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Originally Posted by willravel
The question is could a fire caused by airplane fuel in the World Trade Center buildings was able to not only able to compromise the steel reinforcement of WTC 1 and 2, but it was able to compromise the buildings steel frame at once.
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I promised myself I wouldn't get sucked back into this....
...sigh
To be clear: as far as I know, nobody is claiming that the fire melted the external structural steel on the WTC towers. The contention, as I understand it, is that the fire weakened the steel on the internal floor supports, causing some to collapse onto the floors below, which resulted in greater strain on the structure.
The outer structure collapsed because it was unable to support the additional strain put on it, not because it was melted by the fire.
As I am sure you are aware, the WTC towers are unusual in that the structural support was distributed between the center core (housing elevators, stairwells, etc) and the outer skin, with a wide space around the central core with no structural steel (the floors were hung across the gap between the central core and the outer skin).
The planes crashed through the outer skin, then were largely unopposed until they hit the central core (yes, they had to plow through the mass of furniture, the suspended floors, drywall, etc, but no structural steel). The impact weakened the central core and the severing of the outer skin forced weight to be distributed around the hole, adding strain to the remaining supports.
I'm going through all this to make clear that NOBODY is saying that the fire alone caused the collapse.
Hey, look, a link to a quick and easy guide to WTC collapse. From the good people at NOVA. Are they part of the conspiracy too?
Linky