WHERE DID THE TOWERS GO? by Dr. Judy Wood, Ph.D

[Kyle Burnett]

Hey Jeffrery, I'm still wondering; do you agree that Bazzant's claims of crush-down before crush-up violate Newton's third law? A clear yes or no would be great.

[Jeffrey Orling]

I have no interest in Bazant's nonsense re the destruction of the twin towers.

What I explained, and you can give it the name you please... is very basic. If you provide a sufficient threshold mass which will destroy the upper most of 90 identically (structurally) designed floors... that threshold mass will not only increase with each subsequent floor destruction, but it will of course cause each successive floor below to fracture/fail. What's good for the goose is good for the goose below it.

The crush up crush down nonsense looks at the top of the tower like a monolithic structure which "attacks" another monolithic structure below which had stronger columns. This is NOT what happened and so there is no point in analyzing such an interaction. Right... we know little less massive blocks cannot destroy bigger more massive ones. Rock, paper, scissors and all that.

The gravitational part of collapse took place after the several floor masses in the region above the crash zone fractured by whatever means and descended on the "intact" floors below them and destroyed it... and so on down to the ground. This became a "gravity driven" collapse of all the floors... leaving the columns to "fend for themselves". The columns (fending for themselves) were then unable to stand absent lateral bracing and fell over... or were pushed over by the aggregating collapsing floor masses. (they didn't fend for themselves very well... they needed the help of the floors to stand tall)

Crush up and Crush down are not part of this explanation (the one which actually conforms to the observations... not some theory created from formulas. Bazant can go fly kites. He missed the boat on what happened because he is playing with equations and not observations.

There is a lesson here about how vulnerable open office column free long span office floors are to progressive collapse. THEY ARE... and any terrorists who wants to begin a ROOSD doesn't need to slam a plane into a building, but get several of the top floors to dissociate themselves from their column supports and they will take down the tower. The good news is that there are not that many long span open office column free towers out there. The bad news is that this simple truth is being withheld from the public and officials who could demand some retro fits to avoid ROOSD scenarios in susceptible structures.

[Kyle Burnett]

Your lack of intrest in Bazant's crackpottey aside, it's effectively the official explanation for how the towers came down, NIST deferring to him beyond their explanation of how they became "poised for collapse" left off. Furthermore, it's in large part what what is being refereed to when it is noted that the official explanation for how the towers came down violates the laws of physics. So, regardless of if you are unable to comprehend the fact that Bazant's claims of crush-down before crush-up, or just unwilling to admit it; the fact remains that the official explanation for how the towers came down does defy physics.

As for your own claims about how the towers came down; yes they are very basic, oversimplifications to the point of absurdity in my approximation. That said, if you ever take the time to put your conjecture to the test, I'd be eager to see your results. As it stands, I'm left to believe an actual top-down progressive collapse would look far more like these simulations than what happened to the towers.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Kyle,

NIST offered no explanation of how the towers actually collapsed. I challenge you to cite where they explained the mechanism of collapse and especially in a manner which resembles ROOSD. They were silent on the collapse phase but put out their hoory about sagging trusses.

I invite you to the 911 Free Forums to challenge those scientists and engineers.

http://the911forum.freeforums.org

by telling them that ROOSD is essentially what NIST said.

Any what is your less than absurd and highly credible explanation for the approximately 10 second collapse post initiation... ie whatever started the "destruction"?

I'll be back in an hour.

And before I leave... what are your professional, scientific.. or engineering credentials and experience? How long have you been at them?

[Phil Dragoo]

Jeffrey


I picked out these three paragraphs of yours from your #62 above as representative of your thinking and depicting a process I have accepted from the beginning of discussion:

1. The collapse of the twin towers was a runaway collapse and destruction of the rather flimsy floors which were designed to support 58 pounds per square foot. Whatever the mechanism was which caused the top section's floors to "break apart" or be severed from the columns which held them up... and carried their dead and live loads... once the dynamic threshold mass of floor "debris" came down upon an intact, stone cold undamaged floor... that floor shattered... unable to support the imposed load. It's that simple.
   
