Improbable Collapse Part II

Watched the second ten minutes this time. Some thoughts:

Berger spends the first three minutes or so of this section with some 9-11 Deniers on the march with their retarded "9-11 Was An Inside Job" sign. Then we get a short clip on the construction of the towers. Finally at about 12:30 Steven Jones appears.

He explains that his first reaction was that there must be other examples of fires bringing down steel buildings, but there were no other examples. As usual, the Deniers ignore the impact of the planes and attribute the collapse of the towers solely to the fires. He brings up the Windsor Tower fire in Madrid, and again as usual, he ignores the fact that the steel portion of that building did collapse (as is quite visible in the film clip); it's only the concrete core that survived as you can see in this screen capture:



We get the usual superlatives about how well-designed the buildings were. I'm sure they were, given the enormous expense involved, but of course the intent of telling us this is to increase the "mystery". We get the usual nonsense claim that Underwriter's Laboratories certified the structural steel in the WTC; in fact they did no such thing. We're told that Ryan was fired for "publicly questioning the NIST draft report released in October of 2004. Of course he was actually fired for making false claims in a letter:

But his allegations drew a sharp rebuke from UL, which said Ryan wrote the letter "without UL's knowledge or authorization." The company told The Tribune "there is no evidence" that any firm tested the materials used to build the towers.

"UL does not certify structural steel, such as the beams, columns and trusses used in World Trade Center," said Paul M. Baker, the company's spokesman.

Ryan was fired, Baker said, because he "expressed his own opinions as though they were institutional opinions and beliefs of UL."

"The contents of the argument itself are spurious at best, and frankly, they're just wrong," Baker said.

There is the usual claim that the buildings were designed to handle the crash of a plane into them. Again, true enough, but the assumption was that this would be a plane flying at a relatively low speed, not the 500+MPH that AA 11 and UA 175 are estimated to have been traveling at when they impacted. The difference is significant. In addition, there is the usual claim that the calculations accounted for the jet fuel, but this has specifically been denied by Leslie Robertson, the structural engineer who designed the building, in a TV broadcast in 2002.

James Hoffman opines on the difference in the cruising speed of the 707 and the 767, without bothering to note (again) that the assumption was that any plane that hit the WTC would be lost in fog or darkness and would be traveling well below its cruising speed.