Debunked: WTC: Multi-ton steel sections ejected laterally.

C7 Continued to be excessively speculative and asserting things as fact with no evidence. I've removed him until next year. He's not the target audience here.
 
The overlay I did above was not quite right, as the default position of the model I used put the WTC complex about 100 feet more east than it should be, making it look like a less likely (but not impossible) distance.

It struck me though how difficult it can be to visualize the distance fro the limited views we had, so I pushed the model around to make it as accurate as possible (specifically for WTC1 and WFC3's sizes and positions). I've attached the two files I use. The WFC (via Sketchup Library) has great details of the winter garden area, and matches the existing buildings in Google Earth perfectly. You can then load both these models into Google Earth and turn off 3D buildings, allowing for clear views.
Metabunk 2020-10-26 22-29-31.jpg

Metabunk 2020-10-26 22-24-10.jpg
 

Attachments

  • WFC Complex Amex .kmz
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  • WTC Complex.kmz
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One very minor point, and this is only because I happened to work in the building being referred to as "WFC3" for an extended period this past year--it is actually referred to commonly as either "200 Vesey" or "the Amex Building" (the former for its street address and the latter for its flagship tenant). I never heard or saw any mentioned of it as "WFC3". Carry on...
 
It is not speculation that it takes high explosives upwards of 100 kg to hurl a single wall panel all the way to the WFC, just to satisfy Conservation of momentum. @Christopher 7 studiously avoids that demonstrated fact. He needs to get serious about his hypothesis.
 
It is not speculation that it takes high explosives upwards of 100 kg to hurl a single wall panel all the way to the WFC, just to satisfy Conservation of momentum. @Christopher 7 studiously avoids that demonstrated fact. He needs to get serious about his hypothesis.
It may be more complex... but what sort of force would be required to break it free from the facade... essentially the same sort of lateral force that "Brownian motion" would supply? Would it fall much closer to 1WTC and not "sail" the 430 feet to the World Financial center?
It may be moot because it looks conclusive that most of the facade was pushed off by lateral forces of the floor collapse from top to bottom and it almost "unzippered" or peeled with top leading the bottom... and landing further from the footprint.
 
A large section, peeling away from WTC 1 would remain in tact because once it is falling over there are no forces acting upon it to break a smaller section away. The collapse zone was already past the large section as it peeled away so there was nothing to fall on it and break a single section away....

If your argument were valid, a tall object falling over would always stay in one piece until it hits the ground. This is observably false. For example, when tall factory chimneys are demolished, they often break into several pieces. There is an interesting compilation of chimney demolitions in this video:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI0ryk39H4w
The results are surprisingly diverse. Some chimneys fall almost like a single rigid rod. Others fall almost into the 'footprint' of the chimney itself, as if they were a pile of unconnected bricks. But a common pattern is for the chimney to start falling like a rigid rod, then to break into two or three sections which fall on top of each other. There is a nice example at around 7 minutes into the video, where the chimney breaks quite neatly at about one-third of its height, and then breaks again closer to its 'tip' just before it hits the ground. Understanding these different patterns would be a job for an engineer or a physicist (and I am neither), but I guess it would need to take account of the shape of the chimney (straight or tapering, slender or stubby) and the component materials. An old brick chimney may have very little resistance to lateral shearing forces, whereas a chimney made with reinforced concrete may behave much more like a single rigid rod. As to the physics of the problem, I think it is fallacious to argue that 'once it is falling there are no forces acting upon it to break a smaller section away'. This seems to ignore the inertia (the 'vis inertiae') of the component masses of the object, which may not technically be a force, but still has effects. The inertia of every part of the object is 'trying' to resist its rotation around a pivot, and the resistance is greater in proportion to the distance of the part from the pivot. If the pivot is on the ground, the tallest parts of the object (whether a chimney or a skyscraper) would need to move faster to stay in line with the lower parts, and if their inertia is greater than the cohesion of the parts, they will break away.
 
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If the pivot is on the ground, the tallest parts of the object (whether a chimney or a skyscraper) would need to move faster to stay in line with the lower parts, and if their inertia is greater than the cohesion of the parts, they will break away.
I completely agree.

Inertia is apparently one of the hardest things to understand, I know that Flat Earthers often get this wrong when they're considering what happens when you jump up from a surface moving at speed.

If the chimney stack wants to fall down in a circular arc, then obviously the tip has to accelerate much faster than the base; because the velocity of the falling stack is highest at the tip and near zero at the base, and it has to accelerate from standing to still to whatever it is at that moment. But as the tip weighs the same or less than the base, there's not enough force of gravity to accelerate it that much. The stack then becomes a huge lever that distributes the foreces acting on it, and that's where the shear stress comes from that is breaking the stack apart. The base is trying to pull the tip down hard, and the stack can't carry all that sideways force and breaks up.

You can kinda see it in Mick's experiment, where the top block of the stack he nudges off the closet gets more speed than the rest before it detaches.