   This process repeated rather rapidly... at the rate of 60 mph of 10 floors per second until all the floors were destroyed, crushed, fractured and they and the contents pulverized by the aggregate weight of the debris. Even if 20% (which is way way way too high) turned to fine powder and was carried aloft in the air... the remaining 80% of the floors mass was more than enough to crush anything except steel and a few other strong materials... toilets, telephones, wall board, carpet, ceiling tiles, and so forth was crushed beyond recognition. If you don't think it would happen.... drop a few hundred thousand tons of debris on any of those items and see if you can find them intact.
   
   The very strong columns... increasingly strong as you move down the towers toppled over when they lost the bracing which the floors system had provided. Basic science and Judy Wood should know Euler if she is an engineer. But she's a self promoter of fairly tales. Gage is completely out of his league when it comes to structures and physics as is apparently Cole and David Chandler, who refuse to acknowledge the observations of the towers' collapse.
   

Judy Wood appeared as a guest with George Noory on the Coast to Coast AM radio show recently. She referred to the "dustification" of buildings, and presented a horrific process resembling microwaving which caused the destruction of the towers and forced the doomed upper-floor occupants to shed their clothing and leap to their deaths.


In our several decades of construction, demolition and renovation in the Land of Enchantment, we had occasion to saw, drill, grind, sand, and mechanically break with compressed air jackhammer, mechanical hammer, pneumatic-electric hammer a good deal of material. Be it stucco, slab, adobe, sheetrock, plaster, one will soon produce an atmosphere of dust driving out occupants not equipped with respiratorslet alone collapsing the building on them.


The energy to destroy the buildings was latent, inherent in the construction of the fine open spaces; one needed only to disrupt the transfer of load at limited key locations, be it by fire, impact, compromise of stabilty by removal of adjacent members.


Had we the capability to atomize mass with directed energy, the Corps of Engineers would not be using conventional explosives in Louisiana, and my friend at Raytheon would not have employment on missile systems.

As we wait for Flash Gordon, I suggest the presetting of sequential charges in key attachments of trusses to column spandrels, all performed in ceiling spaces of unoccupied floors by the efficient trades people in generic overalls.


A plane with electronic equipment would then execute detonation with technology familiar to our age. Perhaps the white plane loitering noted in multiple reports.

[Kyle Burnett]

NIST offered no explanation of how the towers actually collapsed.

Right, and in doing so, NIST was "deferring to him beyond their explanation of how they became "poised for collapse" left off", Bazant's papers being the per-reviewed explanation for how the towers came down.

I challenge you to cite where they explained the mechanism of collapse and especially in a manner which resembles ROOSD.

I'd like to see you cite where you imagine I suggested anything of the sort.

As for the911forum.com, I'm Pavlovian Dogcatcher over there, I'm guessing you are Sander? As for credentials and experience, I studied architecture and physics through high school and into college, but went on hiatus before 9/11 and lost the last shreds of my faith in our establishment at that point, and have hence moved on to studding deep politics instead. So I don't nearly match you in credentials and experience, but then you don't match Bazant either, or likely the people who peer-reviewed his papers, and we both agree they are crap.

As for my understanding of what happened to the towers, the massive destruction of evidence makes it difficult to assess in detail. However, in general terms based on what little evidence is available; I've no doubt that incendiaries and explosives were used to weaken the structures before a final sequence of explosives placed throughout the buildings were detonated to bring them down.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Kyle,

I believe it pretty clear from the basic engineering and from the design of those towers that they could rather easily be taken down with some mechanism to fail as few as three of four tenant floors or the heavy floors and equipment on mech floors 108 and 109. If these floors alone were compromised and the equipment they contained as well as the heavy steel which framed them were released from their moorings so to speak... this would come crashing though any typical tenant floor. No doubt in my mind about this.

There were no explosives needed to fail the floors below the crush zone.. as the "ROOSD" driver would be far more efficient and reliable and was basically unstoppable. ROOSD is a chain reaction of sorts like pushing over a single domino and all the others will then fall in sequence.

