Steel Away

I noticed this while reading David Ray Griffin's Omissions & Deceptions last night, but it also gets highlighted in Loose Change a little after 36:05:

200,000 tons of steel shatters into sections no longer than a couple feet long.

This is of course ridiculous, as this picture shows:



It may be just part and parcel of the Loosers' penchant for exaggeration, like the "untouched" cable spools in front of the Pentagon. Griffin's a little more cautious (Chapter 2):

7. Most of the steel beams and columns came down in sections that were no more than 30 feet long.

Of course, the implication is that the building was demolished so that the steel beams and columns would be no more than 30 feet long. But what does this mean? Well, let's go back to the 47 steel columns that were at the core of the building. These columns extended the full height of the structure.

The two towers were about 1360 feet high each (1368 for Tower One, 1360 for Tower Two). So obviously the 47 steel columns were all 1360 feet or more (obviously slightly more since there were basement levels). If we divide that by the 110 stories in each tower we can see that the average height per floor was about 12 feet.

This means that in order to demolish the WTC towers so that most of the steel beams came down in sections that were no more than 30 feet long, they would have had to set charges every 2.5 stories, or on approximately 44 of the floors. Times 47 columns equals no less than 2,068 charges.

But even that won't do the job. Why? Because the buildings crumbled from the outside, not the inside. Some Truthers claim that the core should have survived. So the outside columns would have to be set with charges, once again on about 44 of the floors of each building, on about 240 columns this time.

But there's an even easier way to prove that the steel did not come down in sections "no longer than a couple feet long" (Loose Change) or "30 feet long" (Griffin). And in a delicious bit of irony, we can prove their mistake thanks to the efforts of another conspiracy theorist.

9-11 Eyewitness had a great view to film the collapse of the North Tower. The building first falls at 37:57, and at about 38:24 we see this:



It's not the greatest image, but it's much more obvious in the video footage. If you look in the middle of the picture there are several dark vertical shadows behind the smoke. These are clearly steel columns (like I say, it's much more obvious in the movie). As we watch, they teeter, then fall towards the building in the foreground (which I believe is World Financial Center 3). The cameraman even mentions that piece (he calls it a spire) at about 55:20.

But those steel columns appear to be at least 50 stories high, or about 600 feet. So even if those columns ended up in neat pieces 30 feet long, it was not due to "Controlled Demolition" because those columns were still intact after the building fell. I suspect that if they did indeed end up in pieces 30 feet long it was because that's where the columns were welded together and that they broke into those sections from the shock of the fall (or to be more precise, the shock of the landing). Or, far more likely, that they were cut into those sections post collapse so that the steel could be transported.

This is one of those little things that bugs me about the CT crowd. Despite the enormous destruction of 9-11, they always want to believe that the plotters wanted to limit the damage, by making the buildings collapse neatly (a farcical notion) into easily transported debris. It's like they believe President Bush said something like, "Okay, you can bring down the towers and Building 7, but I don't want any more damage than that. And let's hit the Pentagon on the side that was recently reinforced."