My thoughts and questions regarding the first points in your post:
All good here Gamolon, lets examine my reasoning and logic as to why I think there was a demoltion of some description. Before I come to that though, I want to briefly explain why I don't believe in the OCT theories.
I left the part above for context.
It doesn't make any logical sense to me that there was a key column within the buildings, that lost its support laterally, buckles and brings down the entire building as per the NIST theory.
WHY does it not make logical sense? There has to be some reasons for you you thinking that way.
I actually went and read quite a few pieces of information yesterday after MaggieD said that her aquaintance, who was a structural engineer, said that building are designed to collapse in a certain way. What I learned is that this is an ever-evolving science and has just gained legs after the 9/11 incidents. There are ways to get a good idea as to how a structure will resond to component failure, but that is failing one key component at a time. There is no way that any client would pay the money and spend the time to test EVERY possible permutation of failure mechanisms within a strucure to garantee it will collapse in a certain way every time. And for MaggieD to say that WTC2 was designed to have the upper section tilt the way it did is ridiculous.
Fire science is an even MORE time consuiming and difficult entity to figure out as many of the documents I read have stated. Heating phases, cooling phases, live loads, static loads, environemtntal loads, compnonents, cponnections... How can one hope to correclty predict or determine what will actually happen in any given scenario.
I don't think there is a single column within the WTC 7 which would have that load capacity being transferred through it.
So you fail column 79 at approximtely the 13th floor. you have 34 reaming long span floors attached to that PLUS a portion of the weight of the mechanical penthouse. That weight HAS to the transfered somewhere. So it gets transferd to the other surrounding core columns and
perimeter facade in that area. Those core columns and connecting lateral steel beams/girders have had their load bearing capacity reduce to some degree. Now you have the added load of what was supported by column 79 transfered to other weakened components.
Although there were fires on about 10 floors, the fires don't never appear to be significant enough at any point to overcome the undamaged and unheated floors. Even if we assumed that all these floors were consumed by raging fires, I've never seen any kind of calculation which would show that this could happen.
But there are studies that try and figure this whole mess out. It's not an easy task. Whther column 79 is the actual cause or not, I still believe fire is what eventually brought WTC7 down. They are the best probable causes, not definitive answers.
I can provide evidence of larger fires in other buildings which didn't collapse including WTC 5 & 6 but fires aren't very good at bringing buildings down hence the reason that demolition companies don't use it.
The only example of a building collapsing from fires are the Windsor Tower and even that collapse progresses over a period of minutes, as I would expect due to the uneven way fires and temperatures would vary over an area.?
Studie, you and I both know that structures are different. You have to take each as an individual structure and apply the characteristics of the scenario. You just can't say "..But there were other buildings subjected to fire that didn't collapse." That's like saying "Gerneral Tso's chicken was spicy! That can't be because McDonald's chicken nuggets weren't spicy and neither was Wendy's"
So in essence, what did the buildings you have in your mind that DIDN'T collapse are a good comparison, apples to apples?
1. Were any of the other building's fires unfought by either firefighters or fire figthing suppression systems?
2. Were any of the other buildings designed with long floor floos spans connected from core columns to perimeter columns?
3. Did any of the other buildings contain transfer trusses like those in WTC7?
4. Were any of the other buildings built on top of an existing sturcture and use some of the existing support components?
I am really curious to see Hulsey's report. From what I understand so far is that he didn't model the fires correctly among other things. So far we have the NIST and ARUP saying it was fire.
I have also said this before. I believe fire brought down the WTC7 because, IMHO, no other scenario has presented enough evidence to move ahead of fire. Fire has not been 100% proven, but is the best case scenario with the most evidence.
