Posted on 08/26/2003 5:40:10 PM PDT by sinkspur
Burn Rate of WTC Cubicles Key to Probe
GAITHERSBURG, Md. (AP) - Computers and other office equipment fueled the World Trade Center fires long after the jets that crashed into the towers incinerated, suggesting a need to consider new fire codes for modern office buildings, federal investigators said Tuesday.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is investigating the cause of the buildings' collapse on Sept. 11, 2001, recreated the World Trade Center fire in a mock cubicle.
Investigators discovered that while the jet fuel and the plane's contents burned up in a matter of minutes, the contents of the buildings, including the many office cubicles on the upper floors, continued burning until the structures collapsed.
NIST, a part of the Commerce Department, is conducting a two-year inquiry to create a computer model of the tragedy. The goal is to understand exactly how the fire evolved in the towers, and the specific factors that contributed to their collapse.
``What we are ultimately trying to model is the spread of a fire through the building,'' said Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST investigation.
Sunder showed a video of the fire test to a group of advisers on Tuesday, the first of a two-day meeting to discuss the status of the investigation.
The World Trade Center fires have to be compared with previous tests for office fires done in decades past so NIST can suggest revisions to fire and building codes, Sunder said.
Building and fire codes in many cities are based on tests conducted on older types of offices, where computers and similar technology were less common, he said.
NIST's mock cubicle was patterned after the offices of Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., a consulting and risk management company which leased eight floors near the top of Tower One. They lost 295 employees and consultants.
The tests showed the fire consumed more than 300 pounds of matter in a single cubicle in just a half hour. Fire experts recreated a cubicle with a computer, a desk full of books and papers, and videotaped the fire spreading through the cubicle from a nearby heat source.
A key remaining question, Sunder said, is ``whether the suspension ceiling was intact or whether it fell'' from the impact of the plane. If the ceilings fell, they would have had a dampening effect on the spread of the fire through offices.
Researchers at the University of Buffalo are currently conducting tests to determine how much shaking those ceilings could have taken before falling.
Investigators also plan to begin next month a program of interviewing survivors of the attacks, in order to better understand the evacuation process, and be able to make improvements in things like stairwell size and evacuation patterns.
NIST is also examining the fireproofing between floor supports, the steel exoskeleton that held up the building, and emergency personnel response to the disaster.
To me, it suggests a need to kill everybody who wants to crash a stolen jet into an office building.
NIST is also examining ... emergency personnel response to the disaster.I hope the NIST looks at this DVD^. It has, to my knowledge, the only video taken inside the north tower with the first-responding firefighters as well as the only video of the first plane crashing into the north tower.
Everybody should watch this DVD. It is an incredible account of that Tuesday morning. A great way to "Never, ever forget!"
That would be a good start.
The article states:
Investigators discovered that while the jet fuel and the plane's contents burned up in a matter of minutes, the contents of the buildings, including the many office cubicles on the upper floors, continued burning until the structures collapsed.
If you know that the floor supports failed, you should know that they were weakened by the fire. From there, I don't think it was that difficult to figure out that if the fires had burned out in a matter of minutes, there wouldn't have been a prolonged fire to weaken the floor supports and then there wouldn't have been a collapse.
FYI, according to the PBS/Nova episode about the collapse, the North Tower collapsed from the core, which suggests a mechanism other than floor truss failure as the cause of that tower's collapse. In any event, I think it is safe to assume that if the towers hadn't kept burning, they could have remained standing and everyone could have gotten out who wasn't killed by the impact (also FYI, a substantial number of people were probably killed instantly -- or nearly so -- in the South Tower Sky Lobby as they waited for an elevator to return to their offices after being assured it was safe to do so after the first tower was hit).
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