Matt Jones' Random Acts of Verbiage

A friend of mine who has qualifications in structural engineering made the excellent point that the way in which the towers collapsed should have been utterly uncontroversial. She pointed out that no structure, not even a skyscraper, is designed to last for ever. But when you do want to demolish it. how do you do it? You bring it down vertically. The reason the towers looked like they’d been subjected to a controlled detonation was because they failed in precisely the way the designers intended they should, for which we should be very grateful (if they’d toppled, the death toll in Manhattan could have been a couple of orders of magnitude higher).

All this is moot, of course. We don’t need to reject the Truthers from the standpoint of physics and metallurgy. We can simply ignore them on the basis that no conspiracy of the scale required for the WTC’s destruction has ever been kept secret. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of people would need to be in on the scheme. And you know what they say: the only way two people can keep a secret in Washington is if one of them is dead.
If Nixon and the CREEPs couldn’t keep Watergate under their hats, how likely is it that ‘knowledge’ of the biggest act of government-sponsored mass murder is restricted to the frothing-at-the-mouth brigade? We can ask the semi-frivolous question: if this was a Bush administration wag-the-dog effort, where are the inter-departmental memos? To make the Truthers’ beliefs even remotely feasible, we would have to assume that no-one involved in the operation had any pangs of conscience, that no-one blabbed, and that no paperwork has come to light. The conspiracy theorists are positing that there exists in the US government a cabal of people so surpassingly evil that they were willing to kill three thousand of their fellow citizens to gin up a spurious casus belli. There’s always been plenty of people sufficiently deranged to believe things of this nature, but it’s a worrying development when we start taking them even semi-seriously.

Truthers evidently reach their conclusions by employing Murray’s Knot (Gordian’s brother). Only the most complicated explanations are worth pursuing.

WHO, in the demo biz, uses the term “pull” on any building over 3 stories ? In the demo context, “pull” is done by cables to weaken a structure. Though with precision demo, I’m not sure they even do that much any moe.

“Pull it” was nothing more that shorthand for something like “It ain’t worth losing any firefighters over — it’s coming down anyway. Pull that unit of firefighters out of #7 now.”

Oh, and I also want to know how “explosions” cause “rivers of molten metal.” Come on, people, be consistent. I’ve worked with thermite before — it doesn’t go “bang!” even a little.

Or did some evil conspiracist empty out his whole demo toybox ? (muttering “. . . let’s see, 500 kilos of thermite, 50 kilos of C4, 15 breaching charges, caps, detcord, 200 water-tampers, and look! Here’s that fuel-air munition from last Christmas I forgot I had. THAT’ll be fun! Now, I just have to sneak all this crap up to the top of tower 1 and two.”)

Ooo, “traces of thermite” Let’s see, aluminum-bodied aircraft hits steel skyscraper. What’s the odd’s we’ll find aluminum oxide and iron in the resulting mess.

I just wish folks had the “common sense” necessary to see how crazy this is. We can’t keep anti-terror money-tracking off the front page of the NY Times, and some people think THIS could be kept secret ?

result = setGraspOfReality(0);

I wonder how many man-hours of work Danny Jowenko, OWNER of Jowenko Demolitions, would say it would take to prep a building like WTC7 for a demolition? How many pounds of Thermite/thermate/explosive? How many blasting caps? How many feet of firing line/detcord? Wonder how they prepped that building for the demo during the 7-8 hours between the first attack and it’s failure? Wonder where they staged the explosives and firing line?(had to be somewhere where the debris of WTC1/WTC2 did not make it inaccessible) Wonder that no-one saw any of that activity?

Maybe they did it in advance. The super-secret demo teams came in in the middle of the nights, prior to 9/11, cut into the sheet rock to get to the steel supports, attached the thermite/thermate/explosive whatevers, rigged the blasting caps and the firing line, patched the sheet rock, and painted/papered it over so that none of the 1000′s workers in the building even noticed it was happening during the day. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

From a practical standpoint, it boggles the mind that anyone could somehow think that even if a demolition was done, that it was somehow physically possible to do in the timeframe given.

And for what motive? Did the collapse of WTC7 really inflame the public? As if the collapse of WTC1 and WTC2, the attack on the Pentagon, and Flight 93 did not already do that. The public NEEDED to have WTC7 come down to stir them up. yeah right.

Does anyone use thermite to do demolitions? Anyone at all? My guess would be no; that it works too slowly and therefore yields an unpredictable drop. Better to have all your charges cut exactly on schedule, I’d think. Plus, you can’t possibly thermite a building without lots and lots of prep work, not least of which would be stripping fireproofing from steel beams.

IOW, thermite or explosive demolitions; pick one. Tell us your conspiracy theory consistently, and we’ll tell you why it doesn’t work.

Lt. Col. Guy S. Razer, MS, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot (F-111, F-15E, F-16, B-1, F-18, Mig-29, and Suu-22). Flew combat missions over Iraq. Former instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School and NATO’s Tactical Leadership Program.

