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Originally Posted by host
http://web.archive.org/web/200703070...8&nh=0&ssect=0
The fires at Kader toy actually involved only two buildings, a one story building and an "E" shaped, four story building. The fire occurred in Thailand, in a relatively remote area, hindering fire fighting response time. No data on what the capabilities of the "50 pieces of firefighting equipment" actually were, or about water sources at the scene...i.e., high pressure hydrants, nearby pond, trucked in water on board fire fighting apparatus....???
The buildings were not steel framed high rise towers....
From page 2 of the above linked source:
...A post-fire review of the debris at the Kader site showed no indication that any of the steel members had been fireproofed.......
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I quoted a section of that article in post #46 that reported buildings 1,2,and 3 collapsed at 5:14, 5:30, and 6:05 respectively. However, even if it is actually only 2 buildings it still supports the observation that fire can sufficiently raise the temperature to cause the steel to be weakened enough to cause partial or even global collapse in the event that no external sources of cooling/firefighting are available.
You are correct that the buildings were not high rise towers, nor were the McCormick Building or the Sight and Sound Theatre. The example that Cynthetiq posted wasn't even a building really. But they were constructed with structural steel columns and rafters. In the case of the Sight and Sound Theatre, those structural members
were coated with a fireproofing material, and yet the fire still raised the temperature sufficiently to cause them to fail in a relatively short time (2-3 hours).
One aspect of the unanswered questions is whether the fires could have sufficiently raised the temperature to weaken the structural integrity of WTC7 - What these examples suggest is that it is indeed possible. Also remember that portions of WTC5 collapsed due to fire according to the FEMA report, and there is a picture in post #44 showing a buckled column from fire in an area that didn't collapse. I understood that the FEMA report might be viewed with a skeptical eye, so offered more examples of the capability of fire to be a collapse-initiating mechanism.
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From my post #180, in the original thread:
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fuels feeding fire were consumed, and moved every 20 minutes...fires on multiple floors on WTC 7 were recorded, fires were actually moving at that rate, about every rule of thumb, 10 lbs. fuel per sq ft. one hour 40 min., and 4 lbs. per sq. ft., lasts 20 min. The height of the temp reached and not the duration, is the factor.....
01:05:45
Heat elements in large spans has the effect of sagging.....
01:07:30
Once fire front passes, still much heat and temperatures may not cool down....
01:08:30
Model is more like a series of burners coming on every 20 minutes, all of the heat on the backside of the fireproofing, fire dynamics models, thermal, and gas temps, fireproofing thickness, all taken into account in the models.... maybe fireproofing doesn't work? I'll hold off until all analysis is concluded before a statement will be made about design practices...
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I am having trouble seeing how this contradicts fire being a possible mechanism for collapse. It supports the observation that fire adds energy to the environment, and if there are no cooling elements to remove the energy (or if the cooling elements cannot remove the energy as quickly as the fire is adding it) then the net result is a rise in temperature. Fireproofing is simply an insulator to retard the transfer of energy into the item that is fireproofed, but again if there is insufficient cooling/firefighting, that item's temperature will rise, fireproofing or no. As the bolded part you quoted states: "the height of the temp reached and not the duration [mine: of the fire being in one particular spot] is the factor."
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I am sorry, but I don't see anything provided in the contents of the posts this week that seriously challenges anything that has come before, and, if you're comparisons were so compelling, and obvious, the NIST's WTC 7 collapse investigation, would not be incomplete, in this, the 77th month after the collapse, would it?
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From a faq page on the NIST site, question #14 (
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm):
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When NIST initiated the WTC investigation, it made a decision not to hire new staff to support the investigation. After the June 2004 progress report on the WTC investigation was issued, the NIST investigation team stopped working on WTC 7 and was assigned full-time through the fall of 2005 to complete the investigation of the WTC towers.
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Whether the decision not to hire new staff was good or bad is debatable. But since they didn't, it makes sense that they would focus on the towers since those were the most prominent buildings destroyed. Also, the act of gathering building prints, modelling them down to the bolts and welded joints, and then running simulations is not a quick process. At my previous job we used Algor (an embryonic little brother to ANSYS and LS-Dyna) to dynamically simulate the interaction of a baseball and bat during impact. Granted, this was 6 years ago, computing power was slow, and Algor is probably not as optimized as ANSYS, but it still took upwards of 24 hours to simulate a 1-second interaction between these 2 objects. The model of WTC7 undoubtedly has thousands of objects, maybe 10s of thousands including the bolts. And I'm sure there are many hundreds of hypothetical scenarios involving fuel load, fire location, damage, etc. etc., so I can easily see the dynamic simulation phase taking a year or more.
Additionally, based on the fact that the simulation will now include hypothetical blast events, it would seem that NIST is aware of the criticisms against it for its working hypothesis and the fact that the report is taking so long to finish, and that it has a vested interest in making sure that this report comes out, and that it contains the most probable explanation possible.
As far as the contents of my posts not challenging anything that has come before, I'm not sure if you are referring to things from before in this thread or the one in Paranoia. I chose to participate in this thread because the format allows us to discuss whether the so-far hypothetical explanation for the events matches with observation, and in the case of disagreement with the hypothetical explanation allows us to make the case for another explanation that is more likely, provided we can provide evidence whether direct or circumstancial.
I searched through many CT sites, debunking sites, the NIST and FEMA sites, and other backwaters linked from those sites. I make no claim that the NIST working hypothesis *is* what happened, only that to me it represents the highest possibility at this juncture, and I've laid out my reasoning as best I can. I am happy to re-evaluate or defend my reasoning should observation/evidence that represents a higher probability be presented.