACT: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a hole approximately 75 ft. wide, according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance Report. The exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations confirmed the findings.
Why wasn't the hole as wide as a 757's 124-ft.-10-in. wingspan? A crashing jet doesn't punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building, says ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University. In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns, explains Sozen, who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings. What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. "If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen tells PM, "it didn't happen."
The tidy hole in Ring C was 12 ft. wide--not 16 ft. ASCE concludes it was made by the jet's landing gear, not by the fuselage.
Who are you going to believe, experts with degrees up the ying-yang or Rosie O'Moo whose primary concern is, "What's there to eat?"
Rosie, "Facts are stubborn things," as John Adams said. I know that facts have a strange way of impeding and defeating what Rosie so desperately "wants to believe."
©2007
Tell me...what does he know about engineering, structures, the melting temp of steel, etc etc etc.
The guy is a flake. Nice try, but no cigar.
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