• Statement to this website 3/25/07: “After 4+ years of research since retirement in 2002, I am 100% convinced that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned, organized, and committed by treasonous perpetrators that have infiltrated the highest levels of our government. It is now time to take our country back.

The “collapse” of WTC Building 7 [570 feet tall, 47 stories, and not hit by an airplane] shows beyond any doubt that the demolitions were pre-planned. There is simply no way to demolish a 47-story building (on fire) over a coffee break. It is also impossible to report the building’s collapse before it happened, as BBC News did, unless it was pre-planned. Further damning evidence is Larry Silverstein’s video taped confession in which he states “they made that decision to pull [WTC 7] and we watched the building collapse.

Freemasonry

I firmly believe that the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by Islamic terrorists. I believe this because:

1. It’s true.

or

2. It’s not true and the government successfully pulled off a massive conspiracy to destroy billions of dollars of property and kill thousands in bizarrely complicated ways to achieve a mysterious goal in an overly complicated fashion. I’m not about to mess with this government. It’s incredibly powerful and apparently more than a little insane.

EI

Brian (#95), you stated “a eutectic reaction occurred at the surface and caused intergranular melting capable of turning a solid steel girder into Swiss cheese”. The answer to your question is here.

A eutectic compound is a mixture of two or more substances that melts at the lowest temperature of any mixture of its components. Blacksmiths took advantage of this property by welding over fires of sulfur-rich charcoal, which lowers the melting point of iron. In the World Trade Center fire, the presence of oxygen, sulfur and heat caused iron oxide and iron sulfide to form at the surface of structural steel members. This liquid slag corroded through intergranular channels into the body of the metal, causing severe erosion and a loss of structural integrity.

“The important questions,” says Biederman, “are how much sulfur do you need, and where did it come from? The answer could be as simple–and this is scary- as acid rain.”

Have environmental pollutants increased the potential for eutectic reactions? “We may have just the inherent conditions in the atmosphere so that a lot of water on a burning building will form sulfuric acid, hydrogen sulfide or hydroxides, and start the eutectic process as the steel heats up,” Biederman says. He notes that the sulfur could also have come from contents of the burning buildings, such as rubber or plastics. Another possible culprit is ocean salts, such as sodium sulfate, which is known to catalyze sulfidation reactions on turbine blades of jet engines. “All of these things have to be explored,” he says.

So, while the evidence of eutectic compounds was surprising, it is not a “mystery” in the sense of something that doesn’t fit with the other data. It doesn’t negate the overwhelming evidence that the collapses were caused by a combination of major structural damage to load-bearing columns combined with extensive fires causing deformation of the remaining columns.

Your statement (referring to explosives) “where eutectic compounds are commonly used for obvious reasons” reveals a misunderstanding of the word eutectic. Eutectic merely refers to a process where the mixing of chemicals can lower the flash or melting point of a substance. In the case of the WTC steel, this refers to the mixing of iron oxide and iron sulfide with the steel, lowering its melting temperature. As you can see, there are plausible explanations for it that don’t require the use of any explosives at all. Furthermore, an demolition event doesn’t turn steel into swiss cheese, it severs it.

The statements about the redundancy of WTC7 are meaningless in the face of the damage caused to the building by the collapse of tower one. NIST has not yet completed its report on the collapse of tower 7, but they have this working hypothesis.

The current NIST working collapse hypothesis for WTC 7 is described in the June 2004 Progress Report on the Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster (Volume 1, page 17, as well as Appendix L), as follows:

An initial local failure occurred at the lower floors (below floor 13) of the building due to fire and/or debris-induced structural damage of a critical column (the initiating event) which supported a large-span floor bay with an area of about 2,000 square feet;

Vertical progression of the initial local failure occurred up to the east penthouse, and as the large floor bays became unable to redistribute the loads, it brought down the interior structure below the east penthouse; and

Triggered by damage due to the vertical failure, horizontal progression of the failure across the lower floors (in the region of floors 5 and 7 that were much thicker and more heavily reinforced than the rest of the floors) resulted in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.

As you can see, the damage done when tower 1 collapsed was below the reinforced floors.

One last thought, responding to a different commenter; the idea that NIST is somehow controlled by the politics of the White House is laughable. NIST has a long and commendable reputation of conducting scientific research into the causes of various disasters (they produced reports on both the 1993 WTC bombing and the OKC Murrah Building bombing, among many others) and politics do not enter in to their reports. For example

Some 200 technical experts—including about 85 career NIST experts and 125 leading experts from the private sector and academia—reviewed tens of thousands of documents, interviewed more than 1,000 people, reviewed 7,000 segments of video footage and 7,000 photographs, analyzed 236 pieces of steel from the wreckage, performed laboratory tests and sophisticated computer simulations of the sequence of events that occurred from the moment the aircraft struck the towers until they began to collapse.

The idea that the large number of experts involved, not only government employees but both commercial experts and independent academic scientists, could all be coerced into producing a “party line” report (of hundreds and hundreds of pages of exhibits, drawings, graphs, and detail analyses) is so far-fetched as to be loony bin material.

