The 9/11 Forum

Thanks, MT.

I look forward to a critique of the dust cloud theory described here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/proofs/volume.html

I also offer my humble opinion that the floors were attacked by force and heat, as if by thermobarics or who knows what. This theory derives from the search in the rubble, as you said, for the floor sections ... and the personal belongings, furniture...

The samples of dust studied by Lioy had "charred woody fragments," cellulose/paper, nano-sized glass fragments, and soot... and the RJ Lee Group samples had 5 percent iron spheres. (If there is a thread for that please direct me. I have read your webpage and given it considerable thought. Fly ash comparisons aside, the amount of welding done before concrete was poured could have contributed some to the multitude of iron spheres. But then there were silicate/glass spheres with iron in them, etc... http://journalof911studies.com/articles/WTCHighTemp.pdf, Mark Basile video)

This style of attack wasn't done just to bring the building down. Like you said it was extreme. The cleanup was kept in mind. It had to be fast in order to decrease the window of opportunity for an investigation to get going. Also the extreme destruction depersonalized the scene so people weren't stopping to look at the office belongings/debris while removing it. (About 60,000 pieces of personal property were found during the 10 months of sifting 1.5 million tons at Fresh Kills, total. Numerous people working at Ground Zero and at Fresh Kills commented on the odd lack of personal property and computers/furniture.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnnXTrw88P4
My video.

The New York Times said “those heading the cleanup and those removing the rubble at ground zero are trumpeting nothing short of a construction miracle.... The cleanup, it turns out, will take no more than nine months and cost no more than $750 million.” That was all, after “the authorities. . . [had] estimated the cleanup would take a year and cost $1 billion to $2.5 billion, and they gave contractors blank checks to get the job done.” (Charlie LeDuff and Steven Greenhouse, “Far From Business as Usual: A Quick Job at Ground Zero,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2002.)

Bringing those floor sections into lower Manhattan was one of the biggest challenges of the construction era. During a tugboat strike there were midnight caravans of flatbed trucks with police escorts who cleared the roads. The guy who organized the truck runs actually helped truck away the debris after 9/11. Tom Petrizzo.

When WTC steel erector Karl Koch “asked him if he'd seen any floor sections,” Tom replied,

“No, that's what I don't understand. […] I didn't see one goddamn floor deck come here with a bar joist in it. They must have disintegrated. Because they did not get here. And I handled this from day fu*kin' one.”
“Did they send you any decking that was loose, no joists?” [Koch] asked.
“None,” Tom said.
“None? Well, that's impossible. There were six thousand of them.”
“There's stuff crumpled up, but go identify it as a floor deck if you can. Impossible. A lot of guys come and ask me, they know I was involved in bringing 'em over, but Karl, not one came where I could say, 'Oh, here's one.' I could not show anybody a floor deck and say, 'This is what I hauled over.'”
I [Karl] couldn't believe it. Not one goddamn floor panel.

- Karl Koch III with Richard Firstman, Men of Steel: The Story of the Family that Built the World Trade Center, Crown Publishers, New York, 2002, p. 375.

Matt, that's interesting, too. You're arguing for assistance in decimating the structure for practical reasons. Would you hazard a guess as to how that would be done? You did mention thermobarics (Metamars has, too) but I'm not sure how that comports with the mostly localized expulsions on any given floor at any particular time.

Not putting you on the spot, if you don't have anything particular, fine. It is sufficient to point out how weird some aspects are. But I am curious.

The best I've heard is detcord in the cable channels of the floor pans. I'm not endorsing it, it's just the most clever scheme I've heard that doesn't scream out for associated effects which were not observed - like sending chunks of the structure through windows all over lower Manhattan. Logistical details are another matter, but I was pretty surprised to see what detcord can do to a 5" slab of concrete. People think of it as a means to an end, instead of just being the end.

For me, the degree of pulverization seems incredible when it's stated the way it is by the people you quote. Highly enigmatic. From an energetic perspective, though, the potential energy change of collapse easily dwarfs all but the most extensive of assistance schemes, and it actually is pretty reasonable to expect the whammy at the end to be an efficient pulverization process. From that perspective, maybe there's nothing at all unusual about the post conditions as reported. (any chemical composition considerations aside)

Matt wrote:I look forward to a critique of the dust cloud theory described here: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/proofs/volume.html

This relies primarily on Hoffman's analysis, which I haven't looked at in years. A quick glance at the analysis, though, reveals a couple of issues immediately.

