WTC TOWER COLLAPSES
Re: How much of the structural integrity did the planes take from the area of the buildings where they impacted?
There have been some studies of this. In a nutshell, the main vertical load bearing elements were the columns in the core of the structure. In the case of the South Tower, these columns were not impacted at all by the plane's impact. Yet this was the tower that came down first, in spite of the fact that it was hit 20 minutes later than the North Tower. Which makes the argument about steel heating and losing tensile strength even more far-fetched.
The most plausible explanations are sabotage and the "pancaking" theory, whereby as concrete floors started to collapse, they created a jack-hammering dynamic effect that lower floors couldn't counteract.
The reason I suggest sabotage is perfectly plausible is due to the astonishing degree to which the Bush Administration has been attempting to stifle all standard investigations into the collapse, starting from the astonishing coincidence that FEMA agents just happened to be in New York City on the night of Sept. 10, 2001 for a training scenario, and immediately seized control of the WTC tower site on 9/11 and prevented standard New York City police and fire department investigations from proceeding. And now many of us have read with increasing disgust the effort of the Bush team to stymie the work of the so-called independent "Kean Commmission".
The Bushies are certainly hiding something, though what it is ain't exactly clear.
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Re: But my problem with this is that if such were the case, why wasn't there more of a tilting to the nature of the buildings collapsing?
Since gravity was seemingly the main force involved in the collapse, having the buildings fall straight down would be the normal expectation. To have the buildings tilt as they fell would have required that at a lower elevation, the structure would have failed eccentricly. This apparently was not the case.
What I'm more troubled by is that I would have expected, with the floor systems pancaking, that the central core would have had more integrity and would have withstood the collapse of the relatively weaker elements surrounding the core. This did not occur, and the core was taken down at the same time as the weaker structural elements. It's an anomaly that I have no explanation for, though there are those who believe that it was the sabotage of the central core's columns that precipititated what to all intents and purposed mimicked quite nicely a planned demolition. |
