Reply #3: A couple of thoughts

[sgsmith]

1)a)
I think you're confusing the strength of the perimeter wall and central steel columns with the strength of the floor subsystem. The floor subsystem only has to support the live and dead loads of what is on that floor. Plus, there is some load transferred from the perimeter wall to the central columns due to wind loads on the exterior. But, the floor essentially supported only itself and what was put on the floor. Assuming that the pancake theory is correct, if one floor collapses on a lower floor, that lower floor has it's load doubled (approximately). If that extra load were to cause the two floors to collapse on a third floor, that floor is carrying three times its expected load. That logic shouldn't change if the collapse was on the 90th or 60th floor.

1)b)
What does the failed collapse of a CONCRETE building have to do with the collapse of a STEEL building. Plus, there is no information that shows what the internal structure of the feed mill is. I really doubt that it was an open truss span within the exterior wall. Probably concrete columns and beams or prestressed concrete. I don't know what a feed mill looks like inside, but I imagine that it consists of concrete tubes to hold whatever grain is stored. Certainly nothing like the construction of WTC 1 or 2.

2)
What downward momentum? You talking about Gravity? Most things fall pretty quickly if dropped from any height.

Realistically, we don't know what specifications the WTC 1 & 2 towers were built to. No numbers have been provided for figuring out loads and failure points.

Re: the photo of the collapsed building in Pakistan. Again, you're trying to build a fallacious argument. The concrete construction is nothing like what's been documented for the WTC buildings. Since the only documented use of concrete in WTC 1 & 2 is the lightweight mix used on the floors, which was only a couple of inches thick, you can't compare thick reinforced structures with thin, unreinforced floors.


The biggest problem that I have with everyone's arguments for and against controlled demolition is that we don't have any evidence of what happened within WTC 1 & 2. My belief is that there was some sort of failures that happened some time before the obvious collapse was triggered. I can easily see floors sagging down on lower floors and superloading the floors for quite a while until a sudden failure occurs. The other problem I have is that all of the material failures that I've seen documented (things like concrete cores being compressed, or beams being overloaded or aircraft wings being stressed), the structure looks pretty good right up to the point of failure. Then there is a sudden release of the structure's integrity, accompanied by a loud bang.