All of the concrete mass is assumed pulverized, yet there are plenty of pictures around showing large chunks. Granted, there is the testimony of people like you quoted, but then I've seen slabs in pictures, so I have to temper these reports against my own lying eyes. This could lead to a gross overestimate of energy consumed, perhaps an order of magnitude all by itself (pure guess).

The other thing is the assumption that -

Hoffman wrote:...is doubtful that mixing with ambient air accounted for a significant fraction of their volume. Therefore the dust clouds' expansion must have been primarily due to an expansion of building constituents.

This may not be a valid assumption. By the time the cloud got to Mark Heath, it was far and away mostly air or he would be dead. Not to say it was pleasant breathing, but it was a small fraction of particulate by that time no matter how opaque it looked from a distance. Again, something which could affect the consumption estimated by a large amount.

Edit: reading on farther, I definitely believe the volume is grossly overestimated. It cannot be sufficient to assume minimal mixing just because the boundary layer is well defined. Mark Heath was breathing in that 'pyroclastic cloud' so this assumption is assuredly false.

One more problem:

The cloud was a suspension of fine particles of concrete and other solids in gasses consisting mostly of air. Since concrete was the dominant solid, I will ignore the others, which included glass, gypsum, asbestos, and various hydrocarbons.

Bad mistake. The majority of the cloud could be from these ignored sources. There is no doubt that a significant volume is accounted for with these, particularly the wallboard. Just about everything in the towers except steel was MUCH easier to pulverize than the concrete, and there was a lot of it. Just the particle board in office furniture.

A non-trivial amount of apparent reflectivity came from paper, without a doubt. Again, look at the Mark Heath video. Huuuge amounts of (unburned) paper. That's not even compatible with expansion driven by a thermal process of any magnitude.

The glass surely cannot be ignored, either, also highly reflective. On another forum, someone asked me incredulously where all the glass went and the answer is, it's right there in front of you. It didn't disappear or get blown into the stratosphere, so it fell before your eyes. What does that look like from a mile away on video? Clouds. Not the particulate going up, but there were chips flying all over in a fluidized fashion near the ground. I may sound like a broken record, but check the Mark Heath video.

Huuuge amounts of (unburned) paper

There was. Also lots of burned paper, some burned evenly on the edges as if in mid-air: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiXcKx98c5U#t=46s, some with a dried molten tar(?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYbVhsEmGrw#t=2m2s. Maybe much of the paper mass was protected from the initial flashes by file cabinets that took the brunt of the initial blast of heat... and protected by the dense stacking like columns of wood.

"“so much of the Trade Center ended up as ash, incinerated.”
http://web.archive.org/web/20100706150944/http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020909/landfill/6.html

Mat,

I suppose it comes down to how the concrete was destroyed and how the floor contents were destroyed... the steel for the most part survived though bent and mangled.

If the mechanism for the destruction / disintegration of the concrete was a mechanical process, which I believe it to have been, this would generate an enormous amount of heat... which was transferred to all the materials and radiated into the air... which then expanded as hot air does. Physicists might be able to come up with a number for how many joules of heat would be released in the grinding, and disintegration of concrete to fine particle size as we saw. But if it was a mechanical process heat had to be a bi product... and depending on the amount and perhaps concentration of the heat one might expect addition outcomes... fire or singed paper, even melted metal and micro spheres... it metal had also been ground up in the mechanical process... which I would assume could have taken place.

I don't think the contents on each floor... or all of it... was destroyed by the crush front. I rather suspect the rapidly descending crush front forced the air on each floor out of the way... out through the windows shattering them to tiny shards in the process... crushing most everything in a whirlwind of destruction which took perhaps .1 seconds per floor. The lighter stuff between the slabs... ceiling tiles... insulation... gyp wall board simply came apart with very little force and was carried out the windows by more than tornado force wind. The descending rubble was likely very hot from the heat released in grinding it up. Didn't we see some sort of *meteor* like object which was an artifact of the collapse like igneous rock? It was that heat which descended to the ground with cooler air sucked down behind it and that cooler column or air over the entire footprint was moving down at 65 mph and when it hit ground it spread radially away carrying the heat of the rubble.. the fine dust and lighter debris. The air heated up cooling the debris / rubble and became the billowing hot clouds carrying tiny bits and pieces of the building with it.

