Lots of Kooks Headed Back to College For Engineering Degree

Just kidding. But that doesn't mean they can't play a structural engineer on the internet.

Former Air America and current Nova-M radio host Mike Malloy:

Well, a report by engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in suburban Washington was released today and the cause was . . . a fire 400 feet away. Yeah. There you go. A fire up the street a ways. Got it. Wow. So simple. How'd I miss it? I'm embarrassed. According to the New York Times today " . . . investigators determined that debris from the falling twin towers ignited fires on at least 10 floors at 7 World Trade Center, which was about 400 feet north of where the city’s two tallest buildings once stood. The blazes burned out of control for six hours, as the city fire department, devastated by the collapse of the twin towers, abandoned its efforts to extinguish the fire, and the sprinkler system was incapacitated."

Alex Floum:

Because NIST claims that only column 79 was destroyed in the beginning of the collapse sequence, and because the same side of the building in which 79 was located was the bigger, heavier side of the building, two different influences should have ensured that the building tilted toward the bigger end.

Therefore, high school physics shows that - if column 79 had collapsed and explosives did not take out all of the other support columns at once - building 7 should have tipped towards one side.

Well, hey, if high school physics shows it, why not get the physics professor to opine on the topic?