On Jun 28, 2006, at 1:10 PM, Nick Arnett wrote:
On 6/28/06, Warren Ockrassa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is an aircraft that carries enough jet fuel to cover a football
field to the depth of one foot with highly combustible fluid (do the
math; check me -- this is what I recall from working out the figs
myself about four years ago).
Even if that is true (and I've seen plenty of doubts), there was no
jet fuel
(which is kerosene, for those who don't know) in WTC 7. Yet it
imploded
neatly. At the least, it's weird.
After having been so near the collapse of a supermassive structure, its
roof burdened by debris weighing, possibly, dozens or hundreds of tons,
and sitting atop a honeycomb of parking and subway conduits?
I don't think that's weird.
As to what's true, you've made me revisit my numbers. I've learned I
was wrong in one important figure, and I thank you for making me
diligent.
Here we find some InternetFacts™ (take them for what they're worth):
<http://www.b737.org.uk/fuel.htm>
The max fuel load of a top-of-the-line 737 is 37,712 Kg, or around
90,000 pounds. Figure 8 pounds of water in a gallon and you've got
better than 10K gallons of fuel in a 737, give or take.
Put in terms of metrics, you have about 37K liters of fluid, and a (US)
football field is only about 90 or so meters long. Since one liter is
equivalent to 1000 CCs, and since a football field area is about 50
meters wide (53 yards), we can see that the 450 square meters of the
field are covered easily by the fuel load in a 737, at zero depth, by a
factor of ten to one. Give the football grid some walls and you'll be
able to fill it, to a depth of about 10 cm or so, by what's in your
airplane's tanks.
Okay, not a foot. A decimeter, about four inches. But you get the idea.
That is a hell of a lot of explosive fluid, and the 737s that hit the
WTC towers were on long-distance flights, at the beginning of their
journeys, and damn near capacity in their tanks.
Though maybe not -- it would be silly to fill a plane to the brim when
it only had to make a short run, since you'd be lifting the fuel AND
the jet -- not very efficient. So do as the airlines do and fill the
jet with enough fuel to make the trip, plus an hour or to extra. But
even half capacity is stunning -- football field, two inches of jet
fuel covering it.
And yes, it's kerosene, not gasoline. Lower octane rating. But the
flashpoints of the two are close enough to one another (-40 C for
gasoline, 29 C for kerosene, which is a lot in human space but nothing
for chemistry) that any spark hot enough to light a cigarette would set
them off. And the higher flashpoint of jet fuel was one of the reasons
the towers burned so long. Think of carpeting, wallpaper, ceiling tiles
-- wicking all that kerosene and then burning slowly like a candle.
Heat on heat, mounting slowly, on the central steel framework of the
buildings until their central columns were like hot solder.
It's not high heat in a crock pot that makes your stew; it's a long,
slow cook.
I don't know what to think. I find myself wondering how many people
would
have had to have been directly involved and how they could all stay
quiet if
something really was cooked up. But maybe it wouldn't have had to be
very
many... but so many indirectly. There are a lot of orders from that
day
that demand explanation, regarding security at the WTC, military
drills,
shoot-down orders, etc. So darn many coincidences. And yet it's hard
to
know if such coincidences would be found for any day of any year if we
took
the time to look.
You suggested earlier that fires are chaotic. Well, they are. (You'd
know.) For the first 18 minutes or so, no one even knew the US was
being attacked in a coordinated effort. So conflicting reports, chaotic
orders and strange omissions in emergency responses aren't that hard to
understand, are they?
It's much simpler to say "we were caught with our pants down" -- which
I am sure we were -- than it is to suggest a multinational conspiracy,
possibly involving US officials, was in play here.
What's more plausible? That Dick Cheney was drunk and shot his friend
in the face, or that he mistook a 70-year-old lawyer for a quail?
What's more plausible? That buildings designed to implode underwent
structural failure after a catastrophic event never even dreamed of by
their designers, and the disassociated and tentacular arms of a
badly-organized government failed to respond appropriately in the first
few titanic hours -- or that proper response was quelled from the top,
leaving the local units to fend for themselves as a building (two),
which was little more than a façade erected around a central hollow
girderwork of steel, did more or less what it was supposed to do under
total structural failure?
