This Tower construction foto shows a floor truss spanning the space between the interior spine and a 'trident' of facial columns.
Office furniture and cubicle partitions was their only load, so they were relatively lightweight. It certainly doesn't take an architect or a metallurgist to realize that ANYTHING could have happened to these trusses, mere spider webs compared to the massive vertical elements, without pulling the verticals down. They would simply have sheared the 3/4" bolts and thin welds holding them to the spine and facia.
Suppose a
section of floor had collapsed. Since each floor was designed to support itself plus an
additional load, each floor in turn would have collapsed under the area it could not withstand,
but some portion which had less of an impact would have remained. Each successively lower floor
would thus show less damage, until at some point the cascade would have come to rest. Without an
external source of energy applied to the collapsing system, each floor would not have AMPLIFIED
the damage to successive floors.
Indeed, this is what happened in the case of WTC3, the Marriott Hotel. It is one of only two buildings in the complex we can tentatively say were not wired for demolition, since many of the windows remained intact, not blown out as in the case of WTC6. The other building that was possibly left unwired was WTC4. The need to wire that building for complete destruction was artfully abrogated by having it crushed by the remains of the tipping cap of the South Tower, whether they arrived on its roof in one piece or not.
<-- From page 50 of AFTERMATH
Huge chunks of steel raining down from far above, including central core columns (arrow in the photo at left), pile-drove the Marriott into collapse, but in the photo you can see the collapse attenuated itself to a halt at least three floors above street level.
So, what became of these Twin Tower floor trusses in the collapses? Although, as we all know by now, the cement of the floor pans was blasted to fine powder, the remains of the steel trusses themselves infested The Pile, although probably not in a form identifiable by the casual bystander.
This is because, rather than scrunched up, as one would expect in a pancake collapse, the zig-zag rods that lent the triangularized rigidity to the structures (shown by arrows in the photograph below) were S T R E T C H E D O U T. Rather than collapsing floors pulling in the exterior columns, the explosions blowing out the exterior walls from the core pulled the trusses apart like so many strings of taffee.
From page 180 of the highly-recommended AFTERMATH
This in itself is forensic evidence of controlled demolition.
| What became of the core? If controlled demolition is off the table, it should be simply amazing
that the strongest parts of the Twin Towers, the core, should be the part that ended up as a hole in the ground.
Many of the vertical column segments ended up OUTSIDE the periphery of the towers.
The strongest parts of the core, the strongest of the strong, were the four stoutly diagonally-braced stanchions in the corners, one of which is circled at right. |
 |
1) See if you can find, in all the pictures you see of The Pile, a single diagonally-braced piece of steel that represents the strongest of the strong parts of the Twin Towers. 2) DO THE MATH: Each tower contained about 500,000 tons of steel, or about 4,500 tons per floor and the Boeing 767 carried about 23980 gallons of fuel fully loaded, half of which can be assumed to have burned up in the immense crash fireball. If all of the fuel remaining burned on one floor, that would have been 1516.41 pounds of steel per gallon of fuel, or 11.85 lbs of steel per ounce of fuel. Collect about 12 lbs of steel (the weight of a heavy bowling ball) and pour one ounce of kerosene into a cup under it and light it. See if the steel even gets warm to the touch, let alone melts. |