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Politics : Bush-The Mastermind behind 9/11? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (9167)	12/8/2004 3:34:30 AM
From: Don Earl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20039

Here's a link on ANFO and mining. coalage.com It looks like my impression of 80,000 blasting projects was both right and wrong. They do use that much ANFO, and in some cases MUCH more. The kicker is it's not one blast, but a series of staggered blasts, and the blasts are set up to dampen excessive ground vibration (earthquakes) from each preceding blast. As close as I can tell, an example might be something like 50 deep holes, filled with ANFO, detonated a few fractions of a second apart for each hole. Hole 1 blows up, starts to send out a seismic signal, hole 2 blows up and partially cancels out the vibration from hole 1, and so forth through hole 50. So while they do use that much explosive, there's virtually no relationship between detonating a mining series of charges, and setting off 80K pounds of ANFO in one lump. Also, since the charges are engineered to intentionally keep earth shaking to a minimum, the mining operation is totally irrelevant when it comes to guessing what amount of explosives would cause a two point quake. I was trying to find a link with numbers on the detonation velocity of various explosives, but kept ending up with ten million copies of the anarchist cookbook. I've run across pages with that kind of information on other searches, so I'll look some more when I have time. As I remember, ANFO is quite a few steps below RDX, but I don't recall by how much. The Controlled Demolitions site Ray posted talks about problems with keeping earth shaking to a minimum, and also talks about timing charges to dampen the effect. In any case, the pseudo experts comparing the WTC quakes to mining operations looks like an intentional red herring. As far as I know, virtually every conspiracy theory based on mini nukes and the like is based on that piece. No doubt there are plenty of seismic records from implosions, but for some reason no one appears interested in comparing those signals to the WTC. As preposterous as the official story is, it still sounds better than smuggling 40 tons of ANFO into the basements of both buildings. On the other hand, one guy with a hand truck could bring in enough RDX in a single load to take out the columns in the basement.