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Originally Posted by willravel
Okay, I disagree and here's why:
1) All of the contents of the building were required to meet standards approved for fire safety.
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Yeah, and those fire safety standards involve standard fires. The copy machine catches fire. Someone tosses a cigarette in a trash can. The coffee maker shorts out.
They're not designed to withstand a hellish conflagration caused by a giant airplane dumping tons of burning kerosene all over the place.
Car interiors are also designed to fire safety standards, but they still burn like crazy if you dump flaming gasoline in them, as you can see by observing any carbeque resulting from a traffic accident.
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The insulation around the steel is hardly the only step taken to avoid problems should there be a fire. There were (seldom mentioned) water systems, all contents, desks, computers, cheap fake plants, had to follow code (nothing that could burn too well was in the building).
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You usually think things through better than this Will
Of course things that could burn well were in the building. What do you use to start a fire in the fireplace? Newspapers. Think there were newspapers in there? What else burns well? Kleenex, paper (especially paper with a waxy coating like you might find in, oh, say, a printer). Wood burns really nicely if you get it hot enough. The WTC was certainly hot enough to burn all that wood that made up the desks, especially since most of them were probably pressed particle board. That's NICE and flammable.
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According to NYC code, all wood must be pressure treated with fire retardant chemicals.
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Fire retardant does not mean fire proof. Get something hot enough and it will burn. And even things that are coated in fire resistant chemicals, will burn if something gets through that barrier. If you don't believe me, go make some thermite, and put it on a fire proof safe that you've filled with important papers, and set it off. About 3 seconds later you'll have a fireproof safe with a gaping hole in the top and bottom and ashes where the papers used to be.
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The paint on the walls must be fire retardant.
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Won't do much good if the walls are knocked down by a giant airliner doing a few hundred mph.
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In addition to this, I cannot find anything inside the building that could have burned at more than a few hundred degrees. Computers would burn low and slow, mostly being melting plastic. Chairs would be much the same.
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You're assuming standard ignition. Yes, if you hold a bic up to a computer it'll burn low and slow. Start the fire by exploding a 200 ton bomb filled with kerosene right next to it, and it'll burn quite a bit faster and hotter.
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- Black smoke still = low O2 fire.
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not necessarily. Here's an experiment for you. Get a good fire going. Now put a big grean leaf on it. It'll burn black, but there's plenty of O2 around. Black smoke is also caused by various chemicals burning off. Trust me, I've covered enough high O2, black-smoke-belching fires to be certain of this.
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- The building collapsed in under an hour. While I could easily understand that the building collapsed after maybe 8-10 hours of burning, the thing dropped is less than an hour and it fell at free fall speeds. This would suggest that the crash did damage to the entire structure instead of just the entry point and surrounding areas.
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No it wouldn't. It would suggest that the crash did severe and unrecoverable damage to the area that the crash happened in. Once one floor collapsed you have the weight something like 40 floors coming down on the floor underneath it. Buildings aren't designed to withstand the weight of a 40 story building crashing down onto them.