911 Conspiracy?

[spongebob]

here is just some info if anybody is interested.
http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/latest/wtc.php

plus theres a ton of links at the bottom.

 

[spongebob]

It's all been speculation and circular logic up to this point.

and the conspiracy theories arent? come on now.

 

[spongebob]

This is misinformation. The WTC was designed specifically to withstand the impact of a 707.

And we're not even touching on the engineered fail safes implemented in the WTC design to withstand a 707 collision with the towers - a commercial airliner that’s only slightly smaller then the 767's.

It's all been speculation and circular logic up to this point.

this is leslie robertson, ofcourse his comments are reflective of his sadness and expected self blame of TWC collapse. but this is the structural egineer responsible for the technical design of TWC.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/sept11_towers020912.html

i think what he is conveying is that they designed a building in a way that had never been done before using columns inside in the middle and on the outer skin to achieve extra large spaces. his comments to suggest that if the building had been built like all other skyscrapers at the time it more than likely would have survived. he is almost admitting that the design led to its failure.

 

[buddy28]

and the conspiracy theories arent? come on now.

Who said I wasn't referring to both conspiracy theorists and proponents of the 'official' explanation? Note the word 'all'.

 

[spongebob]

Who said I wasn't referring to both conspiracy theorists and proponents of the 'official' explanation? Note the word 'all'.

ok, you got me. lol.

this link i posted earlier clearly shows the south tower toppeling at the higher floors. it took the side impact. whereas tower one took the direct hit and failed inward and downward.

http://www.civil.usyd.edu.au/latest/wtc.php

 

[spongebob]

Even in the basement! Then there's the pools of molten steel in the sub basement that were created from 'carpet' and office material that allegedly jettisoned down the elevator shafts to the sub floors whereupon it caught fire and smoldered in an oxygen deprived environment creating and sustaining temperatures hot enough to liquefy steel for over a month! Uh.. ok.
.

something i just thought of regarding this. like i said the amount of heat(temp) is not the only factor, time plays a role. how long the fire was at the bottom. i can fully cook an egg at 212F in ten minutes and i can also cook that egg at 180F, it will just take longer.

 

[buddy28]

5. again, it could have been 140mi/hr hurricane, that is lateral movements your are referring to when the designers state it was designed for a hit from a 707. it doesn’t factor in fire.

Hey. No, this isn't correct. The towers were designed specifically to withstand a direct impact from a 707 commercial jet liner - not the kinetic equivalent:

"The structural engineer who designed the towers said as recently as last week that their steel columns could remain standing if they were hit by a 707.

Les Robertson, the Trade Center�s structural engineer, spoke last week at a conference on tall buildings in Frankfurt, Germany. He was asked during a question-and-answer session what he had done to protect the twin towers from terrorist attacks, according to Joseph Burns, a principal at the Chicago firm of Thornton-Thomasetti Engineers.

Burns, who was present, said that Robertson said of the center, 'I designed it for a 707 to smash into it."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-010911kamin-towers.story


Even more interesting is the New York Times report:

"After the 1993 trade center bombing, one of the engineers who worked on the towers' structural design in the 1960's even claimed that each one had been built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded, fully fueled Boeing 707, then the heaviest aircraft flying...

The engineer who said after the 1993 bombing that the towers could withstand a Boeing 707, Leslie Robertson, was not available for comment yesterday, a partner at his Manhattan firm said."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40715FC395C0C718DDDA00894D9404482


Further, Aaron Swirsky, one of the 14 architects on the WTC design team,
was in disbelief the towers collapsed after being impacted by the jetliners on sept 11th:

http://www.jpradio.com/Archive/2001/09/11/asx/010911swi.asx



But here is where it falls apart. The WTC architects contradict earlier statements made by Robertson and Aaron Swirsky and back peddle - in the case of Robertson - on some of their own statements:

"Engineers from the firm said eight years ago that the World Trade Center was designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 crash, because they knew a smaller plane had crashed into the Empire State Building. But even then, they warned that it wouldn't be safe from a subsequent fire.

"Our analysis indicated that the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel [from the jet] would dump into the building," lead structural engineer John Skilling told The Seattle Times in 1993. "There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed."

Skilling's scenario proved to be remarkably prescient.

"We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings," he told the Times.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/custom/attack/bal-te.architect13sep13,0,4261351.story


Robertson contradicts his original statement to the New York Times here:

"He [Robertson] also designed the buildings so they would be able to absorb the impact of a jet airliner: "I'm sort of a methodical person, so I listed all the bad things that could happen to a building and tried to design for them. I thought of the B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, that hit the Empire State Building in 1945. The 707 was the state-of-the-art airplane then, and the Port Authority was quite amenable to considering the effect of an airplane as a design criterion. We studied it, and designed for the impact of such an aircraft. The next step would have been to think about the fuel load, and I've been searching my brain, but I don't know what happened there, whether in all our testing we thought about it. Now we know what happens-it explodes. I don't know if we considered the fire damage that would cause. Anyway, the architect, not the engineer, is the one who specifies the fire system."
http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/html/article_11092001.html

From the horses mouth:

"The two towers were the first structures outside of the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airliner, the Boeing 707. It was assumed that the jetliner would be lost in the fog, seeking to land at JFK or at Newark. To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires."
http://www.nae.edu/nae/naehome.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument


It's difficult to tease it all apart and get to the bottom of it. One on hand, you've got the chief structural engineer boasting the towers could withstand
the impact from a fully fueled 707 and a architectural team member in disbelief the towers collapsed citing they had been designed for similar occurrences. Then you've got other contradicting accounts, even from the chief structural engineer himself, doing a 180 and expressing doubts about the towers ability to handle the fuel fires from a 707 collision he claimed the structure was originally designed to withstand.

