-Caveat Lector- > Phil and John. The information about only one of the >Towers being insured was given out on the media here in Aus the same day >that they were hit......Then nothing more, the subject was conveniently >brushed under the carpet and forgotten about. When they started to >clear away the debris it was stated here again by the media, that it was >found that a large part of the Haulage Companies involved were run by the >Mafia.
Since a large percentage of the 'Haulage Companies' in the NYC metro area are owned and/or run by those with ties to the mafia, this bit of information may or may not mean anything significant; the law of percentages would weigh in favor of having a goodly number of such companies hauling away the debris simply because local companies are being used, nothing more. >Then the Dust as you so quite rightly say John is >definitely an indication of weak concrete... I really wish people would do some basic research on the construction techniques used to build the WTC, information that is easily available to anyone who has access to microfiche copies of NYC papers of the 1960s; the WTC design and construction techniques were quite new and somewhat controversial at the time; alsoone of the primary concerns was how the towers would react to a direct hit from a fully-loaded airliner -- New Yorkers of the day still remembered the airplane that flew into the Empire State Building some 20 years before during WWII, and one of the requirements of the WTC design was that it would be able to withstand the impact of the largest airliner of the time, which back then was a 707... There recently were two documentaries on cable channels which documented both the contstruction of the WTC towers, and also examined why they collapsed as they did, complete with computer simulation of what happened to the structure of the towers as a result of not only the impact of the airliners, but the resulting fire; of course, those of us who are old enough to remember when the towers were first proposed and construction commenced remember that one of the controversies surrounding the building of what were then the tallest buildings in the world centered on what would happen IF they happened to collapse, and we remember that we were assured by the architects that the design of the towers were such that if such a catastrophe DID occur, that the design would cause the tower to fall in on itself rather than, as was the big fear of the day (a fear more of what would happen in a hurricane than a worry about it being hit by a plane) that the towers would fall sideways over and on top of surrounding buildings... The design included this worst-case scenario fail-safe, that if somehow the towers failed, that damage would be minimized to the surrounding area by having the towers 'implode' upon themselves.... The strength of the towers was in their steel exterior, which created an exoskeleton; the 'designer of record' (as he was so labeled on one of the documentaries) explained how they designed the structure so that it could withstand the impact of a 707, which is much smaller than the 767s that actually crashed into the buildings...yet even tho much larger aircraft were used, the buildings DID withstand the impact, and the fact that they did survive the initial crash and were able to remain standing for as long as they did is the reason why the casualty figures are now under 3000, when the figure could have been 10 times as much (there were between 30,000 to 50,000 people working in both towers on any weekday, not to mention the thousands of tourists who visited each day)... The documentaries demonstrated what actually led to the collapse, which was the fact that each floor was made of steel trusses hung from steel brackets attached to the exterior walls and the support columns which were in the central elevator shafts; it was this design of laying floors that not only allowed the towers to be as tall as they were (because it is a more lightweight material than traditional steel column supports), but made the towers an attractive location from the tenant's point-of-view, as it allowed an open floorplan that that the tenant could easily customize for the tenant's own purpose... The only concrete used was a 4-inch layer of concrete laid on each of these suspended floors; in other words, there was no reinforced concrete walls or reinforced concrete supports, because the walls and supports were made of steel. The dust seen in the collapse is made of a combination of materials -- the 4-inch layer of concrete on 100-something floors, sheetrock partitions, the marble used in many tenants' lobbies, the tile and grout used in hundreds of lavoratories, not to mention all the furniture, computers, and human bones ground up by the collapse... >The obvious conclusion one can >draw is that during a previous building inspection, major faults in it's >construction became evident either in material (Concrete Cancer) or >design... Once again, concrete was never a part of the integral composition and strength of the towers -- it was only used on the floor decks to give the floors strength, e.g. so that you wouldn't feel the floors flex nor hear someone walking above you. This strength to the floors had nothing to do with the strength of the structures themselves, which was in the external steel skeleton.... What WAS overlooked, and which I found surprising when the 'designer of record' admitted it on one of the documentaries, is that while he was instructed to design for the possibility of a tower being hit by an airliner, no one ever took into account what would happen when thousands of gallons of jet fuel burned inside the tower...which seems to be not only a strange oversight, but blatently incompetent... And THERE is where the failure occured; while the temperatures of the fire were not enough to melt steel, they were high enough to weaken it. The documentary showed a video that was made some years ago of a test fire that was done in a 'typical' skyscraper/office building; the result of a 'typical' fire (in other words one not caused accelerants) was that the steel supports, especially the horizontal supports bearing the floor above, sagged a good deal. This test building was constructed using conventional methods, e.g., internal supports of normal steel beams.... But that is not how the WTC was built; as stated above, its strength was in its external steel walls, and the floors were suspended from brackets attached to these walls and to the steel beams in the central elevator shafts. These floors were comprised of lightweight steel trusses, much smaller than traditional steel beams. While such trusses are very