If this was an engineered destruction as many claim it it seems more than likely it could have been, those who planned it understood the structure of those towers and that the floors were truly vulnerable to a runaway collapse once overloaded.

Tower 2 raises interesting questions as to what actually was the kick off mechanism because if it was an engineered take down the kick off mass was generated as a result of the top section tilting and the floors crashing down and generating the kick off mass. Perhaps the approach was to somehow get the columns to buckle or displace...then the floors would be unsupported and the whole top would drop and collide generating the threshold mass/energy for a ROOSD. Tower 2 may have been a botched job which didn't matter much in the end because once ROOSD conditions presented in that structure collapse was all but inevitable. Perhaps the asymmetry of the plane strike was the cause of the tilt... but the actual failure still required additional core column buckling to kick off the ROOSD.

The core columns at those elevations were quite a bit thinner sections and not that difficult to attack. There were no massive thick wall box columns up there above the plane strikes. And further the safety factor for the steel was likely less then 2 meaning that if less than half the key columns were compromised the remaining one would fold like a cheap tent. Claims of safety factors of 4, 5 or 20 are pure nonsense. I am doing a detailed columns study to determine the actual safety factor and the preliminary results put it at 1.5... which is slightly above the typical safety factor for steel in high rise frames.

The Wood thesis is complete nonsense because it simply does not fit to the observations of the event. She tries to make the claim that the steel disappeared when virtually all of it fell down and can be seen in the many photos of the debris pile.

One needs to ask if planners studied the towers (as I have) and identified the vulnerabilities (as I have)... why would they resort to complex scenarios and exotic weapons when this was clearly not necessary. Perhaps even the planes themselves delivered the "devices" ... not the fire... which would "attack" the structure enough to undermine enough of the floor supports to kick off a collapse. Or perhaps there were a few devices places and the inevitable fires caused by the flames would "ignite or detonate" the pre planted devices and over time... the key structure supports would be taken out and then a progressive re distribution of the stresses would take place which would also buckle columns and then enough would fail and the mass above would drop, collide and the ROOSD threshold would be created.

One needs to look at this as to how would THEY engineer this take down to be reliable and conceal the fact that there were devices planted.

Leaving the discussion of the actual gravitational collapse untouched has simply set the doubters off the reservation into exotic explosive scenarios... fighting amongst themselves for the proper explanation about the collapse. The collapse was not a mystery.... to those who study the structure which I doubt Bazant bothered to and fiddled around with mass, KE and crush up crush down nonsense... really navel gazing. Had he studied the plans, the specs and he videos he would not bother with is nonsense theories of crush up crush down. It's hard to figure out his motive in all this. He certainly didn't study the event in order produce his paper.

And then we have people who present as experts and haven't studied nor could they even understand the technical issues... witness Fetzer, Boldwyn who are in love with cold steel columns and have no idea what a building weight 500,000 tons standing 1360 feet tall would actually look like if it were breaking apart. Let's be honest here... who DOES know what a building of that size collapsing WOULD look like. How do they know with such certainty that what we see in those images is not a collapse... 500,000 tons collapsing is supposed to be a neat affair and show now debris ejected?... or enormous dust?

Where did all these experts come from?

[James Lewis]

