I used to read PM. It's a shame how downhill they've gone.
The following is my picking apart of the PM article, it is not me trying to correct SelfDestruct, as he just posted the link. Thanks for the link, btw.
I'll elaborate:
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Many conspiracy theorists point to FEMA's preliminary report, which said there was relatively light damage to WTC 7 prior to its collapse. With the benefit of more time and resources, NIST researchers now support the working hypothesis that WTC 7 was far more compromised by falling debris than the FEMA report indicated. "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7," NIST's Sunder tells PM. "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom--approximately 10 stories--about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." NIST also discovered previously undocumented damage to WTC 7's upper stories and its southwest corner.
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NIST researchers only had acces to the whole wrekage one week after FEMA had cleared out. How did more time allowed at the completly collapsed building allow the NIST researchers to discover that there was more physical damage to the building before it collapsed? All of the VIDEO and PHOTOGRAPH evidence found in hundreds of magazines and on television showed that there was almost no exterior damage to the building before it collapsed. There are photographs available that show almost all points of view to the buildings after the initial plane crashes.
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NIST investigators believe a combination of intense fire and severe structural damage contributed to the collapse, though assigning the exact proportion requires more research. But NIST's analysis suggests the fall of WTC 7 was an example of "progressive collapse," a process in which the failure of parts of a structure ultimately creates strains that cause the entire building to come down. Videos of the fall of WTC 7 show cracks, or "kinks," in the building's facade just before the two penthouses disappeared into the structure, one after the other. The entire building fell in on itself, with the slumping east side of the structure pulling down the west side in a diagonal collapse.
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What fire? What "severe damage"? Watch the video that I provided the link for above. There is basically no smoke coming from the building before the demolition. Also, the video clearly shows that the colapse was not "progressive" (as a progressive collapse would see one side cave in, then a bit later, the other would). The colapse is almost simultanious. They were right about one thing: the building fell in on itself. Something that is almost impossible during a fire.
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According to NIST, there was one primary reason for the building's failure: In an unusual design, the columns near the visible kinks were carrying exceptionally large loads, roughly 2000 sq. ft. of floor area for each floor. "What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors," Sunder notes, "it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down."
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Ouch this is a doosey. The blueprints are classified, but I can tell you that it would be difficult for this building to have stood durring violent wind storms or hurricanes if this claim was true. Do you think the mayor of NYC would have an office in a building that could topple over so easily?
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There are two other possible contributing factors still under investigation: First, trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed to transfer loads from one set of columns to another. With columns on the south face apparently damaged, high stresses would likely have been communicated to columns on the building's other faces, thereby exceeding their load-bearing capacities.
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The south face was undamaged, besides the windows that were broken. Were they load bearing windows?
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Second, a fifth-floor fire burned for up to 7 hours. "There was no firefighting in WTC 7," Sunder says. Investigators believe the fire was fed by tanks of diesel fuel that many tenants used to run emergency generators. Most tanks throughout the building were fairly small, but a generator on the fifth floor was connected to a large tank in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: "Our current working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time."
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Where there's smoke theres fire. The windows were blown out a great deal on the fifth floor, but there was almost no smoke. That's a load of crap that the fire could melt the supports so that the building would collapse all at once.
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WTC 7 might have withstood the physical damage it received, or the fire that burned for hours, but those combined factors--along with the building's unusual construction--were enough to set off the chain-reaction collapse.
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I hope they know who they're protecting by printing this.