Thursday, September 8, 2011

Building 7 Explained?

I was recently told about this video by someone on YouTube.



My thoughts:

0:35 "Steel loses half of its strength when heated to just 1200F."

True. But there is no evidence that the fires in WTC7 reached those sorts of temperatures. And scientists on both sides of the argument have shown that the fires could not have reached those temperatures anyway.

"[R]aising those five floor beams to a temperature of 600°C would require an enormous amount of energy, far more than was available from the burning of the office furnishings underneath the floor beams." -Kevin Ryan

"NIST's collapse initiation hypothesis requires that structural steel temperatures on floors 12/13 significantly exceeded 300°C [570°F]--a condition that could never have been realized with NIST's postulated 32 kg/m2 fuel loading." -Dr. Frank Greening

Also, the experiment shown is from the National Geographic documentary, which is addressed here and here.

1:11 "No water to fight the fires."

According to NIST, this apparently was not a "meaningful point of dissimilarity" to other skyscrapers that have been engulfed in fires.

“[I]n each of the other referenced buildings, the fires burned out several floors, even with available water and fire fighting activities (except for WTC 5). Thus, whether the fire fighters fought the WTC 7 fires or not is not a meaningful point of dissimilarity from the other cited fires.” -NIST WTC7 FAQ

1:29 "Firefighters knew the building would collapse."

Addressed here and here.

1:39 "NIST modeled the collapse, and the models are consistent with the videos."

Actually, NIST's models of WTC7’s internal failures are completely inconsistent with videos of the building’s collapse, as pointed out by Dr. Frank Greening.

"According to NIST, the global collapse of WTC 7 began 6.9 seconds after the East Penthouse collapse or about 23 seconds into the simulation. Now consider NIST’s Figures 12-66, 12-67 and 12-69 and in particular the images showing the alleged state of the core 17.5, 19.5, 20.7, 21.8, 24.1, 26.8 and 28.8 seconds into the collapse simulation. These images represent NIST’s view of what the core looked like at ~1-2 second intervals following the collapse of the East Penthouse. What is most significant about these images is that around the time of global collapse initiation NIST’s simulation shows that the eastern half of the core had completely collapsed while the western half of the core remained standing and relatively undamaged. This is quite remarkable since videos of the collapse of WTC 7 show that up to and well beyond the moment that the roofline of WTC 7 exhibited its first downward movement, the exterior of the building revealed absolutely no signs of NIST’s proposed partial collapse of the core even though the core was connected to the exterior walls of Building 7 by dozens of horizontal beams on every floor." [Source] pg. 315

2:11 "Conspiracy sites don't acknowledge the penthouse collapse."

Actually they do. Here's one site that examined it extensively.

2:18 "Free fall speed collapse."

The building DOES fall in complete free fall for eight stories.

2:34 "Steel can fail due to fire, like the collapse of a steel overpass."

Steel can certainly fail due to fire, but the issue is whether or not the fires were severe enough in Building 7 to cause collapse in the first place. And the collapse of the Interstate 580 is hardly comparable to the collapse of any of the WTC buildings.

3:06 "Building 7 is the only skyscraper to burn uncontrollably for seven hours."

As we have already seen, other buildings have burned uncontrollably as well, yet none of them have ever collapsed from fire.