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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Raymond Duray who wrote (16278)3/30/2005 8:18:08 PM
From: TigerPaw  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 20773
 
How could the Windsor Tower in Madrid have been a raging inferno for well over 24 hours and not collapsed

The Windsor Tower was a different kind of design.
It is built of a lot of little "cubical" support structures.
This provides significant redundancy in horizontal support as well as vertical support.

The world trade center had big open spaces between the outer walls and the center. Once the celing beams began to soften from heat they would sag and no longer provide horizontal stability for the structure, but instead would actually pull the outer walls toward the center.

arup.com

As you can see in the picture, the out wall of the Windsor Tower did collapse. The difference is that there were interior walls to hold up the building. The Trade Center had no such interior walls and when the out walls failed, the building failed.

TP