scott3x said:
John99 said:
The airplane you\they are\were referring to... does not mention Ten Thousand (or more) gallons of burning fuel.
Actually the buildings were designed to handle more then that.
They were not 'designed' to handle that. They were designed for many other reasons and considerations but those are estimates because they were not tested with the same variable mentioned. And of course not the ENORMOUS amount of burning fuel. Which was one of the major issues.
Straight from
NISTNCSTAR1-2Draft.pdf, page 302 (418 in the pdf tab):
Salient points with regard to the structural design of the World Trade Center towers:
1. The structural analysis carried out by the firm of Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson is the most complete and detailed of any ever made for any building structure. The preliminary calculations alone cover 1,200 pages and involve over 100 detailed drawings....
3. The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707 - DC 8) travelling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact. Because of its configuration, which is essentially that of a beam 209' deep, the towers are actually far less daring structurally than a conventional building such as the Empire State Building where the spine or braced area of the building is far smaller in relation to the height. The building as designed is 16 times stiffer than a conventional structure. The design concept is so sound that the Structural Engineer has been able to be ultra-conservative in his design without adversely affecting the economics of the structure. This is not the case with conventional buildings where a more radical approach must be used if the building is to be constructed at reasonable cost...
7. The design has been reviewed by some of the most knowledgeable people in the construction industry. In a letter to John Skilling, the Structural Engineer for the World Trade Center, the Chief Engineer for the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel Corporation said:
"In reviewing this design with our Operating and Construction Departments, we are very optimistic that you have turned a new page in the design of structural steel. It is high time that some new thinking be applied in structural steel. In the words of our General Manager of Operating, Lester Larison, he said - 'It was the best damn thing that he has seen come down the pike in his 46 years of experience. Imagine designing a 100-story building for under 30 pounds per square foot.'"
John Skilling put it more succinctly in an
1993 interview after the first WTC attack, for the Seattle times:
"Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed," he said. "The building structure would still be there."
He knew what -could- bring the towers down, though. The very end of the article states rather presciently:
Although Skilling is not an explosives expert, he says there are people who do know enough about building demolition to bring a structure like the Trade Center down.
"I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it."
John99 said:
Here is a question for you:
If a manufacturer of an automobile claims that its car can roll over ten times and the occupants will come out unharmed would you volunteer for the test?
Ofcourse not. It's a bad example. However, if the designer of the WTC building said that the towers should only have suffered significant damage where the planes hit and yet the towers suffer a complete collapse within seconds of its initiation and the -only- way the designer could have envisioned this happening is if it were taken down by controlled demolition, well, then, don't you think it -might- be good to investigate if the towers were, in fact, taken down by controlled demolition? And yet NIST freely admits it never bothered, that it saved very little of the steel from the twin towers and none of the WTC 7 steel at all. It gives us some tweaked out computer simulations and expects us to swallow the whole thing. The sad thing is that many do.
John99 said:
scott3x said:
A fully fuelled Boeing 707 could carry 23,000 gallons of fuel.
Does it mention the fuel in the theoretic estimations?
Perhaps in the analysis that went missing. But analysis have been done since and they make it clear just how absurd the idea is:
Non-animated Visualization Aids to Assist in Understanding the Demolitions of the World Trade Center Twin Towers