To really understand it, Robertson et al would have to spill their guts in
regards to his NYT statement. What exactly did he mean by "impact"? Was he just referring to the net kinetic energy released
during the initial collision? Or by 'impact' did he also consider the ensuing
secondary fire damage too? Again, all coming back to semantics and speculation.

One would think if they took the trouble to consider the effect of a fully
fueled 707 colliding into the towers, they would have predicted the secondary
fires resulting from such an event and planned accordingly - just like in the 1945 Empire State-B-52 collision Robertson personally cited as a primary historical precedent for boosting the WTC structural integrity during pre-construction.

I guess we will never know.

At this point, I’m signing off the thread. I'd like to continue the okc stuff later, but as far as the wtc collapse theory goes, it's a crap shot. Pure conjecture that isn't going to lead us anywhere.

But it was fun while it lasted

 

[buddy28]

something i just thought of regarding this. like i said the amount of heat(temp) is not the only factor, time plays a role. how long the fire was at the bottom. i can fully cook an egg at 212F in ten minutes and i can also cook that egg at 180F, it will just take longer.

One more for the road!

I know what you're saying. But it doesn't jive considering the massive piles of steel extending to the subbasement would have essientially created the worlds biggest heat sink - the intertwined steel packed together would draw away the basement heat via conduction preventing the occurance of hot spots.

 

[Forge]

Spongebob, to hell with the towers themselves for now, lets look at events surrounding 9-11:

2) There is incontrovertible evidence that the US Air Force all across the country was comprehensively "stood down" on the morning of September 11th. Routine security measures, normally in place, which may well have been able to prevent the attacks, or reduce their impact, were suspended for one hour while the attacks were in progress, and re-instated once they were over.

3) Neither the Joint Chief of Staff, the Secretary of Defense nor the President of the United States acted according to well established emergency protocols .... Why was the President permitted by the Secret Service to remain in the Sarasota elementary school? At 9.05, nineteen minutes after the first attack and two minutes after the second attack on the WTC, Andrew Card, the presidential chief of staff, whispered something in President Bush’s ear. The president did not react as if he was interested in trying to do something about the situation. He did not leave the school, convene an emergency meeting, consult with anybody, or intervene in any way, to ensure that the Air Force completed it’s job. He did not even mention the extraordinary events occurring in New York, but simply continued with the reading class.

4...There are several cases damaging to the credibility of the official accounts of 9/11. But the U.S. response to Mohamed Atta, the alleged lead hijacker, is most extraordinary. The FBI had been monitoring Atta’s movements for several months in 2000. According to PBS’ Frontlines, the Immigration and Naturalization Service failed to stop Atta from entering the U.S. three times on a tourist visa in 2001, even though officials knew the visa had expired in 2000, and that Atta had violated its terms by taking flight lessons. Furthermore, Atta had already been implicated in a terrorist bombing in Israel, with the information passed on to the United States before he was first issued his tourist visa.

5) How did many of the hijackers receive clearance for training at secure U.S. military and intelligence facilities, and for what purposes? Many of the terrorist pilots received their initial training in Venice, Florida at one of two flight schools of highly questionable credibility and with approval of US intelligence. Mohamed Atta had attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama; Abdulaziz Alomari had attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas; Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

7) At a time when the U.S. intelligence community was on alert for an imminent Al-Qaeda attack, the Bush Administration made it easier for Saudi visitors to come to the U.S. under a program called U.S. Visa Express, introduced four months before September 11th. Michael Springmann, former head of the Visa Bureau at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia said that he was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Departtment officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. His complaints to higher authorities at several agencies went unanswered. In a CBC interview, he indicated that the CIA was indeed complicit in the attacks.

16) Revelations of profits made by insider trading relating to the 9/11 attacks, point to the top levels of US business and the CIA... Only three trading days before September 11th, shares of American and United Airlines -- the companies whose planes were hijacked in the attacks on New York and Washington -- were massively "sold short" by investors. Executive CIA Director AB "Buzzy" Krongard was one of those who profited from the deal. The names of the other investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million in profit taking remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account. No similar trading in other airlines occurred on the Chicago exchange in the day immediately preceding Black Tuesday. There were also unusual trades on several companies occupying the World Trade Center, including Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., and Merrill Lynch & Co.

17) Selected persons were told not to fly that day. Newsweek reported that on September 10th, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns." Why was that same information not made available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft?

