On Jun 28, 2006, at 1:59 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
In other words, the rubble pile could have been acting like a great big
forge.
How many modern cases of spontaneous human combustion have you heard of?
It used to be a big deal, one of those things that happened regularly
for no good reason anyone could find, and it was bizarre. Wooden houses
didn't burn down, flammable drapes didn't get anything but smoke
damage, and still, lying in the middle of a scorched floor, were the
remains of a body, burned to ash, but with weird omissions, such as an
untouched hand or foot.
While SHC has never been fully explained, a plausible explication has
been proposed: Wicking.
You (Nick) know what wicking is, of course -- fuel or any fluid being
sucked along a conduit. In SHC, the idea is that a body, a person, has
become unconscious or otherwise helpless next to a low-heat combustive
force, sometimes a candle, sometimes a lamp. As the body is heated
regionally and rapidly in a small area, fat melts and wicks, and the
burning process is fed slowly and almost carefully, almost
deliberately. A good source of wick action, such as cotton or wool,
helps — and in the days before DuPont, what did most people wear?
Just as you can hold a burning candle in your hand and not feel pain,
the wicking process in SHC might feed into the gradual, but total,
burning of a victim while leaving his surroundings unscorched.
Why this is important is that SHC cases often speak of bones being
turned to ash, which is a thing that usually requires the high heat of
crematoria to make — hot enough to fire pottery, which starts at 500
degrees F and goes well up from there. And even then, bones are left,
and have to be broken manually before the ashes are put into an urn.
Well, as you noted, slow, low fires can sometimes do the same things as
fast, hot fires — and they can do things fast, hot fires cannot. The
wicking action and low gentle heat of a candle or wicking fire can
destroy collagen in bones (you can get collagen from a low simmering
soup, but not a fast, high cook), and maybe the low forge-like fire
you've described can help us understand what happened in the WTC.
You don't need ten thousand degrees of heat in one second to make steel
melt. (Its melt point is around 3100 degrees F). All you really need is
a thousand degrees over a few hours, wafted gently by air from time to
time. Heat builds. And in the case of the WTC structure, you don't even
need melting to start the collapse. You just need plasticity, which
happens at a much lower temperature.
BTW, I'm starting to get worried. In the last hour or so I've Googled
terms like "gasoline flashpoint", "737 fuel load", "WTC tower collapse"
and "melting point of steel".
Please think kindly of me when you learn I'm in GitMo.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
<http://books.nightwares.com/>
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf>
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Storms_on_a_Flat_Placid_Sea.pdf>
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