It'd be interesting to know how much of that kind of sideways load bearing capacity was designed into the WTC facade.
 
It'd be interesting to know how much of that kind of sideways load bearing capacity was designed into the WTC facade.
The sideways load-bearing required the floor panels being tied into the core. It was a "framed tube" system.

As I understand it, this all is quite different to WTC7, which had an "exterior moment frame". This difference was partially why the collapses looked so different. In the towers, the core collapsed last. In WTC7 the core collapsed first.

A relatively accessible 30-page description of the systems can be found here:
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910105

There were four major structural subsystems in the towers: the exterior wall, the core, the
floor system, and the hat truss. The structural design team incorporated a framed-tube concept
for the exterior structural system. Columns supporting the building were located both along the
external faces and within the core. The core also contained the elevators, stairwells, and utility shafts. The dense array of columns along the building perimeter resisted lateral wind loads, while also supporting the gravity loads about equally with the core columns. The floor system provided stiffness and stability to the framed-tube system in addition to supporting the floor loads.

...

In the framed-tube concept, the exterior frame system resists the force of the wind. The exterior columns carry a portion of the building gravity loads, and in the absence of wind, are all in compression. Under the effect of wind alone (not including gravity loads), columns on the windward side are in tension and the columns on the leeward side are in compression. The overturning moments of lateral wind loads are primarily resisted by tube action, i.e., axial shortening (compression) and elongation (tension) of the columns on all sides of the tube. The columns on the walls parallel to the wind direction are in tension on the windward side and in compression on the leeward side. The shear force from the wind loads is primarily resisted by frame action (in-plane bending of columns and spandrels) along the two faces parallel to the direction of the wind. In a framed tube system, the floor diaphragms play a key role since they carry lateral forces to the side walls of the building, thereby allowing tube action to take place. In addition, floor diaphragms provide lateral support for the stability of the columns.
Content from External Source
And in the context of this thread, it's well worth remembering the relative fragility of the connections holding this whole system together.
Metabunk 2020-10-27 08-00-52.jpg

Great in aggregate, but one solitary section atop another (or atop a larger sheet) is just attached by the bolts at the end of the box columns, making that the obvious failure point.

fig-B-7.gif
 
The overturning moments of lateral wind loads are primarily resisted by tube action, i.e., axial shortening (compression) and elongation (tension) of the columns on all sides of the tube. The columns on the walls parallel to the wind direction are in tension on the windward side and in compression on the leeward side. The shear force from the wind loads is primarily resisted by frame action (in-plane bending of columns and spandrels) along the two faces parallel to the direction of the wind.
That clarifies what I had on my mind: the lateral load from the wind is redirected by the construction into axial forces along the columns, so the whole design is not meant to support shear forces at all. It's all down to the 7/8 inch bolts.
 
One very minor point, and this is only because I happened to work in the building being referred to as "WFC3" for an extended period this past year--it is actually referred to commonly as either "200 Vesey" or "the Amex Building" (the former for its street address and the latter for its flagship tenant). I never heard or saw any mentioned of it as "WFC3". Carry on...

Yeah, it's a bit confusing, especially when talking about WFC vs. WTC. But the naming comes from the NIST maps.
Metabunk 2020-10-27 08-13-22.jpg
 
Yes, but in this example, what is being considered might be a solitary panel atop a larger sheet.
And - unless some member knows of another example - the beam embedded in the corner of WTC3 is the sole example for which we have strong proof that it came from a toppling sheet of perimeter. And "have strong proof" could be "HAD strong proof" since we no longer seem to have access to the hi-res graphics proof.

I certainly have never seen "strong proof" for the mechanism for any of the other those 6 or 7 "outlier" beams that traveled those long distances.
 
And - unless some member knows of another example - the beam embedded in the corner of WTC3 is the sole example for which we have strong proof that it came from a toppling sheet of perimeter. And "have strong proof" could be "HAD strong proof" since we no longer seem to have access to the hi-res graphics proof.

I certainly have never seen "strong proof" for the mechanism for any of the other those 6 or 7 "outlier" beams that traveled those long distances.
I think there was similar damage to the Deutsche Bank building from panels coming off the south face of 2 wtc.

It should be noted... that there is a good probability that the ROOSD collapse was not uniform and some sectors lead and some lagged. Also the floor spans were different meaning more mass at the long span locations... Long story short... the facade "peeling" was no more "uniform" than for floor collapse ("pancakes" not)... and there is good reason to believe there would be some separation of panels at the highest levels which would not be expected/seen at the lower floors. Perhaps in the few seconds of ROOSD there was a sort of "catching up" of the debris to a more evenly distributed mass as it progressed down inside the cage of the facade. It would be similar to a rock slide examined at the top as its getting going and the bottom were the avalanche is wide and more "uniform chaos."
 
I think there was similar damage to the Deutsche Bank building from panels coming off the south face of 2 wtc.
There were about half a dozen notable "outliers". Beams that became embedded in buildings at distances greater than most of the debris field. The topic was debated extensively 8 to 10 years ago. Mostly responding to truther insistence that they proved "Explosive Projection". Setting aside the Burden of Proof aspects most attempts at rebuttal relied on abstract speculation or based on examples of partial evidence.

