Monday, September 27, 2010

The beam that fell too fast...



I normally don't like discussing little anomalies in videos like this, but I found this kind of interesting. Some time ago I posted the image below and noted the single beam that's fallen much further than the rest of the debris, as if it was falling faster than freefall.



In many videos this beam can be seen falling unusually fast, as if it was launched downwards. Up until today I had never bothered to time it, mainly because I couldn't find a continuous shot from a good angle.

The video above is continous and pretty much square on, so I thought I'd use it to see how much time there was between the start of the north tower's collapse, and the moment the beam disappears behind WTC7. As the video shows, it was somewhere between 6.7 and 6.8 seconds. The north tower was 417 meters tall, and WTC7 was 186 meters tall, so the distance between the two roofs was about 230 meters. The amount of time it would take to freefall that distance in a vaccum is about 6.85 seconds. So even if this beam was dropped from the height of the roof of the north tower at the exact moment the tower started to collapse, it still wouldn't have reached the roof of WTC7 in under 6.8 seconds. Put simply, this steel beam had to have been falling significantly faster than freefall. Obviously this is impossible unless it was launched downwards by something, such as an explosion.

So not only were there horizontal ejections, there was also at least one downward ejection!