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

[James Lewis]

Oh yes, there is another problem with your theory. It requires the weight to be evenly distributed across the floors. How could this have happened when neither tower had and entire floor burn straight across. Both towers were hot on one side and burned mainly in the localized area where the planes actually hit. And also, if what you're saying was actually the case, why did the South Tower come down first, when the North Tower sustained a far more direct hit and burned for quite a bit longer? Sorry, but that doesn't make a damn lick of sense (sorry, my East Texas upbringing rears its head), not to me, or to anyone else applying simple common sense to the situation.

Lewis raises another straw man argument.

I do not present a theory or an hypothesis but present the engineering principles use every day to design structures.

The strength of materials has been tested and is presented in design load tables. Take out your ASTM steel design manual or even Wood Structural Design data for example and you will find the design loads for various types of steel or wood, sections, connections and so forth. The assembled tabular performance data exists for all building materials and is used to design structures for specific load conditions.

When I design a structure I don't have to test it to see if it will stand and carry the required loads because I base the design on established empirically derived engineering data.

LERA went through a similar process when the designed the towers. However the DID do some wind tunnel testing, which at the time was very new for buildings. It was done to determine of their unconventional approach to wind shear was sound. The wind tunnel test determined that the building moved too much in anticipated wind loads and so visco elastic damping was added to the the truss to facade connection attached to from each truss to every other facade column location.

Further, there were concrete slump tests done as per usual to determine that the concrete mix met designed specs. We don't have the construction logs however showing those test results.

Some of the steel was tested as well, random and destructive testing to determine if it was as per spec. Much of the discussion of how the design loads and materials and systems is in the NIST NCSTAR !a report and makes interesting reading.

I've stated many times that the twin towers were a very unusual design in that they had their floors constructed in assemblies off site and were very long span with the columns to support one side of the floor slabs also used as the mechanism to resist wind sheer. And the facade was likewise custom fabricated off site.

Further the columns required for the bottom all were custom fabricated box sections of welded plates. There were no rolled section available to support the calculated axial loads. Their design was determined, not by testing them... as it is rather impossible to place a load of 32 million pounds on the sample to see if it would fail. This was the yield strength of core column 501 for example.

The formulas which describe Euler buckling were empirically determined centuries ago and probably a the basis for some experiments in schools. But in the real world Euler's formulas and Young's modulus are used all the time to mathematically test and design structures,

The towers were MOSTLY bolted together as well, but welds are tested as well...

What I have described is basic engineering and is exactly what is predicted for any structure which is over stressed, or over loaded. The key here is that the floor failure was a sub set of the entire structure... and the failure of one floor led to the failure of the identical floor below and then to the columns. Once the load imbalance (excessive) was introduced to the floors.. by redistributing load ONTO them which were formerly carried by the columns... the floors HAD to fail.

The reason why you don't see other high rises come down like this is because presenting such excessive over loading to the upper floors is almost a virtual impossibility under normal circumstances. The destructive load came from the top section of the tower itself as it was somehow destroyed (14 floors in tower 1) and no longer supported by the columns but in increments at each floor level, but became an imposed live dynamic load on the upper most intact floor... a live load which was more than 20 times the floor's yield strength.

Go place a ton on every square foot of the top floor of Sears tower and watch all the floors below it collapse exactly as the twin towers.... or any high rise structure for that matter... steel or concrete frame. No heat required what so ever. If you drop the ton it its force is multiplied as a dynamic load.

Engineers analyze the performance of structures without physical testing. But they do test complex structures such as auto in destructive testing... or airplanes in wind tunnels.

Absolutely no real need to do physical tests to prove what has been proven about material performance. And scale models will not be reliable. You can't scale all factors in a test such as time or gravity. But if you want to see Euler buckling at work try to assemble a 1/100 scale model of column 501. it will stand 13.6 feet high made of 38 segments that are 4.3 inches tall by .52" x .22 in cross section at the base and H sections which are .14 x .14 made of material which is .01 thick. Place these one atop the other with a dab of glue and see how stable the 13.62' column is. It wont be and it wont be an accurate test of column 501 either. You can't scale model this structural failures!

Every time you drive over a suspension bridge consider that it was designed on paper and probably with a slide rule and little or no testing other than noted above.. slump tests and random materials destructive testing. When the engineering is done properly and erected to spec the structure performs as designed under the load conditions EACH component was designed for. If you overload an elevator, you can fail it's cables or car structure etc. but the building it is contained in will NOT fail.