Mr. Orling, I have to say that I am deeply bothered by your spurious use of "science" to discredit Dr. Woods' theory of what happened to the Twin Towers. You seem you want to use your position as an architect as a pulpit to make statements that cannot be reconciled through science, or plain common sense. One question...if the buildings did "collapse" in the way that you suggested, why is it that no other building in history has been observed to collapse in the same way after burning? As an example, the fire at One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, on February 23, 1991, burned for 19 hours, far longer than the Twin Towers did, and not only did the building NOT collapse (the fire gutted eight floors of the building), but even the glass didn't melt - and the melting point of glass is far lower than the melting point for carbon steel. So how can a fire that burned for a much shorter time, and gutted far fewer floors, cause a structure as large as 1 and 2 World Trade Center to simply "collapse"? That simply doesn't make any kind of sense - common or otherwise. As for the theory about how the explosives, if any, could have been placed in the buildings, there is a simple answer for that. In the months preceding 9/11, the WTC was evacuated several times, different floors each time, for fire drills. That would have given any conspirators, or their mechanics, ample time to place explosive charges at strategic places inside of the building, as the evacuations lasted for around an hour to an hour and a half. My point is, the official version, and yours, do not make one whit of common sense. And yes, I understand that "scientists" like yourself have differing points of opinion on certain things. And I assume that we've all heard the old saying "walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, must be a duck", right? Well, if you accept the premise of what that says, which is basically the Principle of Identity in logic (an item or thing is what it is, and cannot be anything else), the the inverse must also be true. That means this: If it doesn't walk like a duck, quack like a duck, or do anything else remotely duck-like then we must be dealing with an animal that is something other than a duck. And I realize that this isn't the most "scientific" way of explaining things, but what it IS...is pure logic and common sense, pure and simple. And on a side note, full disclosure: I do not subscribe to Dr. Woods' theories of the WTC destruction. But I DO subscribe to common sense and logic, which both your's and Dr. Woods' theories seem to steadfastly ignore. I'm not a scientist...I'm just an old country boy from East Texas with a good bit of book sense and a hell of a lot of common sense. And neither your theory, nor Dr. Woods, holds water when the light of logic is shined upon them. As Sherlock Holmes said: "Detective work is about eliminating the impossible. Once you have eliminated the impossible, what you have left, however improbable, has to be the truth". Meaning, it has to be true because that's all that's left to see. Thank you very much :-)

Kyle,

I believe it pretty clear from the basic engineering and from the design of those towers that they could rather easily be taken down with some mechanism to fail as few as three of four tenant floors or the heavy floors and equipment on mech floors 108 and 109. If these floors alone were compromised and the equipment they contained as well as the heavy steel which framed them were released from their moorings so to speak... this would come crashing though any typical tenant floor. No doubt in my mind about this.

There were no explosives needed to fail the floors below the crush zone.. as the "ROOSD" driver would be far more efficient and reliable and was basically unstoppable. ROOSD is a chain reaction of sorts like pushing over a single domino and all the others will then fall in sequence.

If this was an engineered destruction as many claim it it seems more than likely it could have been, those who planned it understood the structure of those towers and that the floors were truly vulnerable to a runaway collapse once overloaded.

Tower 2 raises interesting questions as to what actually was the kick off mechanism because if it was an engineered take down the kick off mass was generated as a result of the top section tilting and the floors crashing down and generating the kick off mass. Perhaps the approach was to somehow get the columns to buckle or displace...then the floors would be unsupported and the whole top would drop and collide generating the threshold mass/energy for a ROOSD. Tower 2 may have been a botched job which didn't matter much in the end because once ROOSD conditions presented in that structure collapse was all but inevitable. Perhaps the asymmetry of the plane strike was the cause of the tilt... but the actual failure still required additional core column buckling to kick off the ROOSD.

The core columns at those elevations were quite a bit thinner sections and not that difficult to attack. There were no massive thick wall box columns up there above the plane strikes. And further the safety factor for the steel was likely less then 2 meaning that if less than half the key columns were compromised the remaining one would fold like a cheap tent. Claims of safety factors of 4, 5 or 20 are pure nonsense. I am doing a detailed columns study to determine the actual safety factor and the preliminary results put it at 1.5... which is slightly above the typical safety factor for steel in high rise frames.

The Wood thesis is complete nonsense because it simply does not fit to the observations of the event. She tries to make the claim that the steel disappeared when virtually all of it fell down and can be seen in the many photos of the debris pile.

One needs to ask if planners studied the towers (as I have) and identified the vulnerabilities (as I have)... why would they resort to complex scenarios and exotic weapons when this was clearly not necessary. Perhaps even the planes themselves delivered the "devices" ... not the fire... which would "attack" the structure enough to undermine enough of the floor supports to kick off a collapse. Or perhaps there were a few devices places and the inevitable fires caused by the flames would "ignite or detonate" the pre planted devices and over time... the key structure supports would be taken out and then a progressive re distribution of the stresses would take place which would also buckle columns and then enough would fail and the mass above would drop, collide and the ROOSD threshold would be created.

