9-11 - Building Demolitions

Within a few days of 9-11, there were television interviews with mining engineers and other technical professionals who study building demolition as a profession.

"Looks just like a demolition to me" was the essential statement of one of the prominent engineers who was interviewed.

That was his first response, based on about 30 years of experience.

He came back in front of the camera within a few days and recanted his statement.

I have a feeling that between his 2 television appearances, he had some conversations with his boss and other personnel and he was instructed to officially change his mind.

So he officially changed his mind.

So obviously, outspoken, knowledgeable technical people are a problem for the perpetrators of 9-11.  They have a hard time explaining how 2 airplanes caused the collapse of 3 large buildings on 9-11.  The third large building is WTC7.  WTC7 was a 48 story building that was over one hundred yards from WTC1 and WTC2.  It was struck by clouds of dust from the collapsing WTC1 & WTC2.

Please note that 9-11 was a calm day and the building code for New York City skyscrapers is that they have to be built to survive 100 mile per hour winds.

The fact that WTC7 collapsed was not lost on Americans watching the event.

One of those Americans, Jim Hoffman, put up a website at
http://research.wtc7.net/

I have met Jim and watched his videos and watched him present his case.  He uses look-up tables from civil engineering textbooks to crank through the calculations for the amount of energy necessary to pulverize concrete slabs.  It takes a lot of energy to turn 300,000 tons of concrete into dust.  If you have any doubt about the validity of this approach to studying 9-11, try crushing one pound of concrete using a vise.  You will become very tired and you will find out that it really DOES take a lot of energy to pulverize concrete.

Now, we engineers do something called an "energy balance analysis" all the time.  We look at the energy going into a system, the energy coming out, and so on.  We consider different forms of energy -
1.  Kinetic energy.  For example, a passenger airplane flying at a few hundred miles per hour.
2.  Gravitational potential energy.  The top floor of WTC1 was 110 stories off the ground and weighed several dozen tons.  That alone constitutes a lot of energy.  The 55th story would have had half as much gravitational potential energy as the top floor.
3.  Chemical energy.  The jet fuel in the airplanes, and conceivably flammable materials in a steel & concrete office building.

What Jim Hoffman found was that all of the energy available was only about 1/10 of what was necessary to render 300,000 tons of concrete into dust on 9-11.

In other words, there was an additional & very large source of energy at the WTC site on 9-11.


Put another way, if you drop a piece of concrete, it doesn't normally turn to dust before it hits the ground.

But that's what happened on 9-11.  300,000 tons of concrete was turned to dust before it hit the ground.  If you take the time to research 9-11 and look at some of the pictures of Ground Zero, you can see the amount of debris that was left over after the collapse.

When I look at those pictures, I am always surprised by the lack of concrete debris.

But, as much as I admire Jim Hoffman and am surprised by the pictures of Ground Zero, that is not "the Clincher" for me.

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What strikes me about the collapse of the 3 large WTC buildings - 1, 2, and 7 - relates to my experience as a mechanical engineer, specifically my experience melting metal for casting purposes.

It also relates to my experience as a mechanical engineer, assessing the thermal capacity and thermal conductance of metal structures.

My background - I have an engineering degree from Stanford University and approximately 30 years' experience as a hands-on design engineer.

From one of my own posts in the classic "Israel did 9-11, All the Proof in the World" Thread at TIU -
http://theinfounderground.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=39041

"I think one of the best ways to understand the demolitions is to take some classes in metalworking, specifically in casting. a 6 week lost-wax jewelry casting class, for example.

Some engineering classes wouldn't hurt either, specifically thermal conduction and related parts of thermosciences.

You have to work SO hard to melt silver & gold in a wood-fired furnace using oak (burns hotter than pine). It works better if you can add some air input (that's why they call it a blast furnace, more oxygen helps the fire burn hotter).

In my experience melting silver in a campfire (melts about 1763 F), I used about 35 pounds of oak for the one successful attempt. i did it about 5 times as part of my jewelry training in 1998.

I also used a steel mold and a steel frame to hold the steel mold. so i got to see how the steel performed in a really hot fire.

It got red hot and kept all its apparent strength. in engineering you learn that it loses its strength, but i was doing something simple and not asking a lot of the steel. held up just fine.

Notice the numbers -
35 pounds of oak, maybe 4 cubic feet
10 pounds of steel
1/4 pound of silver

Now how much steel did the WTC have in it ? we know it was comparable to the mass of the concrete - 300,000 tons.

Notice that I did not melt steel. I have melted brass, copper, gold, silver, and aluminum.

( I have welded steel.  The bottom line is, it takes a huge amount of energy to melt a very small amount of steel.)

The reason i don't play around with casting steel is because it melts at 2700 F and it hurts my eyes to look at such hot fires. my kiln tops out at 2000; to do steel i would have to get an oxyacetylene torch setup.

LONG STORY SHORT - the jet fuel that didn't go up in the big ball of flames.

Its effect on the steel of the WTC - like holding a lighter up to a cast iron frying pan for 30 seconds.

What i'm saying is, based on my metalworking experience, I know there was not enough energy to do anything but locally warm the structure.

Because steel is thermally conductive, not as good as copper but still very usable for a heat sink, and because the whole thing was heat sunk into the ground, i doubt more than a few parts of the steel structure got hotter than 212F - the boiling point of water.

My background - my jewelry casting experience is outside of corporate job, my casting experience is part of being a mechanical engineer. also when you're a mechanical engineer you spend all day doing calculations about thermal capacity and how hot things get. then building the prototypes & measure how hot they got. i started in Silicon Valley in the early 1980's.

It took me a while to process all this. although some of my jewelry casting experience was in 1998 & 9-11 was 2001, it wasn't until recently when I did a test-fire on my kiln and with a new torch that i started realizing how hard i was working to melt very small amounts of metal. Then I thought more about the metal melting (casting) work i did in 1998.

I could do the calculations for the WTC steel. this would involve determining it's thermal capacity (how much energy would be needed to increase the structure temp 1 degree C or F at important structural points) and then asking, how much energy is contained in -
* jet fuel
* burning carpet
... and whatever other fuel sources were in the building.


once it becomes clear that the WTC 1, 2, & 7 were demolished, then the question becomes, "who ?"