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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (20615)	4/8/2004 8:37:36 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81068

Searle, The firemen's discussion is completely non-conclusive as to the collapse mechanism. Discussion of steel popping should be kept in perspective. About three decades ago, a new steel bridge was being erected over the Willamette River in Portland, OR. I knew an engineer who was a witness to the failure of a horizontal welded joint that spanned the entire width of the roadway. Approximately 60 feet of weld gave way all at once due to an miscalculation of the stress forces during construction. A joint which is now in compression on the completed bridge was at the moment of failure in tension because of the way that the falsework was being lowered. Fortunately, the span only fell a matter of about six inches and came to rest on the falsework. There were no injuries, but a completely astonished crew found such a failure hard to imagine. Important to the discussion of the collapse of the WTC towers, as the Steel Bridge failed, it sounded like a huge gun shot or explosion that was heard miles away. So, the point I'm making is that as a steel structure disintegrates, the sound and fury of the event can be confused for an explosion. I don't put much credence in the hearsay evidence in a bull session in a fire house. What is far more intriguing to me is the metal samples from the demolished WTC structure that appeared to be "swiss cheese" to the professionals in fire science at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute. That is completely baffling, and the only seemingly logical explanations for that appear to be some sort of eutectic reaction, the likes of which have never occurred on any other steel framed building failure in history.