Which is precisely why I said anyone who buys this conspiracy nonsense is an idiot. (And yes, I chose the word carefully and deliberately.)

Jesus. Maybe we should put these idiots together in one room, and let them argue about the exact form of the deception. Because, you see, there were no airplanes crashing into the WTC. The people in those airplanes are still alive, or taken to some remote site and murdered by our government, just so Dick Cheney can make his former co-workers a 1% profit margin.

Once, just once, I’d like to see a conspiracy theory on this that didn’t fall apart the first time it was examined.

Guy Razer…has anyone, anywhere ever heard of Guy Razer before he decided to speak up? If Razer is a former pilot, what on Earth does that have to do about his credibility re: the physics of building collapse? If Razer has an MS in “Aeronautical Studies”, why does that trump my engineering degree?

I mean, if the guy’s the genuine article, what in his resume ought to make me pay him any attention other than that due to a former serviceman who has unfortunately contracted some sort of dementia? Why does Ed Begley, Jr have any say at all about this? Why do people pay a professor of philosophy any attention in matters engineering and scientific? Why does a practicing physician and former building wiring engineer have any cache at all as being “from MIT”? Why does a former DoD mid-level manager get to revise his resume, promote himself to full colonel and call himself the former head of Star Wars, and do so without raising a large number of eyebrows? This is appeal to authority, any appearance of authority.

cut out what is true leave in what you like: empty and controlled you are.

Popular Mechanics has aliitle problem with their “Citations”. When are you going to get to this: Matt?

Not your traditional way of following the facts back towards the source for Popular Mechanics…They can just get some one to step in for a word or two without giving their workcited page.

Have a nice day :}

What?

right you know that is good work.

APA or MLA: What did they use?

Come on prove your facts through your source documenation.
Right?

Right because you have to except that.

Feel?

You and I both know that if we tried to calm anything on that scale then the wolves would eat us. But, I see your point of view. :}

How does one fight?

No

Your source is.

Popular Mechanics wrote an amazing piece: Debunking The 9/11 Myths (which eventually became a more complete book of the same name). If any part of you believes any of the nonsense, go read that article.

You lead people into bad places: Matt.

Your Smart, but how can you feel your way through these facts without using proper citations, and sources…anything that can offer more of info on the facts that your “Debunking The 9/11 Myths” is claiming?

See Matt, this guy right here feels like you do.

“citations from some of the world’s best in science”

Now, there is a great article that has citations from some of the world’s best in science, engineering and construction found in Popular Mechanics which you could GOOGLE and use that as a compliment to this bog when going up against …

Your not feeling like this is important: Matt you are smart.

Consulted: ask, check with, talk to, seek advice from, see, look up, turn to check in.

Did they have coffee and doughnuts. Seemed like they got some real good advice Matt.

Popular Mechanics let you down. Next time Trust, but verify.

Nice blogging with you, oh don’t forget to delete the clutter I hate to see this come up again.

Semper Fi
USMC

Mr. Jones:

Nice try, but no cigar for you! You are obviously a phony and a shill. You, and many responders here are part of a phony internet network, trying despretely to cover up the truth. There are hundreds of phony websites like yours, probably funded by the CIA. Guess what you little prick: It ain’t working! There are many reasoned arguments here, telling the truth as it really is. You pretend to speak with a greater degree of reason than the people who are onto our lying administration, which you are a part. Better try a little harder and get further instructions from your handlers. Damage control! Go to plan B, plan B I say!

PS: Are you related to John Hinkley? You look just like him.

HA HA, funny, huh?

You are so smooth in your cleaverness. I’m not as cleaver as you, but I am much smarter, and obviously more principled. That hit piece in Popular Mechanics? It was penned by the nephew of Michael Chertoff, our Homeland Security director. The name Chertoff means “Son of the devil”. And this man has dual citizenship and is a citizen of Israel! Just think about that fact. Homeland Security isn’t about security of the United States. It’s about the security of Israel. Americans had never called the US our homeland. It’s what jews have called Israel. And here we are, fighting a proxy war for them. 9/11 was the catalyzing event necessary to get the American people to go along with this. PNAC describes this in their own documents. Homeland Security of the US is a phony enterprise. We have spent a hundred billion dollars for this lousy organization which hasn’t made us a bit safer, yet our borders are wide open and anyone who wants to come here just floods over the borders, arabs included. Put that in your little crack pipe and smoke it pal.

Buddy, you’re as phony as a three dollar bill. You’re too obvious! You’re running naked. Better go put some clothes on.

I know pal, you’re a phoney!

Have fun celebrating Cinco de Mayo with your tv like “friends” You are a smart alec little boy. Any one who has seen how building 7 fell knows it was “pulled”. And you pretend to be reasoned? The plane that was shot down in Pennslyvania was intended to hit building 7. Yes smarty boy, it was shot down. The debris field was miles long, and there was no plane that hit the ground. Just small pieces of it. Counter that with one of your smooth, ninja like retorts, you slimey snakeboy.