[Phys-L] Re: Here we go again. WTC brought down by aircraft, not.

[Bernard Cleyet <anngeorg@PACBELL.NET>]

I don't know why I didn't post this (below ------ ) when I wrote it
hours ago.  Since then RT posted.  I was about to answer him off list,
but thought others may require disabusing.


I am not a communist. I am a socialist, a Fabian socialist.  All the
people I met in the evil empire called it the socialist block * and
traveled freely w/ in that block.  The East Germans (DDR) were
especially well informed because they could compare their experience w/
the propaganda from Honecker and the West Berlin and German (BRD) radio
/ TV.

I am not paranoid just suspicious. Having read about the rise of Nazism
and experienced or lived during McCarthyism, the VietNam War, Allende
Chile, the War against the Evil Empire, the Balkan Wars, and now the War
Against Terrorism, I would think no one would be surprised.


Furthermore, I posted the article about the UT Prof. as a joke,  not
again!?  but on skimming it, I found he'd brought up questions I hadn't
heard before, at least one of which was answered by succeeding posts.

* I don't remember ever hearing the word Communist (or variants) the six
weeks I stayed in Eastern Europe or the weeks during my visits later to
Russia.

bc, who thinks if "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not
be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public
Safety may require it." (Article One, section nine). is overturned by
the supreme court ........

--------------

I'm referring to the insulation not the design.

This is, like, a four year old memory that the insulation was not up to code
(four hour resistance?). Furthermore, this was because, the WTC was
built by the govt. (NY Port Authority,) they could get away w/ cutting
corners.  I did find the below.  The whole article is interesting (to
socialists).

"The Twin Towers constituted a complex system in terms of physical
infrastructure, its intended purposes of leasing and occupancy, the
congeries of
subsystems comprising its management, and its societal impacts of
international trade
relationships and real estate agglomeration – in all of which
engineering design played
a crucial role in both the creation and destruction of the towers, and
which offer  a
glimpse into the processes of requirements and trade-off analysis.  Dr.
Marshall notes
the non-standard construction of the towers, whose truss system was
devised for
convenience during construction – the trusses were lightweight and easy
to raise
hundreds of feet in the air during construction. [I presume normally the
trusses are made of prestressed concrete, and,  This left them
susceptible to fire,
however, as they would heat up quickly.  Dr. Marshall notes further that
part of the
building design process is setting parameters for the minimum time a
building must
maintain its structural integrity; for the World Trade Center to achieve
an x-hour fire
rate, the trusses would have needed to be coated with insulation to
increase their
survivability, allowing all occupants to exit safely,

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX   [operative section]

and the insulation failed.  According
to Dr. Marshall, some engineers believe the trusses had not in fact been
insulated; others
speculate that the planes’ impact dislodged it.  In any case, heat
transfer was
insufficiently studied and understood to provide adequate insulation.
Scientific research.  Because the collapse constituted atypical behavior
as the result
of fire, the above does not help resolve the disagreement among
engineers about
whether the impact or the subsequent fire was the proximate cause of the
towers’
collapse; Building 7, for example, burned and collapsed without a direct
impact

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

occurring (see Appendix A).  It does, however, suggest a focus for
scientific research to
prevent building collapse as direct or indirect consequence of fire.  As
Andre Marshall
indicates, the University of Maryland’s fire protection engineers
advocate more science,
which translates to performance-based codes, in the code development
process.


http://www.isr.umd.edu/ISR/education/REU/REU2005/2005%20WTC.pdf


bc



p.s. NI (not incidentally) An architect called in either 10, 11, or
12/11 to either the morning show (KPFA) or DEmocracy Now.  He was a
student (grad) commuting to NJ while they were under construction, which
he observed from start to finish.  He described the unusual design
(then), and suggested the collapse mode; the same as all? of us now
agree.  This was some time before I heard of this scenario from the
OTHER media.




Hugh Haskell wrote:

> At 09:53  -0800 11/16/05, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
>
> > I believe * the planes and incompetent illegal construction did it.
>
>
> I have to disagree about the incompetence and/or illegality of the
> WTC construction. The buildings were built by a new (at the time)
> method--that of using the central tower as the main support for the
> floors and not using the outer walls as structural elements. This
> design was neither incompetent nor illegal, and is now a fairly
> common practice. By using it, buildings can be made stronger, taller
> and of lighter weight (stronger and lighter, I'm happy with; taller
> may be a questionable goal). The insulation applied to the structural
> members of the tower was clearly not sufficient to resist the heat
> from the massive fire that the spilled fuel created, and that was
> what ultimately caused the buildings to collapse. But the possibility
> of a fully loaded aircraft hitting the buildings was not contemplated
> at the time, since that was not on the route out of either LaGuardia
> or JFK. Inbound aircraft did come in that way, but they would not
> have nearly the fuel loads of an outbound plane and so would not give
> rise to the level of fire that was seen on 9/11. The design took that
> possibility into account, but not the one that actually happened.
>
> It was, in fact, the central tower supporting structure that allowed
> the buildings to fail in the way they did, that is, to not topple to
> the side, but to pancake on themselves. Had they toppled, the damage
> and loss of life would have been much greater than it was. One design
> flaw was the concentration of elevators and stairs around the central
> tower, which meant that once the fire started, there was no escape
> from above the level where the impact occurred. Had they put the
> stairs on the corners of the building, or somewhere on the outer
> walls, at least two of them would have remained open from above,
> allowing many more people to escape. However, I'm not sure that such
> an eventuality would have occurred to the designers then (although I
> cannot imagine it not occurring today). It does seem reasonable,
> however, that any number of possible problems could have made it
> useful to have a distributed exit system from the buildings, so that
> something happening near the central tower would not block exit from
> the floors above, as happened on 9/11. It is likely that the corners
> of the building were thought to be of more value as occupied space
> rather than as escape routes, so that decision might have been made
> in spite of the designers' wishes rather than because of them.
>
> I think one can say that, given the construction standards at the
> time, the WTC buildings were well and competently built, and even
> failed within the parameters envisioned by the designers.
>
> Hugh
> --
>
> Hugh Haskell
> <mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
> <mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>
>
> (919) 467-7610
>
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