ax1
Legend
Molten metal? Sure - some metal burns at a low temperature - are you denying that? I don't know what the melting point of aluminum is but there was a lot of it in the building - I would guess it's fairly low - much lower than steel anyway.
That doesn't mean the structural beams "melted" there was all kinds of metal in that building dude. Of course - some metal did melt - but none that were responsible for the stuctural integrity of the building.
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[TD] Written by Richard Gage, AIA, Andrea Dreger & Gregg Roberts [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate"] Tuesday, 24 August 2010 15:31 [/TD]
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Extremely high temperatures were evident before and during the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and at Ground Zero. Seven minutes before the destruction of the South Tower, a Invalid Link Removed appeared, accompanied by several smaller flows, as Invalid Link Removed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The material’s glowing color showed that its Invalid Link Removed was close to “white hot” at the very beginning of the flow and “yellow-orange” further down. Iron-rich spheres in the WTC dust are additional proof of temperatures above the melting point of iron. Pyroclastic-like, rapidly Invalid Link Removed after the destruction of the Towers can also be explained only by the expansion of hot gases.
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[TD="align: left"]Invalid Link Removed An excavating machine at Ground Zero lifts debris dripping with molten metal[/TD]
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The high-temperature phenomena at Ground Zero are documented by various sources:
Bechtel engineers, responsible for safety at Ground Zero, wrote in the Invalid Link Removed: “The debris pile at Ground Zero was always tremendously hot. Thermal measurements taken by helicopter each day showed underground temperatures ranging from 400ºF to more than 2,800ºF.”
The fact that high-temperature phenomena were an important issue at Ground Zero is underscored by the Invalid Link Removed acquired: images by Invalid Link Removed, Invalid Link Removed, Invalid Link Removed, Invalid Link Removed/U.S. Army, and at least 25 images by Invalid Link Removed, taken between Sept. 16 and Oct. 25. In addition, temperature measurements by helicopter were Invalid Link Removed, and the firefighters used Invalid Link Removed too.
Many witnesses, including rescue personnel and firefighters working on the piles, described the phenomenon of “molten steel.” Terms used in Invalid Link Removed are, for example, “molten steel,” beams “dripping from molten steel,” “molten steel … like you’re in a foundry. Like lava, from a volcano.” A Invalid Link Removed taken on September 27 by a Ground Zero worker shows an excavating machine lifting debris from the WTC wreckage dripping yellow/orange molten metal.
WTC clean-up workers and 9/11 artifacts architect Bart Voorsanger, in the PBS video “Invalid Link RemovedInvalid Link Removed,” described what must have been several tons of “fused element
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The heat at Ground Zero was not only extreme, it was also persistent, as proven not only by witness statements and a photograph by Invalid Link Removed of orange-red glowing steel as late as October 21, but also by thermal images taken by Invalid Link Removed and Invalid Link Removed satellites. The EarthData thermal images also show that the “hot spots” remained at the same locations. The phenomenon did not “move” across the site, like one would expect from fire as it consumes the fuel available in any one location.
University of California professor Invalid Link Removed, the first structural engineer given access to the WTC steel at Fresh Kills Landfill notes, “I saw melting of girders at the World Trade Center.” Astaneh also “describes the connections [between supporting columns] as being Invalid Link Removed: ‘If you remember the Salvador Dalí paintings with the clocks that are kind of melted – it’s kind of like that. That could only happen if you get steel yellow hot or white hot – perhaps around 2,000 degrees.’”.
Iron workers at the site Invalid Link Removed that huge columns that were Invalid Link Removed into horseshoe shapes - without the flanges showing any cracks or Invalid Link Removed. They cited, "It takes thousands of degrees to bend steel like this".
FEMA documents in their Invalid Link Removed of its May 2002 WTC Building Performance Assessment Team study, for sample 1, “evidence of a severe high temperature corrosion attack on the steel, including oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting.” A “sulfur-rich liquid” containing “primarily iron, oxygen, and sulfur” “penetrated” into the steel.
The extremely high temperatures contradict the official story. Office and hydrocarbon fires burning in open air (~500° to 1,500° F) cannot reach temperatures in the range that iron or structural steel melts (2,700° F). This was even acknowledged by NIST’s Co-Project Leader, John Gross, in the same public talk where he stated regarding the phenomena of molten steel, “Invalid Link Removed” Yet there is abundant proof of the molten metal, which Invalid Link Removed reveal to be iron, in the debris piles. Furthermore, NIST itself performed Invalid Link Removed to establish the temperatures reached by the WTC office fires. The temperatures established are far below the temperatures required to produce all of the above phenomena – which occurred both before and during the destruction and at Ground Zero.
The steel problem was “solved” by NIST by Invalid Link Removed most of the steel from being systematically examined for failure modes and heat excursions. The steel collected by the Port Authority, which has been stored in Hangar 17 at JFK Airport, was not included in the investigation except for 12 pieces. Of the 236 pieces that NIST possessed, many were excluded based on the circular argument that only columns from impact and fire floors were of interest in the investigation. Thus, NIST avoided having to discuss 51 of its 55 core columns. Sample 1 from FEMA’s Appendix C was also excluded.
In addition, NIST developed a Invalid Link Removed of “visual examination” that it then substituted in place of the systematically used tool. NIST’s “paint cracking” method has the following “advantages”: paint cracks can be produced not only by high temperature excursions, but also by “corrosion”/ “environmental degradation” and by plastic deformation; many columns had no paint left for examination, Moreover, by relying on a method that requires microscopic examination, NIST was able to ignore pieces that were obviously heat-affected but had come from non-fire floors. A contractor’s report that employed common visual examination was “reviewed”: NIST contrasted the contractor’s results with their newly developed method and their fire exposure observations, and by employing again a circular argument. NIST’s steel “examination” shows that its “working hypothesis” was in fact its premise, and that NIST gone to great lengths to maintain this premise.
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Some want to cite “natural thermite reactions” for the high-temperature phenomena: airplane aluminum must have reacted with rust. This possibility can be ruled out based on the findings of a Invalid Link Removed that was conducted in 2002 at the Colorado School of Mines for the Minerals Management Service. Officially, the study, whose lead author is a close research associate of T. W. Siewert of NIST, is about thermite-sparking in offshore environments. But due to a Invalid Link Removed the question about the feasibility of natural thermite reactions in the WTC is answered too. The authors established the ignition temperatures for rust, dehydrated rust and iron-oxide-based thermite reactions. The necessary temperatures are so high that one can conclude that thermite reactions between airplane aluminum and rust (some rust was on beams according to documents), dehydrated rust (rust dehydrates in fire) or iron oxide (iron oxide was part of the primary paint) were not feasible in the WTC. Also tested was what happens when aluminum impacts rust at very high velocity, so, interestingly, even the possibility that the impacting airplanes caused natural thermite reactions can be ruled out.
The overwhelming evidence of these extremely high temperatures, which normal office fires and jet fuel cannot produce, cries out for a new investigation. The hypothesis of explosive controlled demolition must be examined and, if confirmed, followed wherever it leads, so that Americans can know for sure what was the real cause of the catastrophic loss of life at the WTC on 9/11 and the identities of everyone who was responsible for it.
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