Reply #102: The columns are the whole issue

[freedom fighter jh]

What happened to the columns?

The columns were holding up the buildings. Once the columns collapsed, the rest of the buildings had to collapse.

Just what happened to them? Did they simply buckle? If so they would have remained standing, each column in one piece. Did each column break into two pieces, each several hundred feet long? If so, they would have been visible after the collapse. After all, the towers measured only 200 feet on each side, so 94 pieces each 500 feet long would have stuck out from the rubble. Or did they break into much smaller pieces, or perhaps melt? It must have been one of these things, because these are the only possibilities left. The longest pieces of steel beams documented in the NIST report were about 40 feet long. I'm using that as a best guess for the longest pieces that were produced. It has to be a guess because, as you know, most of the steel was not left available for examination.

You are absolutely right to consider energy. What was the source of the energy that broke each of 47 massive steel columns into 30 pieces each? One would need a steel manual as well as specific knowledge about the columns to try to calculate that amount of energy. It would be equal to the force required to make each break in each column (or otherwise cause the column to break into pieces), times the distance through which that force would act, times the number of breaks per column, times 47, the number of columns. Remember that these columns were built strong enough so that together they could hold up a 110-story building, and they did that for a quarter of a century. Intuition tells me that that energy is many times the building's potential energy, the energy that was available in the fall. By my calcs, the buildings lost less than 20% of their potential energy in the fall. That 20% would have had to shatter the columns, pulverize the concrete, and accelerate the air to gusts.

Not plausible. Something that is not in the OCT destroyed the columns.