strong for their weight, they are very vulnerable to damage in a fire if they are not protected by some sort of fire-proofing... As shown in the documentaries, the initial blast caused by the 767s crashing into each building seems to have blown much of the fireproofing away, and what little remains was shown on some of the recovered debris to have fused to the steel in glass-like blobs... It would seem to me that the fact that the fireproofing could be blown away by a plane crashing into the building is another failure of design -- it's not enough to instruct a designer to account for the initial impact in a design, and then ignore everything else that would occur due to such a crash... BTW, the 'designer of record' claimed that accounting for what would happen due to jetfuel burning within the building after a crash was not his job but someone else's, but he did not mention who he thought should have been responsible.... So what happened is that you had a much larger aircraft than designed for crashing into the building, an aircraft so large that it basically filled a complete floor; what that means is that just the size of the craft assured that a good number -- if not all -- of the internal supports in the central elevator shaft were destroyed...plus you had a big hole punched into the external skeleton at the point of impact, and a goodly-sized one opposite the impact point where the exploding plane crashed through... And with all of that initial damage, the buildings still remained standing; in other words, they performed EXACTLY AS DESIGNED.... The problem was in what was NOT taken into account in the design -- the result of thousands of gallons of jet fuel burning for an hour or more against unprotected lightweight steel trusses.... Which resulted in the steel softening and slumping -- and since the floors were merely suspended from brackets, as soon as the steel slumped it meant that it would slip out of the brackets and crash to the floor before... So you had two burning towers; the first tower that was hit had about 10 stories above it, plus communication equipment on the roof; the second tower was hit lower down on the building, meaning there was the equivalent of a 30-story skyscraper sitting on top of the impact site, not to mention the weight of the aircraft itself. In other words, you had significantly compromised supports at the points of impact which then needed to support between 10 to 30 stories above but also the additional weight of the aircraft...to put it more simply, you had perhaps a couple of floors now having to support the weight of a 767 plus 10 to 30 floors above...it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this was way above the amount of weight they had been designed to support... So it's a credit to the initial design that they indeed remained standing for as long as they did; but due to the fire weakening the lightweight floor trusses, it was inevitable that the towers would eventually fall, and when they did, they fell as they were designed to do. The strong external skeleton held together long enough to prevent the collapsing floors from doing anything except pancake on top of each other which, I reiterate, is HOW IT WAS DESIGNED TO COLLAPSE... As soon as one floor gave way, it was inevitable that there would be a complete collapse; the shower of concrete dust proves nothing, since concrete was only used as a flooring material and not as an integral part of the building's structure. >The building was supposedly designed to bend and give during high >winds. Which it did; there were 2 hurricanes it experienced since it was built, the worst hurricane had sustained winds of about 130 mph with gusts up to 180 mph, and neither tower sustained damage...indeed some people rode the storm out in a 'hurricane party' at Top of the World, the restaurant that was on top of Tower 2... They were built to withstand sustained winds of at least 200 mph, and indeed they seem to have succeeded in meeting that expectation... >Was the concrete unable to withstand the pressures exerted?? This is an idiotic question, since concrete was not used for anything except flooring, it had nothing to do with the strength of the building.... >Did the Insurance >Company pick this fact up in an inspection and refuse to insure it??? Another idiotic question; the WTC was over 25 years old, if there was anything seriously wrong with its construction, insurance-wise, one would think that it would have become known decades ago... >The tower then became an >ideal target for so called Terrorist attack... As a symbol of America, it was always a target, first for stunt people seeking free publicity, later on for terrorists... I believe the 9/11 attacks probably were initially planned, at least in a general, preliminary sense, immediately after the failure of the 1993 bombing; when that failed, certain parties immediately scratched their heads and wondered why it had failed, then set about to study why the bomb failed and what needed to be done to assure success. As I pointed out above, all one needs to do is avail oneself of the information that was openly discussed in the NYC papers of the day, which detailed the design of the towers and debated their safety, specifically regarding how they could collapse and what would happen if they did... And Atta, being a student of urban design, specifically in regards to superstructures like the WTC, would have been particularly knowledgeable regarding the design weaknesses of the WTC and how to exploit those weaknesses... >The point is that if the concrete is made properly it is near >indestructible. It depends on the type of stress the concrete support is subject to; just the other day there was a segment on a cable show regarding the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, specifically regarding the portion of multideck highway that collapsed, trapping many rush-hour commuters. That highways support had been built properly, albeit in the 50s before San Francisco inacted strict codes for earthquake standards; that support was perfectly okay for everyday use, and had degraded little over the 30 or so years it had in use...but it just was not designed to withstand the amount of force exerted on it by an earthquake... Attacking a concrete pier with a jackhammer is quite a different matter than expecting that pier to be able to support thousands times more the weight it had been designed to hold... Which is all a moot point, since concrete was NOT used in the support structure of the WTC towers, only as a flooring material... <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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