Posted on 04/29/2002 12:09:14 PM PDT by Timesink
Just a note to let everyone know that Nova will be airing this program on the WTC and forensic engineering tomorrow evening. It's supposed to air at 8 pm Eastern, but PBS being what it is, your local station could run it at any time of the day or not.
In any event, the web site is already up and has some interesting information on it.
It's definitely suspect if PBS is doing it. I make it a point to miss most of their documentarys, having watched one concerning Christianity and the Bible.
It goes to show that the For-Profit networks got off their butts faster and investigated the science and engineering of the issue much earlier than the PBS crowd. They understood that people out "there" were curious about why the buildings came crashing down and got their show on TV before the Big Bird set. The only reason why there's such a big commotion right now about the PBS documentary is that they have so many supporters in the media at large.
Discovery Channel, TLC, History Channel, Animal Planet and all the kiddie networks are all making money hand over fist in programming territory that used to be the sole domain of PBS before the advent of the cable box. Why? PBS didn't care about the viewer's interests - just their own agenda.
The only thing I'm surprised about is that this show about the WTC is not being aired during one of their fundraising drives. Call me a cynic.
jriemer
The PBS special brought up the point that the airplane's impact disabled all sprinkler systems above the crash.
According to the NOVA story tonight, replete with good animations, the blast of the impacting jets blew away the foam substitute. It's unclear to me whether asbestos would have been as easily blown away. Maybe it would have, in which case the point's moot.
Well, I don't know how a building could be redesigned to be terrorist-proofed against hijacked aircraft, but perhaps instead of the building design being the issue, maybe tall structures should be armed with surface to air missiles that could take out a 767 or 747 on a head-on impact course.
The facdt that they didn't mention the fact that asbestos was used on the lower floors and that they focused on the "insulation" being blown off of the structural members makes me very, very suspicious. Would asbestos have reacted in the same way?
The program only mentioned the subject of sprinkler systems in a couple of sentences about the first tower struck. It stated since the aircraft impacted the core, the sprinkler system was affected.
The program made the point that the core on the second tower was not directly affected by impact, and there was no mention of the sprinkler system in the second tower struck.
Ironically, in the FEMA report, one of the primary reasons for the collapse was the fact the sprinkler system had been disabled, yet in an hour long program, Nova mentions the sprinkler systems for less than 15 seconds.
No mention of the evidence presented in a Memphis court that days before 9-11 Middle Eastern terrorists, the Hammad cousins, were working on the sprinkler systems at the WTC.
see www.gomemphis.com
search for Hammad articles for the complete picture
March 29, 2002
Towers Withstood Impact, but Fell to Fire, Report Says
By JAMES GLANZ and ERIC LIPTON
Fireproofing, sprinkler systems and the water supply for hoses were all disabled in the twin towers on Sept. 11 in the face of a blaze so intense that it drove temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees and generated heat equivalent to the energy output of a nuclear power plant, a federal report on how the towers fell has concluded.
The fire, combined with these failures, brought down the towers even after they had shown surprising and lifesaving resiliency to massive structural damage caused by the impact of two hijacked airliners, the report says.
I noticed that that went unmentioned, as well.
But in the world of pc -- political correctness -- asbestos = bad, bad, bad. Bad, asbestos, bad!
(Well, it is bad if you breathe its loose fibers, but what the heck, you can seal it off so its fibers won't be inhaled. Unless it'd been removed from the lower half of the buildings, that means that for 30 years people worked in the lower halves in an environment with asbestos nearby.)
What I found interesting, and something I hadn't previously known, was that 4 people from above the impact areas managed to make it down to safety. Also, that 1 stairwell in the South Tower was apparently intact enough above the floors blasted out and on fire, so that if more people had known about it -- a communications problem -- they might have been able to get out.
Hard to say. Ideally there would have been effective insulation everyplace where the ambient air was above the temperature of the steel, and no insulation anywhere else (so as to allow the steel to dissipate heat to the air). While no insulating material has quite this property, some synthetic materials are much closer to that kind of behavior than asbestos (which acts as an insulator unconditionally).
From a thermal perspective, I think the best that can be accomplished would be to have all structural members coated with a material whose R-value was initially quite low but whose R-value would increase substantially when heated above a few hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and have all joins treated with similar material, but with a slightly higher 'transition temperature'. A structural element which was undamaged but exposed to flame would have its own insulation 'activate' when the insulation reached its critical temperature (which would be before the metal did so). As long as the metal stayed below the transition temperature of the joint, however, it would be able to dissipate heat to the surrounding structure.
If a structural element were mangled and the bare metal was exposed to the flame source, its insulation wouldn't do it any good. Once the structural element reached the transition temperature of the joint, it would no longer be able to dissipate any heat and would itself be prone to soften and melt fairly quickly. On the other hand, a structural element which was sufficiently mangled as to expose considerable bare metal would be less likely to be playing a useful supporting role than the structures to which it was attached, so its own meltdown would likely not be a problem.
One difficulty, though, with such a building approach is that all of the variable-R fireproofing materials I know of get physically thicker when heated. I don't know any way to use such a material in a building joint and have the joint be structurally sound.
While the show was interesting, my husband and I found it to be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking....IF the structure had different fireproofing or IF the structure hadn't used dry wall...basically just blaming decisions from 30 years as being cheap and stupid (you know, back when we didn't have the technology to use computer models....)
and, being PBS, IF anybody had flat out said, "well, the towers fell because insane, militant idiots crashed huge jetliners into them" it was edited out.
General Longstreet, in his old age, was asked why the War was lost-was it the failure to go right at Gettysburg, the class conflict between the planters and the common man, disloyalty on the home front?
After a minute's reflection, the old General said,
"I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it".
I haven't watched NOVA since "the Pinks and the Blues". They also did a couple of shows on ESP and UFOs without airing a single articulate skeptic. Odd considering they could do a show on black holes and provide 10 conflicting opinions.
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