Can't you admit that all of this is extremely suspicious? The air force standdown ALONE is proof enough that the government knew and aided the attacks. The insider trading, and by a CIA director no less, is just icing on the cake.

 

[spongebob]

Hey. No, this isn't correct. The towers were designed specifically to withstand a direct impact from a 707 commercial jet liner - not the kinetic equivalent:

"The structural engineer who designed the towers said as recently as last week that their steel columns could remain standing if they were hit by a 707.

Les Robertson, the Trade Center�s structural engineer, spoke last week at a conference on tall buildings in Frankfurt, Germany. He was asked during a question-and-answer session what he had done to protect the twin towers from terrorist attacks, according to Joseph Burns, a principal at the Chicago firm of Thornton-Thomasetti Engineers.

Burns, who was present, said that Robertson said of the center, 'I designed it for a 707 to smash into it."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-010911kamin-towers.story


Even more interesting is the New York Times report:

"After the 1993 trade center bombing, one of the engineers who worked on the towers' structural design in the 1960's even claimed that each one had been built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded, fully fueled Boeing 707, then the heaviest aircraft flying...

The engineer who said after the 1993 bombing that the towers could withstand a Boeing 707, Leslie Robertson, was not available for comment yesterday, a partner at his Manhattan firm said."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40715FC395C0C718DDDA00894D9404482


Further, Aaron Swirsky, one of the 14 architects on the WTC design team,
was in disbelief the towers collapsed after being impacted by the jetliners on sept 11th:

http://www.jpradio.com/Archive/2001/09/11/asx/010911swi.asx



But here is where it falls apart. The WTC architects contradict earlier statements made by Robertson and Aaron Swirsky and back peddle - in the case of Robertson - on some of their own statements:

"Engineers from the firm said eight years ago that the World Trade Center was designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 crash, because they knew a smaller plane had crashed into the Empire State Building. But even then, they warned that it wouldn't be safe from a subsequent fire.

"Our analysis indicated that the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel [from the jet] would dump into the building," lead structural engineer John Skilling told The Seattle Times in 1993. "There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed."

Skilling's scenario proved to be remarkably prescient.

"We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings," he told the Times.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/custom/attack/bal-te.architect13sep13,0,4261351.story


Robertson contradicts his original statement to the New York Times here:

"He [Robertson] also designed the buildings so they would be able to absorb the impact of a jet airliner: "I'm sort of a methodical person, so I listed all the bad things that could happen to a building and tried to design for them. I thought of the B-25 bomber, lost in the fog, that hit the Empire State Building in 1945. The 707 was the state-of-the-art airplane then, and the Port Authority was quite amenable to considering the effect of an airplane as a design criterion. We studied it, and designed for the impact of such an aircraft. The next step would have been to think about the fuel load, and I've been searching my brain, but I don't know what happened there, whether in all our testing we thought about it. Now we know what happens-it explodes. I don't know if we considered the fire damage that would cause. Anyway, the architect, not the engineer, is the one who specifies the fire system."
http://www.skyscrapersafety.org/html/article_11092001.html

From the horses mouth:

"The two towers were the first structures outside of the military and nuclear industries designed to resist the impact of a jet airliner, the Boeing 707. It was assumed that the jetliner would be lost in the fog, seeking to land at JFK or at Newark. To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires."
http://www.nae.edu/nae/naehome.nsf/weblinks/CGOZ-58NLCB?OpenDocument


It's difficult to tease it all apart and get to the bottom of it. One on hand, you've got the chief structural engineer boasting the towers could withstand
the impact from a fully fueled 707 and a architectural team member in disbelief the towers collapsed citing they had been designed for similar occurrences. Then you've got other contradicting accounts, even from the chief structural engineer himself, doing a 180 and expressing doubts about the towers ability to handle the fuel fires from a 707 collision he claimed the structure was originally designed to withstand.

To really understand it, Robertson et al would have to spill their guts in
regards to his NYT statement. What exactly did he mean by "impact"? Was he just referring to the net kinetic energy released
during the initial collision? Or by 'impact' did he also consider the ensuing
secondary fire damage too? Again, all coming back to semantics and speculation.

One would think if they took the trouble to consider the effect of a fully
fueled 707 colliding into the towers, they would have predicted the secondary
fires resulting from such an event and planned accordingly - just like in the 1945 Empire State-B-52 collision Robertson personally cited as a primary historical precedent for boosting the WTC structural integrity during pre-construction.

I guess we will never know.

At this point, I’m signing off the thread. I'd like to continue the okc stuff later, but as far as the wtc collapse theory goes, it's a crap shot. Pure conjecture that isn't going to lead us anywhere.

But it was fun while it lasted

excellent point and good finds, i figured there would be some statements from the build team that would be somewhat contradictory.

i think in the end they will find that the apperent insufficient insulation will be a strong factor. for some reason it was only about 50% of what code requires. the NY port authority had waivers on it i believe. the south tower which had the least amount of fire retarded collapsed first although it was hit last. there is an engineer(and many others backing him) that claims the fire retarded was a major factor. whether it was knocked off or insufficent.

im signing off for now as well, im going get back to my remodel. but i will continue on TWC collapse exclusively.

peace.