I really hate Bush et. al. I don't think a single thing they have ever
done is right, with the one exception of invading Afghanistan. (The
followup was a disaster, of course.) I would LOVE to see them all swing
from yardarms for pretty much everything they've perpetrated on the US
and the world in the last half decade. But I cannot find it plausible
that ANYONE knew of the WTC attacks before they happened, that there
was ANY kind of conspiracy in play. As much as I'd love to see Bush
done up for treason, I just can't get aboard here.
Let's think of what didn't work for a moment. The Pentagon didn't
collapse; only one face was affected. And the flight downed by civilian
patriots in Pennsylvania would tend to suggest there wasn't a larger
plan at work here.
The attacks were coordinated, and they worked very well. We're still
rabbiting on about them even after the bombings in Madrid and London
(and whither the Vast Conspiracy in those places? Couldn't the bombings
have been much worse than they were?) -- we got woke up, woke up hard.
But there just isn't credible evidence to accept the idea of a
conspiracy. The "what if" games are a lot like the games played by
proponents of _Holy Blood, Holy Grail/The DaVinci Code_, building what
seems to be a plausible argument -- but only AFTER you accept the
principal idea, which is not supported by Biblical, historical or
cultural scholars. (I'd like for this one to be true too, just to tweak
the fundies, but it isn't. It just isn't.)
Just as Jesus Christ never married Mary Magdalene, there were no
thermite or similar bombs in WTC tower 1 or 2 on the morning of
September 11, 2001. Take away the premise and the foundation -- like
the towers themselves -- simply collapses under its own weight of
improbability.
What bugs me the most is how very, very little has been spent on
investigating and explaining, while so much evidence was lost forever.
Evidence, I take it, means the rubble and body parts taken away from
the site of the attacks. (I'm not trying to be unfair -- but where in
the rubble could evidence be found?) But again, that's NYC. What about
the Pentagon, what about the Pennsylvania site? If there was even a
hint of larger coordination, don't you think the brass in the Penta, at
least, would have demanded further investigation? Is it really probable
they'd let themselves be hushed?
As for investigating -- I take it you mean the WTC implosion. Well,
it's been done. There have been extensive written and televised
documentaries on the subject, and the case is closed. When one-third of
a building's mass in height drops on the lower two-thirds, you must
expect catastrophe. The WTC chief architect himself said as much.
Maybe some of this comes from a sense that tall buildings are a little
like mountains -- solid stone, unshakable, permanent. Well, they're
not. They're actually fairly fragile lattices of masonry, façade and
steel framework, and susceptible mostly to failure on a vertical axis.
They use a construction called "curtainwall" to hold up windows and
other outer structural details, and the appellation is valid.
Curtainwall is a lot like both curtain and wall -- thin, suspended and
surprisingly delicate. These buildings and their curtainwalls are
designed to withstand a tremendous amount of horizontal force (wind)
and more than a little torsion (swaying in said wind, which even the
most robust skyscrapers do, to the point that some have installed
counterweights in their roof assemblies to work against the swaying),
but they are not invulnerable. They don't tip over readily, but if
enough damage is done on their vertical load-bearing framework, they're
going to fail.
I'm reminded of an old Monty Python sketch, wherein John Cleese, in an
intense bid to become a freemason, proposes a new living-block
apartment model to prospective purchasers. The tower is built on a
central-column design (as are all modern buildings), and he claims this
will totally preclude the possibility of structural collapse. As he
says so, his model collapses, the little model floors falling down
along the central column he was promoting.
This is almost exactly what the WTC towers did.
The
outrage of fire investigators is appropriate. At the very least, we
failed
to learn a great deal that could go into designs to resist such
attacks.
How? How can you possibly make a skyscraper with every possible
contingency in mind?
If you were really worried about earthquakes, wind, fire, flood and
terrorists, you'd never build past 5 stories -- the upper limit reached
by buildings in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on the reasoning
that most people can't make it past five flights of steps without
becoming fatigued. (This was, of course, in the days before Otis, et.
al.)
There is just no way to rationally suggest that a tall, tall building
is safe against every possible emergency. Such a structure cannot be
built, and attempting to do so is a silly and pointless endeavor.
The towers were designed to come down. That they were made to do so in
2001 by attack is surprising from a cultural point of view, but not at
all from the perspective of engineering or modern architecture.
--
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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