If you overload the top floor of any number of identical spec'd floors and it collapses... all the same floors below will then ALSO collapse when that floor's loads are presented to the ones below. Basic engineering... not a hypothesis or theory.

If you don't accept or understand these basic concepts, you have no business discussing the destruction of a building which came down... came apart and lost its structural integrity. People are only exposing their own ignorance of statics, and engineering by stating that it is impossible for a building such as the twin towers to fail as we observed.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Mr. Lewis,

Apparently I am not making myself clear. The collapse I describe is what I term Phase II - post initiation and AFTER the 4 seconds of the collapse of the top 14 floors in tower one, for example.

It is a collapse of the (as Fetzer likes to call it) stone cold structure - floors if you will which were at room temperature.

The floor collapse as describe by ROOSD does not require ANY HEAT or WEAKENED steel columns... it is simply the over loading by MASS assaulting the floors. I don't have to strike a pane of glass with a uniform impact to shatter the entire glass.

The assault of ROOSD was an avalanche of debris from above. Uniform? What do you think the mass distribution would be for each square foot of the material above the 96th floor? If you plotted it.. first you would have to consider 14 floors which each weighed about 120 pounds on each square foot. The would have to guess at the super imposed live load distribution... The window offices would have the big desks eh? But the filing cabinets would be in the darker windowless areas close to the core. But the actual percentage of super imposed live loads to the dead loads of those 14 floors is less than half. Each floor was designed for 58# superimposed live load but the floors are rarely loaded to that amount... floor space is left open to allow people to move about. How much does the contents of your office weigh and how many SQ ft is it and you can see it's probably way less than the 58#/s ft... so the live load is not really going to cause spikes in the load distribution.

[Jeffrey Orling]

Mr. Lewis,

Why did the south tower come down first? It's damage was lower and more asymmetrical for one thing. Seems as if the structural failure in phase I caused a rapid load redistribution and an asymmetrical one which led to the top not having support on the south side and so it began to drop AND rotate.

But we don't know what happened in Phase I and so its speculation to explain why the south tower's top failed in less time than the north tower.

Do you think "they" planned it that way? Why?

[James Lewis]

Well...maybe I'm just too much of a simple East Texas country boy to be able to use anything than common sense in investigating this thing. The way I see it, the only way that WTC 2 would come down first would be that the detonating charges were set up to go off in that building first. But, that's just simple common sense, which for some reason, doesn't seem to go over very well here. By the way...what theory would you apply to the destruction of WTC 7??

Mr. Lewis,

Why did the south tower come down first? It's damage was lower and more asymmetrical for one thing. Seems as if the structural failure in phase I caused a rapid load redistribution and an asymmetrical one which led to the top not having support on the south side and so it began to drop AND rotate.

But we don't know what happened in Phase I and so its speculation to explain why the south tower's top failed in less time than the north tower.

Do you think "they" planned it that way? Why?

[Jeffrey Orling]

Mr. Lewis,

All three collapses were gravity driven but NOT gravity started. CDs destroy the columns in the bottom of a structure so the weight (gravity) pulls the mass above down and it crashes and crumbles. I realize many refuse to accept this explanation for this part of the collapses.

It appears from the observations of Bldg 7 that the core failed first and not completely but the failure seems to have been perhaps as low as floor 7 or as high as floor 13. The failure progressed westward through the core and the first notice that something was seriously wrong to the naked eye was the collapse of the East Penthouse which literally plunged right down through the entire building... There was movement before the collapse of the East penthouse which can only be detected with computer analysis of the videos. This motion seems to indicate that there WAS load redistribution going on and the structure was torquing and twisting... distorting. We don't know what caused this distortion. It doesn't seem the result of a bomb blast.... but cutting of some columns and main girders... perhaps.

When the entire core had dropped it pulled the OOS floors down and then the skin descended like a hollow box and it may have slipped outside the skin beneath it. I haven't studied Bldg 7 much. It doesn't appear to be a ROOSD though.

[Kyle Burnett]

Wood clearly presents theories as theories. Orling presents theories as facts.

Again, neither are presenting theories in the scientific sense, just hypotheses. As for Wood, I've yet to see her present anything with clarity, and rather have found she generally resorts to making her arguments by begging the question. However, I've also seen her state her "theories" as if they were facts, for example, in her Request for Correction to NIST, she cites as evidence:

The "holes" that are only adequately explained based on unusual energy effects, consistent with the use of Directed Energy Weapons (DEW).

So, where's an example of a directed energy device producing holes like those in WTC 6? Wood, like Orling, has no actual theory, just lame hypotheses which they can't even attempt to put to the test of experimental confirmation.

