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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: carranza2 who wrote (9207)9/14/2001 7:01:40 PM
From: Raymond Duray  Read Replies (1) of 74559
 
Hi carranza2,

Anyone know anything about asbestos insulation and whether it could have allowed the steel structures to hold a bit longer?

Yes, the World Trade Center's steel columns were protected by an asbestos fireproofing. The design criteria was to protect the steel for a period of about 2 hours in the event of a normal office-type fire. The heat generated by the combustible material in an office (paper, fabric furnishings) is dramatically less than that available when a fully-fuelled 767 is driven into the structure. The remarkable thing about the progressive destruction of the WTC towers is that the impact force was not fatal to the buildings. What was however beyond the wildest imaginings of the design team was the deliberate introduction of jet fuel to the most vulnerable portion of the buildings. Should the jets have impacted on higher floors, the pile driving force of the upper stories would not have been adequate to bring down the towers. And the same is true of an impact at the lower floors, where the columns were of such massive proportion that they most likely would have withstood the fire until suppression. The planners of this attack seemed to know precisely where the weakest link in the structure was located, above the transition to thinner columns, and below a still considerable mass that could be used as a hammer to drive the rest of the structure into the ground.

Re: Seems like a metaphysically certain intuitive point,
To my American ear, the use of the term metaphysical seems a bit unusual. Can you explain in what sense you mean the use of the term?

-Ray
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