I’m sorry for the longish hiatus (curse you, Civilization 5!), but in lieu of my own work here, I’d like to present a recent excellent post by Carlos at the James Randi Educational Foundation:
Consider these two statements:
A – Fire can bring down steel structures buildings like Twin Towers.
B – The Twin Towers collapse was a controlled demolition.
It is quite possible to believe that both statements are true. If you believe that “B” is true you don’t need to believe “A”is false.
In other words, if you believe there is sufficient evidence that explosives were used in the towers, it does not mean that you have to believe that the collapse due to fire would be impossible.
So what are the arguments that support the claim that fire can not bring down buildings?
Before answering, let me remind you some facts:
1 – Steel does lose strength at high temperatures.
2 – The fire protection were removed from the truss on the floors where the impact occurred.
3 – It is not necessary to remove all fire protection to make the structure susceptible to fire.
4 – The failure of a structural element can cause the failure of others.
5 – Progressive collapse does exist.
This… is not about evidence of controlled demolition nor NIST findings. It’s about arguments that support the claim the towers (WTC 1 and 2) couldn’t have collapsed due to fire.
There is, of course, no reason to have to believe a simple collapse of a steel-framed building is not possible. This is what AE911Truth and Richard Gage have stated, though. It’s amazing to me that they consider it such.
But for the reasons Carlos puts forward, there’s no reason not to consider unassisted collapse a viable option. It is possible for buildings to collapse due to fire alone. That one has not before 9/11 or after is not evidence for the opposite, but evidence for the power of the social safety net that exists throughout cities that build such large buildings. Between design codes and firefighting operations, humanity has only let three buildings slip past the many safeguards meant to keep them up.
Indeed, the unassisted collapse of these buildings has already led to better design and resulted in at least one building being saved during a catastrophic fire –the Mandarin Oriental. The designers of that building had conducted an extensive internal study of the WTC collapses, and then designed the Beijing building from the lessons learned. However, AE911Truth uses this victory, a genuine instance of humanity learning from tragic mistake, to say the tragic mistake could not have been a mistake.
They could not be more wrong.