...did you ever answer Kyle's question about how the towers defied Newton's Third Law?

Please note that's not quite what I suggested. The towers, being physical objects, adhered perfectly to the laws of physics, while it's only false explanations of there destruction which doesn't, Bazant's explanation flagrantly violating Newton's third law being one notable example. But no, Jeffery is either unable of comprehending that fact, or simply unwilling to acknowledge as much.

[Jeffrey Orling]

There is no violation of any laws of thermodynamics in the phase II of the collapse. And Kyle is correct is that I don't present a theory, but an explanation based in basic engineering concepts supported by the observations.

Bazant produced a theoretical calculation which matters not. He didn't bother to describe the observations... didn't even have to refer to them and his diagrams show he did even look at them closely.

I am not even sure why Kyle's objection is at this point to the engineering concepts which describe a gravity driven destruction from the plane strike zone down driven by the mass of the floors above the strike.

[Ed Jewett]

I haven't visited (or re-visited) this thread since my PC had a cataclysmic meltdown not unlike some of the buildings in New York City about a decade ago, so forgive me if this has been posted previously:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgN080yySe0

I can't help but think that this is remarkably similar to another event that took place in clear daylight in Dallas decades ago. It speaks for itself in so many ways. You can argue the fine points of precisely how what happened happened, but you can't refute the obvious in plain sight, nor can you refute the sheer audacity of the event in modern day concepts, nor can you refute the remarkable depths of the secondary disinformation. The mere fact that there are waves of people attempting to tell us not to look, not to believe, or to look elsewhere and believe something else, also speaks for itself.

[Jeffrey Orling]

There was a magic show and lots of deception set forth and a media which has drilled in the false narrative for a decade. But the fact that there was deception and lies doesn't mean we have to through out all critical thinking and assume or propose that everything told is a lie or when the official narrative is silent on some aspect that the officials are covering up something unspeakable.

There was no official account of the collapses. There was only an official narrative which is not credible about what CAUSED the towers to collapse.

We can agree on that and many other things... but we can't seem to agree on whether the towers collapsed or were exploded to bits. Logically you could have a natural failure with an engineered cause but you can't have an engineered failure from a natural cause.

Of course if the buildings were completely destroyed top to bottom by explosives or some strange new device/mechanism it would be a lot more complex, spectacular and damning than kicking off a collapse with a handful of well placed bombs... which I suppose presumably is a smaller conspiracy than envisioned by the truth movement.

The recent kill operation of OBL was met with a chorus of MSM cheerleaders. Was that a coordinated conspiracy between Obama and the MSM? Or did they just fall in line because it's good for business? While I find the story full of holes, I don't think the media was conspiring with Obama either. But it does show the pressure to conform and not question and how this builds false consensus and narratives.

[Jason Donovan]

Jeffrey,

I've been following your posts in both this and the first "Judy Wood" thread, and I'd like to thank you for your input it has set me straight on quite a few things, and given me the impression that I'm starting to think more clearly about the whole demolition issue. Thank you!

I have a few questions I'd like to run past you to see if you might have any comments to make.

First, to me the towers seem as if they may have been designed so that this sort of catastrophic collapse might be possible. Or perhaps I just don't know enough about metal frame architecture. When we build a wooden house where I come from, we rest the joists on the bearers for the most part, whereas with the wtc towers the joists were bolted flush to the sides of the bearers around the perimeter of the core, and bolted to brackets welded to the side of the perimeter framework. Could the wtc architects have chosen to opt for a "joist upon bearer" design which would then have made a catastrophic collapse like the one we saw a far less likely proposition?

And the other question I have is to do with the core of the towers. I can see how the floors outside the core might be made to collapse catastrophically with no assistance except for the weight of the falling floors above, but I can't so easily see how the core could have been so thoroughly destroyed without the assistance of demolition activity at levels below that of the initial point of failure where the planes hit. I can see how the floors outside the core could collapse to the ground in 10-15 seconds, but I can't quite get my head around the idea that the core could be stripped of its horizontal members in the same short amount of time, with only gravity as the motivator after the initial failure set the collapse in motion. Because, after all, there were lots of heavy metal beams bolted very securely to lots of other heavy metal beams in the core, but none of the joins attaching the core structure to the perimeter structure were anywhere near as strong in comparison. So I guess the question is, are you quite confident that the core could be destroyed by gravity alone, in the observed time, once the collapse had been initiated?

Thanks,
Jason.