Are real scientists expected to believe NIST?

Who are these "debunkers" you're talking about?

 

May be a real high rise building engineer could tell us what is going On? Anyone in this engineering forum?

 

There was quite a bit of discussion in the architectural journals, Baron Max shared some of it with us and highlights were floating around in email spam. Less than a year after 9/11 experts were analyzing the collapse of the building and the details of its construction. They was a lot of debate over whether the city of New York was guilty of criminal stupidity for forcing them to complete the buildings without asbestos. It was suggested that by removing the asbestos they had saved about three people from dying of asbestos poisoning during the lifetime of the building, at the cost of 3,000 lives lost because the building was not fireproofed. This theory was eventually disproved. But there was no one who did not believe that the cause of the collapse was anything other than the impact of the airliners.

But its leader is Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi and a member by marriage of the Saudi royal family. They could hardly operate on Saudi soil, they needed to be someplace where there are hiding places, and especially a country that was not a U.S. ally full of U.S. military bases.

Saudis are the major source of financing for all of the anti-Western terrorists. They build and supply all of those terrorist training camps masquerading as schools for poor children throughout the Muslim world from Afghanistan to Indonesia. There is no other Muslim country whose people have as much money as the Saudi people do. Except possibly Iran, and they're doing their part by bankrolling Hezbollah and the Palestinian extremists.

In case you haven't noticed, the Saudi people hate America and routinely refer to us as "the Great Satan." They are outraged that what they perceive as a Christian nation has military bases within driving distance of Mecca, Islam's holiest site. The two princes who run the country and some of the petroleum executives are as transnational as the big shots in any country (including our own). They see the value of ambivalence and tread a fine line of not incurring the wrath of the U.S. But if you go just one level below them, where there are hundreds of billions of dollars available to support worthy causes, you find a fanatical level of hatred for the United States.

The Bush administration is just as transnational as the Saudi princes. They're petroleum barons, for the goddess's sake. The Saudi petroleum barons are their buddies. Their not going to attack their own homies. "Oil is thicker than blood." At that level, with these families, there is no sense of national loyalty. The Bushes are the kind of honorless people who give capitalism a bad name. They don't give a flying fig about what happens to this country, as long as they can make money off of it. What the Bush Dynasty did after 9/11 was precisely to DEFLECT the blame away from their pals in Saudi Arabia. They blamed Afghanistan, as if Afghanistan were an actual country that could accomplish something. And they blamed Saddam, because they had it in for Saddam ever since he embarrassed George I in the First Gulf War. 9/11 gave them an excuse to finish some unfinished business; revenge and honor at the cost of American (and Iraqi) lives.

Buildings are not like trees. I don't think they have the kind of structural strength that would allow them to crack cleanly in one place, then topple sideways and land full-length and intact on the adjacent city block. Once they get a little bit off of vertical I think they start to crumble.

Baron Max knew a lot about this stuff but he was more interested in making himself out to be a loudmouth misanthrope than in contributing his knowledge. I agree that this is difficult to research. This long after the event, you have to be a member of an architects' society or subscribe to one of their journals to see what they were saying about it in immediate aftermath.

 

I am sure the building designs have been analyzed and the new building they are going to replace with, will have right type of designs. There is nothing wrong in revisiting the topic as long as we can talk about how to prevent such manmade disasters.

The asbestos issues is an interesting one. In India there are thousands of building with asbestos roofs. Over the years, they get sealed by weather, oil, wax etc and does not cause any human health issues. NYC could have encapsulated the asbestos easily and used it. The problem is no one thought that someone will pour tens of thousands of jet fuel and ignite it. That is a black swan moment.

The only way to build a tower that can withstand such fire is using massive reenforced concrete columns, like the Malaysia Petronas towers. These days we build residential houses with toothpicks and commercials with I-beams that barely covers the code.

Sometimes ago, I saw on TV that an entire subdivision was burnt to the ground in a California forest fire - except one concrete house built by a Taiwanese Architect.