neither of the buildings you point out fully collapsed, the buildings only partially collapsed. There's a HUGE difference. There is also a HUGE difference seeing that Windsor burned for OVER 24 hours while building 7 burned for less than 6. There's also a huge difference where building 7 was twice as big than both of the buildings that you showed.... Since it completely collapsed from a fire that burned less than 6 hours is strange to me...is it honestly that hard to find it questionable that a huge building like that came down in less than 6 hours b/c of some fire?
So once again, you didn't answer my question. Why? B/c there is no steel structure before 9/11 that collapsed because of a fire at virtually free fall speeds.
http://www.interfire.org/res_file/pdf/Tr-097.pdf
On the morning of January 28, 1997, in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
township of Strasburg, a fire caused the collapse of the state-of-the-art, seven year old Sight
and Sound Theater and resulted in structural damage to most of the connecting buildings.
The theater was a total loss, valued at over $15 million.
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/txt/publications/tr-049.txt
This is again with no existing structural damage prior to the fire....
All interior firefighting efforts were halted after almost 11 hours of uninterrupted fire in the building. Consultation with a structural engineer and structural damage observed by units operating in the building led to the belief that there was a
possibility of a pancake structural collapse of the fire damaged
floors
There was the McCormick place fire in Chicago in the 60s where a steel frame building having suffered no other structural damage collapsed completely within 3 hours due to fire.
Here's another where there was existing structural damage and there was concern for further structural collapse due to fire...
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/TR-068.pdf
Here's a steel frame school that the roof collapsed within 20 minutes of the start of the fire...
http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-135.pdf
Should I go on or will you admit that steel construction is entirely susceptible to collapse due to fire?
You say show me a steel building that collapsed at "free fall speeds" (which is in an off itself odd since air resistance being negligible at those velocities I'm not sure how else a building would fall).
Well I say
1. Show me a steel frame building at least 40 floors high.
2. Is the size of a city block
3. Is a "tube in tube" structural design
4. The core columns linking the structure to the foundation have been damaged
5. Had other structural damage to the out tube on top of #4
6. Had a lower floor fire that burned for at least 6 hours
7. Had load bearing trusses that were bolted together with 5/8" bolts.
if you want to draw a comparison with another collapse thats what you've got to find. Find that and show differences in the collapse and then you'll have something, until then its drawing false analogies and just simply not having the background to understand what you're looking at. Not everything in science and engineering happens like you intuitively think it should.
Hell I can show you pipe flow (fluid in a pipe) examples where after a certain point, the fluid accelerates itself without outside intervention by converting internal energy into kinetic energy. Is that something you would intuitively say would happen? Probably not but thats what the mathematical description of the fluid properties says and thats what we see when we conduct experiments.
The trap you're falling into is thinking this is a simple cause/effect when its far from it. There are countless factors that govern exactly how any complex structure is going to behave when its taken beyond its load bearing or damage tolerance limits.
Well Building A didn't collapse like WTC 7. Yeah and? Building A wasn't built exactly like WTC7, didn't use the same load bearing paths, didn't have the same damage, fire wasn't in the same location, etc etc etc.
A little search will reveal that there are quite a few architects and structural engineers that don't believe the story as it has been sold to the american people.
Then there are quite a few architects and structural engineers who aren't competent to do their job and probably need to have their license revoked. Everything I learned in the 2 years out of 5 I spent in the classroom learning structural design and analysis jives 100% with the descriptions of the collapse.
