Comments by "M Fitz" (@MFitz12) on "VICE TV"
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@FigureFish - Then you can handle this since its Tuesday;
Controlled demolition is a hand-wave rationalization for the simple minded. No thought required. In fact best if no thought is applied.
It is also wrong. Let's fix that.
Fundamentally the reasons for collapse of the Twin Towers are simple and many of the key mechanisms are visible to the naked eye. All you have to do is look – you don’t need any authority such as an agency, someone waving a credential around or a YouTube video to tell you what to think:
Impact Damage + Fire + Time + Gravity = Collapse
Remove any one of those elements and there is no collapse.
But first we must cover the basics. The Twin Towers were constructed from 3 main elements;
-The 47 hollow steel box-section central core columns which carried the majority (more than 50%) of the gravity loads.
-The 236 hollow steel box-section perimeter columns around the outside of the building which carried the remainder of the gravity loads and ALL of the lateral (wind loads).
-The lightweight long-span steel floor trusses which were bolted at each end to the core and perimeter columns, tying those systems together to form an integrated unit where no one element could survive without the others.
Impact Damage
The impact of 117 tons of airliner (equal in mass to 10 dump trucks) at 467-509 mph has an energy comparable to a ton of TNT. Ask most people if a ton of TNT could bring down a large building they would probably say “sure, no problem”, but some people can not grasp that same energy in a different form. Needless to say this impact – larger than all but the largest Air Force bombs - caused considerable physical damage to the perimeter column and floor truss systems in the impact area. Scores of columns were destroyed or damaged and the trusses across multiple floors damaged or destroyed, impairing the buildings structural integrity and causing gravity loads to be asymmetrically redistributed to the surviving structure, some of which was damaged. Much of the critical structure is destroyed, the rest is carrying more load than it normally should and some of that is damaged.
Additionally, active and passive fire protection and suppression systems were compromised by the impacts. Stand pipes for the sprinkler systems were carried in the outer walls and severed by the impacts, elminating water pressure. Fire protection systems such as fire doors, gypsum board walls and SFRM coatings on the floor truss systems were damaged, destroyed or stripped. All of these factors conspired to dramatically reduce the survival time of the steel structure due to,…
Fire
Carrying as they did around 10,000 lbs. of accelerant in the form of jet fuel – which was atomized on impact – the impacts started large, floor-wide, multi-floor fires which erupted simultaneously.
Time
Steel gets weaker over time as it is heated. Anyone who took metal shop in high school or went on a field trip to a blacksmiths shop knows this, but it should be obvious to everyone else too. 150 years of fire science research and just practical day-to-day experience has taught that lesson well enough.
The hydrocarbon fires started by the burning jet fuel (which again acted principally as an accelerant not a primary fuel source) were more than capable of creating heating conditions that would damage and weaken steel OVER TIME. Enclosed area fire measurements and many building fire code models have repeatedly shown normal building fires as capable of producing vapor layers above 1,600F, and 1,800F peak temps, which is well above the temperate required for structural steel to lose much of its load carrying capacity. Most steels start to experience drastic strength and modulus reductions between 900F to 1,100F.
Melting – as in steel converting to its liquid state - is not in any way required and did not happen.
Again, to compound matters, impact forces destroyed much of the active and passive fire fighting and fire suppression systems, dramatically reducing survival time of the structure – how long it could hold up in a fire.
Gravity
The fire does not need to "cause the collapse of the entire building." A localized collapse (1 or 2 floors) will do just fine. Gravity takes care of the rest. The rest of the building can be entirely undamaged. It makes no difference. Let me explain.
Collapse initiation (what started the building moving) in the Twin Towers is clearly visible to the naked eye if you bother to look. Few do, preferring instead to jump to conclusions based on scant or no evidence and plenty of false starting assumptions.
In the fire-and-impact damaged floors sagging floor trusses can be seen to cause the inward bowing of many of the surviving perimeter columns (remember, many columns were destroyed, others damaged) by up to 5 feet until the perimeter columns buckled. NYPD helicopters reported leaning in both towers prior to their failure, which is absolutely consistent with the clearly visible perimeter column bowing.