The main point of my post was to identify the one known exception which was the beam in the corner of WFC3. It was - still is as far as I know - the only one for which we have (or had) definitive proof of the mechnaism which put the beam in that location. It fell as the top part of a very large sheet, the sheet toppled and its upper end "swiped" WFC3 causing the top beam to brake off the sheet and embed in WFC. The remainder of the sheet continued "swiping" down the face of WFC causing more damage.
 
While the discussion of the outlier pieces is interesting, it seems to make no sense to even consider that their distance may have been the result of explosive detonations given that we can see very conclusively that none of them left the WTC at speeds indicative of having been propelled by explosives at the time of collapse initiation. This was demonstrated by Mick earlier in the thread here and then all but ignored by Christopher7, who in turn took the thread down a speculation rabbit hole it never needed to even approach.
 
While the discussion of the outlier pieces is interesting, it seems to make no sense to even consider that their distance may have been the result of explosive detonations given that we can see very conclusively that none of them left the WTC at speeds indicative of having been propelled by explosives at the time of collapse initiation.
Isn't that rather "begging the question" of the thread topic? Recent posts - from both "sides" - have conflated discussion of at least two different bits of beam. The one(s) embedded in the corner of WFC3 and the one in the roof of Winter Garden. And the status of "proof" is different for those two. One - the WFC example - has been subject of rigorous explanation elsewhere. The other - the Winter Garden example - subject to speculation but no extant "proof" either way.
I've raised the two procedural issues viz:
(a) Does proof still stand if the best visual evidence is no longer accessible; AND
(b) Is "debunking" (or "rebuttal" OR "explanation") only valid if it is posted on Metabunk.....

This was demonstrated by Mick earlier in the thread here and then all but ignored by Christopher7, who in turn took the thread down a speculation rabbit hole it never needed to even approach.
That is not the full picture - it is only partially correct. Certainly Christopher 7 went to speculation BUT much of the debunker responses were speculation. Pot v Kettle problems. And Christopher 7 raised several issues which (whether he realised it or not) were more advanced understanding of WTC collapse dynamics than the mainstream counter arguments put by opponents.
 
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Isn't that rather "begging the question" of the thread topic? Recent posts - from both "sides" - have conflated discussion of at least two different bits of beam. The one(s) embedded in the corner of WFC3 and the one in the roof of Winter Garden. And the status of "proof" is different for those two. One - the WFC example - has been subject of rigorous explanation elsewhere. The other - the Winter Garden example - subject to speculation but no extant "proof" either way.
I've raised the two procedural issues viz:
(a) Does proof still stand if the best visual evidence is no longer accessible; AND
(b) Is "debunking" (or "rebuttal" OR "explanation") only valid if it is posted on Metabunk.....


That is not the full picture - it is only partially correct. Certainly Christopher 7 went to speculation BUT much of the debunker responses were speculation. Pot v Kettle problems. And Christopher 7 raised several issues which (whether he realised it or not) were more advanced understanding of WTC collapse dynamics than the mainstream counter arguments put by opponents.
I don't recall a robust discussion of "peel" dynamics... It's a term like "global collapse" which describes something identifiable... but lacks details. Although the interior of 7wtc collapse before the facade (asserted) its exterior did not peel but collapsed almost intact. The wtc was a "veerendeel-like" truss of staggered panels 36'h x 10'... while 7wtc was a moment frame with spandrels and attached curtain wall.
For sure the twin towers' core columns (many) survived the floor collapse and panel peel. There was no evidence of any tall standing core columns at 7wtc surviving the floor and perimeter collapse. 7wtc core had essentially 24 columns in 3 rows with a transfer structure connecting the north row and one at the west side... and two transfers framed into the east side of the core.
 
This post may be OT... please move or delete as needed.
I was thinking this morning that the collapse of the top block of 1wtc looks similar to the collapse of the top of 7wtc.

1 wtc - antenna collapse into roof first is the motion observed and leads the collapse of the block
7 wtc - EPH collapses into the roof is the first motion observed and leads the collapse of the building
1wtc & 7wtc facades of 1wtc top block and facade of 7wtc come down almost completely intact with a crush up - crush down at their base.
There is not "peel" of the top block or the facade of 7wtc.

The peel is a ROOSD attribute.... likely from lateral forces from the growing debris collapsing inside the cage of the facade.

One can conclude that the debris inside of 7wtc may have led to the undermining of the perimeter columns of the tower causing its "release".

1wtc seems to have "lost" its facade as ROOSD was racing down to the ground causing the peel.

There was no structure left to be "crushed up" in the ROOSD... it had become debris barreling down inside the cage of the facade.

7wtc likely was being crushed up from the bottom as it hit the ground can columns, beams and spandrels were breaking apart like collapsing jenga blocks.
 
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