Reply #149: it's the nature of engineering practice

[paxamor]

>I'm no expert in construction or fires, but you've got to face the fact that all those buildings contain all that isulation (which costs real money to install) for a real reason. That reason is that steel buildings are prone to collapse if the steel is overheated by fire.

That's actually a very good question.
(Even though your repetition that steel buildings are prone to collapse due to fire is tiresome).
The answer has to do with the way engineers work.
Engineering involves uncertainty. Since you can never know exactly what stresses a structure will sustain --
What if a building were hit by a huge fire, earthquake, and hurricane at the same time, while it was filled to capacity?
Those are the kinds of scenarios that engineers think of.
Their job is to anticipate unimaginably terrible combinations of events.
For example, the designers of the WTC anticipated they would be hit by fully fueled 707-340s.
(that's over twice the fuel that the 767s were carrying).

So that's why the steel frames of buildings are insulated even though fires have never caused one such building to collapse.

This is very different from the way most people approach problems.
Engineers use redundant design and create structures that are many times as strong and survivable as they need to be.

It's because the cost of failure is so high.