You can see the bowing followed by buckling failure here in the excellent Gary Pollard video of the collapse of the South Tower; WTC2 Collapse -- Gary Pollard (Enhanced Raw Copy from NIST)
youtube.com/watch?v=ULdiD6gYZO0&list=PL4GiNqqck-lzR7pebSWRVLoXyu-aWR3Rr&index=599&ab_channel=MrKoenig1985
The formerly static mass above the failure point was instantly transformed into a dynamic mass approximately 30 times greater, turning its abundant Gravitational Potential Energy into actual kinetic energy. That energy was mostly directed INSIDE THE BUILDING, through an overwhelming mass of debris falling through the open office space, impacting the floor below, instantly shearing the bolted connections (a pair of 5/8” bolts per floor truss connection) between the floor and the core and perimeter columns and causing that floor to fail. As each floor failed in sequence it added its mass to the already falling mass, creating even more energy acting on the structure below.
Many people start with a false starting assumption about the collapse of the Twin Towers which can be simply (and generically) stated as “how can 20 floors crush 90 floors”?
They can’t, and didn’t.
Columns were not impacting columns. The falling debris was BYPASSING THE COLUMNS BELOW and acting on the floor connections, not the columns. All that stuff you heard on the conspiracy sites and videos about "15 floors can't crush 90 floors" or a "small block can't crush a bigger block" is bullshit. Wrong mechanisms.
Overly simplified but much more accurate to think in terms of; 20 floors fell on one floor. One floor couldn't hold the weight, so it failed. Then 21 floors fell on one floor, which couldn't hold the weight and failed. Then 22 floors,...
rinse and repeat until you hit the bottom.
It was one floor at a time.
The South Tower collapsed before the North Tower even though the North Tower was hit first because the South Tower was hit harder, lower (more mass above the damage area) and asymmetrically. From start to finish the collapse of the North Tower took about 34 seconds, the South Tower slightly less since it didn’t have as far to go. For those math challenged, that is less than 1/3 the rate of free fall.
That was probably more than you bargained for and possibly a lot more than you wanted, but I assure you it is the Cliff's Notes version. I sincerely hope this helped. Serious questions are welcomed.
And the best part of all of that is, the Twin Towers could have collapsed due to Impact Damage + Fire + Time + Gravity AND the 9/11 attacks could still have been an inside job. Collapse of any building was incidental, not essential.
No reason to cling to obvious nonsense technical claims about pre-planned demolition, controlled or otherwise.
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Facts beat ignorance-fueled personal incredulity
After the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier, the resulting “peace dividend” had seen the size of the United States Air Force cut in half, and the standing alert force defending the continental United States (CONUS) was decimated.
As the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 began to unfold, DC Air National Guard pilots with the 121st Fighter Squadron, Andrews AFB, now Colonel Heather Penney and her commanding officer, now General Marc Sasseville were in a scheduling briefing. Not being an alert unit, only a skeleton crew was on hand that morning, enough to send up just a 3-ship flight, but no chain of command present, nobody to give them authorization to launch. ANG peacetime chain of command is civilian, going up to the state governor normally, but for this squadron because of its geographic location actually goes to the office of the President Of the United States.
Who was out of town, in Florida.
It was about an hour after the Pentagon was hit when Vice President Dick Cheney – in the White House chain of command – gave the order for the ANG squadron at Andrews to put whatever they could in the air.
Because this unit was not an alert unit, the jets were not armed. No missiles and only a handful of inert training rounds for the 20mm cannon were on board. At this time there were 3 possible bogies. The pair climbed into their unarmed F-16 fighter jets and took off in pursuit of one of them, a Boeing 757 which was reported to have turned-around near Cleveland, descended, and was now heading back towards the Capitol. Two more F-16’s were getting fueled and armed to join them when they were ready, 45 minutes later.
With 'Shoot-to-kill' orders but unarmed. the pair decided before take off they would ram their fighter jets into Flight 93 to prevent it from reaching its target. Sasseville ramming the cockpit and Penny the tail in order to bring the hijacked aircraft straight down. They set up a CAP and worked with Potomic Air Traffic Control to identify possible targets.
It was a suicide mission.
Flight 93 however, had already crashed before they even took off.
Sass and Penny flew several more sorties that day, including escorting Air Force One back to DC later in the day.
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