One needs to look at this as to how would THEY engineer this take down to be reliable and conceal the fact that there were devices planted.

Leaving the discussion of the actual gravitational collapse untouched has simply set the doubters off the reservation into exotic explosive scenarios... fighting amongst themselves for the proper explanation about the collapse. The collapse was not a mystery.... to those who study the structure which I doubt Bazant bothered to and fiddled around with mass, KE and crush up crush down nonsense... really navel gazing. Had he studied the plans, the specs and he videos he would not bother with is nonsense theories of crush up crush down. It's hard to figure out his motive in all this. He certainly didn't study the event in order produce his paper.

And then we have people who present as experts and haven't studied nor could they even understand the technical issues... witness Fetzer, Boldwyn who are in love with cold steel columns and have no idea what a building weight 500,000 tons standing 1360 feet tall would actually look like if it were breaking apart. Let's be honest here... who DOES know what a building of that size collapsing WOULD look like. How do they know with such certainty that what we see in those images is not a collapse... 500,000 tons collapsing is supposed to be a neat affair and show now debris ejected?... or enormous dust?

Where did all these experts come from?

[Jeffrey Orling]

Mr. Lewis.

There are very few buildings which share the structural attributes of the Twin Towers. And this certainly applies to all previous towers which experienced raging fires such as the one cited in your post. Totally different animal.

Of course all towers have columns and so this is a shared attribute. But what I have described did not involve column failure but FLOOR failures... between the columns which help them "in place".

But more importantly, I am not claiming that FIRES caused the weakening which led to the floor destruction. While intense heat DOES weaken steel and hence fireproofing is applied to give a two hour margin typically for steel, I don't believe office fires burning for the time intervals at the twin towers had much to do with the floor collapse... if anything. I've made that clear many times.

I am not a scientist and do not make such representations. I am architect for over 40 years and actually worked for the firm which did the construction drawings for the twin towers as my first post graduate job. I simply look at the failure by examine the structure which is precisely what anyone who would take them down would do - study the structure and figure out the most efficient way to take them down. And that is part of what I have done.

Obviously you fail to understand that a floor can collapse... any floor... in any building (not slab on grade of course) if there is too much imposed load placed on it. In the case of the twin tower floor failure/destruction this began AFTER the section above the plane strikes (in tower 1 from floor 96 or so up and in tower 2 from floor 80 or so up) were dissociated from the columns which supported them. We don't know the mechanism for this and as stated above office fires don't seem to cut it here so something else was a play.

But one masses of those magnitudes was no longer supported by columns these masses began to drop, pulled by gravity of course. And these masses... 30,000 tons or more in for wtc 1 and perhaps 60 or 70 thousand tons for tower two dropped they came crashing onto the top floors of the intact section below. It doesn't much matter whether this mass was rubblised entirely or partially or acted a single mass.... if it descended on a typical WTC floor that floor would immediately fracture and fail... turn to rubble and the driving mass would continue on down also breaking apart with each collision.

ROOSD is the explanation for the collapse... not what began the collapse. We don't know what BEGAN the collapse... explosives, cutter charges, even DEW which might have turned to tops to disorganized mass as opposed to mass organized as office floors and equipment and so forth.

This is a forensic engineering explanation which IS supported by the observations... and to most engineers who study this it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck so it IS a duck and that duck is a progressive floor failure from over loading.

Try this though experiment. Place an German made Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster tank weighing 1500 tons and gently lower it onto floor 98. Observe what happens. I'll tell you what happens. The tank will crash through every single floor right to the ground.

And that is essentially what happened to the twin tower floors. Burning contents by fire is not going to free the mass of the floors themselves and the contents to become the destructive driver. Fire protection of steel is there to prevent the FRAME itself from buckling and collapsing. What happened at the twin towers is the FRAME basically was INTACT, but the floors were destroyed. And then the frame collapsed without lateral support.

Get it?

[Kyle Burnett]

Jeffery, I'm still wondering; what is your username on the911forum.com?