Collapse

When the towers came tumbling down

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
05/05/02
http://zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/collapse.htm

The nursery rhyme, "London bridge is falling down," like most nursery rhymes, has a basis in reality, and was originally a political gibe against the powers that be. The bridge in 1665, was a main thoroughfare over the Thames, and heavily built up with a wild array of structures, woodbeam and siding and thatch, all very flammable. When the Great Fire of London struck, the bridge caught fire, and the structures all burned. Miraculously, the bridge itself survived, but nobody was in any great hurry to shore up the rickety and charred structure, and it soon became apparent to one and all that at some point, most likely when traffic was at it's heaviest, the whole thing would plunge into the noisome waters below, drowning dozens, if not hundreds.

Eventually the kids managed to embarrass the powers that be into rebuilding, and a sturdy stone structure, reasonably fireproof, was erected in its place, and it was agreed that perhaps this time around, they should forego building a bunch of firetraps on the bridge. That bridge still stands to this day, albeit 8,000 miles away in Arizona. For that matter, much of London was rebuilt on the ashes with an eye to making the whole thing a bit less of a conflagration waiting to happen. While the results left a lot to be desired, it was a distinct improvement over what went before. Since then, London has made substantial inroads in fighting some of the other civic problems that kept cropping up, such as plagues, and killer smogs that killed thousands. And they're working on the problem of the whole city sinking into the sea. That one is, as they say, a poser.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about London is the fact that it actually still exists. Between nature and the Germans, it shouldn't. But Londoners are always able to acknowledge their mistakes and fix them. They haven't had a serious case of the plague in over 200 years.

While Putsch and his generalissmo banana Republicans scamper away from any investigations into what the government knew or suspected prior to the attacks, the American Society of Civil Engineers decided to conduct their own investigation into why the World Trade Center towers collapsed. The science program "Nova" broadcast a report on that this week. The details of the report have been widely reported, so I'll only briefly encapsulate: The towers collapsed for three principal reasons. First, the blast from the shrapnel and flame impacting the side of the towers stripped flameproofing from the steel beams, particularly the weaker horizontal floor struts that ran from the central core of steel posts to the reinforced steel edifice. Second, the core areas, which contained most of the elevators and the emergency stairs, were protected only by drywall, rather than concrete, and thus exposed those areas to destruction from blast and fire. Not only did it cut off the only escape routes for most people above the point of impact, but it permitted the core area to reverberate, swaying out of synch with the outer edifice, and destroying more of the horizontal floor struts, which were never designed for those types of stresses.

Enough of the horizontal struts failed, and the floors started pancaking down on themselves, and the collapse was on. The ASCE concluded that the building had lived up to its design specs, exonerating the architect (whose office now commands an arresting view of Ground Zero, poor bastard) and the construction companies. However, the specs failed to account for the stripping of the fire-retardant material, the effects of blast on the central core, and the possibility that edifice and core might vibrate out of synch with one another. The building was meant to withstand lateral pressure (a wind of 30 knots would exert more force on the building than the impact from a 757 did), but it was expected to be uniform pressure. You can't plan for everything, and the designers got hit by three unexpected consequences of the crash that noone foresaw.

However, buildings CAN be designed and even retrofitted against the possibility that anyone else will want to fly a large commercial jetliner into the side of a skyscraper with a full load of fuel. That way, you lose hundreds of lives, rather than thousands.

There are going to be people who will take issue with the report. Some will have valid reasons for doing so, engineers and architects who will question some of the assumptions. Hopefully, we'll all have the wisdom to separate them out from the conspiracy buffs, who will continue to insist on a wide and wild variety of allegations about the 9/11 attacks. The most plausible one is that the buildings had explosive charges already set up prior to the airline crashes, to bring them down in order to conceal any number of evidentiary scenarios. Most of the scenarios are of the Paranoid Arabic variety, which include the idea that the planes had nobody on board, but were controlled by Mossad agents using remote control. They flew the planes into the sides of the buildings because they thought it would look way cool. A variant on that is that "they" destroyed the buildings to conceal the fact that all the Jews had left the building before the crashes. America, which has never suffered a shortage of paranoid crackpots, has come up with some pretty good ones, including one in which Putsch is supposedly punishing the financial community for making his economic plans look stupid. From there, you go straight into the X-files stuff, UFOs and Elvis and all that good stuff. Maybe I'll write a book claiming that Clinton secretly buried Jimmy Hoffa under one of the towers, but forgot which one, and the Teamsters arranged the collapse in order to set Jimmy's soul free to avenge his murder. I bet Regnery Press would publish it. It's got Clinton killing someone, so they just overlook the little discrepancies between when the towers were built, when Hoffa vanished, and how old Clinton was in either event.

The reason I say "plausible" is because a lot of people, myself included, saw a strange little ripple travel down the corners and midpoint sides of the north tower just before it started its almost vertical fall, and it looked, for all the world, like one of those planned demolitions of tall buildings that the newscasters run on slow days and Fox makes half-hour specials about. I spent the first couple of days after 9/11 wondering about that before various people explained the cascade nature of the collapse, and that the points of failure would be the same critical locations where demolition experts set their charges.

The Civil Engineers' report confirmed this in substantial detail.

I'm not expert on building design, but the report seems solid. Barring further evidence to the contrary, I plan to accept the report at face value. Nobody really considered that a jetliner would immediately fragment into tiny shrapnel, while keeping most of its kinetic energy, and would, in effect, sandblast the struts down to bare steel in 1/100th of a second. Nobody envisioned a situation where the core supports and the edifice would be swaying out of sync.

We can build structures that can better withstand such abuse, and it probably won't be a bad idea to start. For one thing, coming up with a strategy that so effectively hurt the United States – a place viewed as an unassailable monster by many in foreign lands – is going to motivate others to try similar attacks. If another skyscraper is attacked, we may find that it was some other small, angry group of which we were only dimly aware, and it might not even be a foreign one. The fall of the towers was, in some quarters, a huge propaganda victory for Osama bin Laden. Someone will try to bring down another at some point down the road. For all we know, Osama got the idea from Timothy McVeigh and his buddies.

But even as we get some good working answers on what happened to the towers, the government is still stonewalling. They refused to permit a government investigation of the towers, and the civil engineers had to work around the government's unseemly haste to get rid of the evidence.

Putsch and his minions are hiding something. The engineers' report suggests that it wasn't something about the towers themselves, but there was something.

I don't think anyone expected two commercial airliners to fly into the sides of the WTC on 9/10. Even among the servile toadies of the Putsch administration, you couldn't keep something like that a secret for very long. But they knew something was about to happen, and were ready to seize the opportunity when it did. Does anyone really believe they got the 800 pages of the Patriot Act written in just two weeks?

Other groups, like the civil engineers, are investigating on their own, if for no other reason then to find out why this strange, alien government in Washington is so reluctant to investigate openly what happened.

And the truth will out. It's too big to stay hidden for long.