First off, leave Jesse Ventura out of this. He's gone off the deep end. And I don't mean I only think he's weird because he switched from Republican to Democrat.
I mean he's 2 computer beeps away from smearing feces on his face and re-enacting Romeo and Juliette in a one man play naked in Central Park. Dude's diddlying crazy.
Second? I ain't just an engineer. I'm an architectural engineer. That means I know exactly how to design buildings. I know exactly how to build them. I know exactly what causes failures.
Past that, I've been studying Fire Protection, with my Thesis being designed to PREVENT steel failure due to fire.
The failure wasn't some great mystery that the government is hiding from us. First off, the building was designed to survive the impact force of smaller jet. However the engineers did not consider that the impact would blow all of the Spray On Fireproofing off of the columns.
Steel itself is a great structural material. Hell, without Steel concrete itself would be useless. The problem is that steel has VERY poor thermal properties in relation to heat. That's why we use Metal for pots and pans and not wood. The structural steel with fire proofing could last many hours, perhaps even days. Without fire proofing, it would be lucky to hit half an hour.
Most steel is only loaded to 50%-75% of the capacity (the latter being if the loading properties are EXPLICITLY known). 60-65% is a good average for us to work with. Now if you take the thermal properties of steel, it hits 65% capacity at about 1000 degrees fahrenheit.
But when you consider that roughly 1/8 of all the steel columns were severed on the buildings, suddenly all the other columns must carry the load. Not taking into account wind loading due to asymmetrical column loading, the columns were loaded up 85-90%. This failure occurs at 850 degrees Fahrenheit.
And in case you can't figure out what this information means, it means that steel doesn't have to melt to fail. And just for toejams and giggles, at 1450 degrees Fahrenheit, most steel becomes roughly the consistency of soft gum.
Second, the pancake analogy for how these numbnuts think that a building should fail is childish at best. Each individual floor is only designed to hold roughly 100 pounds per square foot at MAX. However, they are not designed to hold the actual weight of the building above it. And for every second the building is falling, the force of the section doubles. So in roughly that first 3/4 of a second it took for the first failure to fall to the next, not only would that floor NOT be able to hold it, but it would have to hold 175% of the total weight. It wasn't just the weight of the next floor up that was falling. It was the weight of MANY floors. In the next second of fall it has roughly 300% the force, or it's hitting 2x HEAVIER than the top section itself.
As to the damage to the other WTC buildings? Well that ain't hard to figure out. Many millions of tons of FLAMING WRECKAGE fell upon a complex of buildings all near the base of what were some of the tallest buildings known to man. Again, it is simply childish to think that a falling person wouldn't crush a few ant hills when he hit the ground.