It makes sense to me that paper would be easily swept up in the tornado like wind and carried out the window openings... but paper that was contained in cabinets and dust would then be crushed by the perhaps 50,000 psi dynamic load which descended on it.

Turning 90,000 tons of concrete mechanically to mostly dust would explain the various heat effects seen.. ash, *meteors*, micro-spheres and carbon based materials being incinerated.

Do you doubt that could happen? You don't expect little to no heat being produced.. would you?

Physicists might be able to come up with a number for how many joules of heat would be released in the grinding, and disintegration of concrete to fine particle size as we saw.

Greening: http://www.911myths.com/WTCONC1.pdf Comments?

Do you doubt that could happen? You don't expect little to no heat being produced.. would you?

I doubt the 2,700°C heat claimed by Jones, et. al. would have come from friction (friction and what else?).

Mat,
Strike a match and you can release enormous enormous energy. The cold caused the space shuttle to explode. Things progress. Sh8t happens... one thing leads to another. Chain reactions.

Matt, thanks for the info.

I'll include the quotes in my website. Physical description of flooring or lack of in the rubble certainly is important.

In no way can the ROOSD concept be considered decisive proof in itself. Interesting how the strong possibility of progressive floor collapse is not mentioned by either NIST or AE911T.

It needs to be considered and cannot be ignored.

Since we can map large sections of the perimeter and the core yet we cannot see the floor slabs during collapse progression, let's review the mound of rubble within the footprint once again.



Once the core columns on the surface are removed, there seems to be a mound of what appears to be gravel. It is so dence that heavy equipment can form pathways upon it.


My library of the area of the WTC1 footprint during clean-up can be found here


Here is the mound a few days earlier before the surface debris was removed;



The excavation equipment form a pathway up one side of it as seen in the first image.

What is the nature of that mound that makes it so sturdy?




Matt, I know you are a person with a good knowledge of the visual record. The images in my library are of a high resolution so we can zoom in on details of the rubble mound during excavation.

I suppose you can't drive up that heavy equipment on a mound of dust...

Thanks MT for your collection of images. I like to have the date when viewing them. It appears the early shot was on Sept. 17, per metadata. The later shots were from Oct. 3 if the data can be trusted. http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sharpprintinginc.com%2F911%2Fimages%2Fphotoalbum%2F1%2Fn_core_4.jpg

The areas around the towers' cores, in the footprints, were compact debris down through B4 according to LERA/PBS. http://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds/engineering/engineering_rescue_02.html -- but to facilitate equipment safety, asphalt millings were dumped all over the place.

"We were putting milled asphalt, you know, to kind of build a road and flatten certain areas and put, put dirt over the debris, so we could bring trucks in and whatnot..."
- Kenneth Holden, Former Commissioner, Dept. Of Design & Construction, "The Center of the World - New York: A Documentary Film" 2003, PBS

"One morning in the late fall, I accompanied Ken Holden into the expanding valley at the center of the pile, where a temporary access road of ground-asphalt millings was being built. A fire chief came up and said, 'You've gotta give us time. You gotta get these guys to stop covering up the debris, burying us with dirt.'"
- William Langewiesche, American Ground, p. 70

Mat,

Hard to know how much fill they employed to create a surface for the machines to move onto the pile. But since there was a lot of fallen steel, it was obvious that they decided to construct a load bearing smooth access roadway to get to the top of the pile and pick off the steel.

Obviously the scattered debris posed many challenges for removal since it was so widespread... and the steel sections were so large ... 36' long. And they were also looking for survivors and trying to recover human remains... not to mention the entire site a 7 story basement... so it wasn't as if they could just drive heavy construction machinery to any location and work there. What a mess!

In "America Rebuilds" a guy from the DDC says "a couple grapplers" were lost by falling about 20 feet into voids. Nobody got hurt, luckily.

Let us try to capture the clean up of the footprint in stages.



A bit later for WTC1...




and a bit later...





Matt, all the quotes and images of the descent to the base of the footprint would be appreciated

SOme access holes within the core, but that doesn't look like a 4" thick slab protecting it. More like a bunker.



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going deeper...