Saturday, January 14, 2006

WTC cover up?

I have been reading some stuff on the WTC collapse that asks some interesting engineering questions about the NIST reports of the events in the World Trade Center on 9/11 from the time of the plane hits until the buildings went down.

Hoffman's critique points out that NIST's Report, while avoiding even claiming to model the collapses, implies but does not show that it modeled the onsets of the collapses. The Report's section entitled Results of Global Analysis" describes the tops of the Towers first tilting and then moving downward as intact blocks, but there are no images in the Report of its computer models showing this behavior. The New Civil Engineer (NCE), an engineering trade journal based in the United Kingdom, published an article highlighting NIST's failure to publish visualizations of its alleged analysis of "collapse initiation."
More from the UK:
University of Manchester (UK) professor of structural engineering Colin Bailey said there was a lot to be gained from visualising the structural response. "NIST should really show the visualisations, otherwise the opportunity to correlate them back to the video evidence and identify any errors in the modelling will be lost," he said.

University of Sheffield professor Roger Plank added that visualisations of the collapses of the towers "would be a very powerful tool to promote the design code changes recommended by NIST."
Interesting. Right after 9/11 I began hearing a lot of "demolition theory" stuff and dismissed it. Now I'm not so sure.

Of course a lot in any simulation depends on initial conditions - which would be hard to know in detail with most of the evidence gone - but we could Monte Carlo it and see what the range of results might be.

Some interesting photos of the building collapse and these bullet points here:
# The buildings collapsed straight down, and at virtually free-fall speed, as in controlled demolitions, and then the rubble smoldered for months.
# Many people in the buildings said that they heard or felt explosions.
# Virtually all the concrete of these enormous structures was pulverized into very fine dust.
# Much of this dust, along with pieces of steel and aluminum, was blown out horizontally several hundred feet.
# Most of the steel beams and columns came down in sections about 30 feet long, conveniently ready to be loaded on trucks.
The difference between a gravity collapse and explosive demolition with respect to the WTC.

This link got me started: James Fetzer where I got the recent studies of the JFK Zapruder film. (through a slightly different link).

3 comments:

sonicfrog said...

One HUGE problem with the "We Blew Up The Towers" theory is, think of the manpower that would be involved in setting up the enormous array of charges to make the building fall in this fashion. One big flaw in conspiracy theories is that it is very, VERY HARD for governments to keep secrets. The current NSA flap is just the latest example. JFK's assassination conspiracy is "workable" because you only need a few people to pull that off, and those few can be easily silenced. The WTC is at best highly improbable due to the enormous amount of people that would have to be involved to covertly plant the charges AND set them off in the proper sequence. That would take years to set up. And there is no way in hell you could expect to keep that a secret with so many people involved. Another flaw in these theories is that they rely on the absence of proof as proof, i.e. the government won't let us see this file or that, so obviously those documents certainly are the proof that confirms our theory.

DCPI said...

Did you ever visit the WTC? The towers were truly massive, more so than can be imagined. I work on Wall Street and can tell you that what you saw in person at the site was nothing like what on television. Remember the facade that stood for weeks after? It was more than FOUR stories tall. If you visit today, go down into the path station and look around. Then imagine all of that space filled with debris, you will then realise something of what you are talking about.

Anonymous said...

That is an impressive bit of research.

One omission is glaring though, you never looked up the pre construction dimensions of the steel columns,if you did,you would see that the steel columns were manufactured in convenient to haul 30 foot sections,so it makes sense they would break up into 30 foot sections.