Sunday, June 6, 2010

Debunking the Debunkers' Free Fall Fallacies

One central argument debunkers have raised over the years is that the WTC buildings could not have been brought down with explosives because that would have caused the buildings fall in free fall.

However, a video made by debunker AlienEntity actually disproved the notion that free fall is a neccessary characteristic of a controlled demolition.



My thoughts on this video:

Obviously he is trying to use the fall of the east penthouse to make his main point. But, having already been established, including the fall of the penthouse is not an objective way of timing the collapse. As I myself have already pointed out, there are enough problems with the collapse of column 79 and the east penthouse alone.

His flawed argument about the penthouse aside, there are several significant points his video makes. First off, it shows that explosives can actually cause a building to fall at 50% the rate of free fall. This is important because, given the fact that the Twin Towers collapsed in about 15 seconds and their free fall time would be about 9 or 10 seconds, it shows that the Towers evidently did fall in time intervals that would be consistent with a demolition. However, this is a huge problem, considering that:

-The collapses started at the top and not at the bottom of the buildings.

-Supposedly no explosives were used to bring the buildings down, according to the official story.

In any case, let us now look at WTC 7. His video uses the Landmark Tower demolition as a comparison to Building 7. Oddly enough, a comparison of the Landmark demolition to WTC 7 was made long ago by the truth movement. By comparing the main structure of WTC 7 to the Landmark Tower, we see that both buildings fell in approximately the same amount of time. Building 7 was 576 feet tall and the Landmark Tower was only 380 feet tall. How could Building 7, being almost 200 feet taller, fall in the same amount of time as the Landmark building? His video also mentions the period of free fall Building 7 underwent, but merely hand waves it away by saying there's "a lot of misunderstanding about what that actually means." There certainly is a lot of misunderstanding about it, but it's not truthers who have the misunderstanding. The main argument debunkers have against the 2.25 second period of free fall is the supposed buckling of 8 of the lower floors in the building.

I touched on this subject quite extensively in my previous post, but I will expand on it by breaking down the main problems with this argument.

1. We have no visual evidence of this buckling occuring, so the claim is only based on NIST's word.

2. All of NIST's models show the buckling occuring only on the west side of the building.


However, the free fall occurs over the entire width of the building. We know this because the roofline remains essentially straight through period of free fall.

Other than the slight kink, the roofline remains essentially straight for the first 4-5 seconds of its collapse.

3. Even if the buckling did occur, there is no evidence supporting that it would even cause the building to free fall in the first place. We would only be looking at warped and twisted steel, but not zero steel.




4. NIST's own simulations show that this buckling would cause the building to fall in a different manner than what was observed in the videos.


Ultimately, it has been established that free fall is not a neccessary feature in a controlled demolition. But debunkers would have you believe that NIST's "progressive collapse" theory could cause a phenomenon in a building collapse that even controlled demolitions can't always cause. Until debunkers give a truly rational explanation for the free fall of WTC 7, I will continue to see it as a physical impossibility in a natural collapse. And the ironic thing is, NIST agrees that it is physically impossible.