Pt.2

"..

Still, experts concede, in a hellish day, 7 World Trade might have sustained structural injuries never envisioned in fire codes. That day began with flaming pieces of steel and aluminum and, horribly, human bodies raining around the building.

With the collapse of both towers by 10:30 a.m., larger pieces of the twin towers had smashed parts of 7 World Trade and set whole clusters of floors ablaze. An hour later, the Fire Department was forced to abandon its last efforts to save the building as it burned like a giant torch. It fell in the late afternoon, hampering rescue efforts and hurling its beams into the ground like red-hot spears.

Within the building, the diesel tanks were surrounded by fireproofed enclosures. But some experts said that like the jet fuel in the twin towers, the diesel fuel could have played a role in the collapse of 7 World Trade.

"If the enclosures were damaged, then yes, this would be enough fuel to explain why the building collapsed," Dr. Barnett said.

Dr. Barnett and Mr. Baker are part of an assessment team organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to examine the performance of several buildings during the attacks. If further studies of the debris confirm the findings of extremely high temperature, Dr. Barnett said, "the smoking gun would be the fuel."

Others experts agreed that the diesel fuel could have speeded the collapse, but said the building might have met the same fate simply because of how long it burned.

"The fuel absolutely could be a factor," said Silvian Marcus, executive vice president for the Cantor Seinuk Group and a structural engineer involved in the original design of the building, which was completed in 1987. But he added, "The tanks may have accelerated the collapse, but did not cause the collapse."

Because of those doubts, engineers hold open the possibility that the collapse had other explanations, like damage caused by falling debris or another source of heat.

The fuel tanks were not the only highly flammable materials in the building. But while some engineers have speculated that a high-pressure gas main ruptured and caught fire, there was none in the area, said David Davidowitz, vice president of gas engineering at Consolidated Edison. The building was served only by a four-inch, low-pressure line for the building's cafeteria, Mr. Davidowitz said.

The mayor's command bunker, built in 1998, included electrical generators on the seventh floor, where there was a small fuel tank, said Jerome M. Hauer, director of the mayor's Office of Emergency Management from 1996 to 2000. That tank was fed by a tank containing thousands of gallons of diesel fuel on a lower floor, he said.

Francis E. McCarton, a spokesman for the emergency management office, confirmed that assessment. "We did have a diesel tank in the facility," he said. "Yes, it was used for our generating system."

The manager of the building when it collapsed, Walter Weems, said the larger tank sat on a steel-and-concrete pedestal on the second floor and held 6,000 gallons of diesel fuel. He said an even larger cache, four tanks containing a total of 36,000 gallons of diesel fuel, sat just below ground level in the loading dock near the southwest corner of the building.

"I'm sure that with enough heat it would have burned," Mr. Hauer said of the diesel. "The question is whether the collapse caused the tank to rupture, or whether the material hitting the building caused the tank to rupture and enhance the fire."

Falling debris also caused major structural damage to the building, which soon began burning on multiple floors, said Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the Fire Department. By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away from it for safety reasons.

A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Barnett said.

"Any structure anywhere in the world, if you put it in these conditions, it will not stand," Mr. Marcus said. "The buildings are not designed to be a torch."

"...burning fuel apparently undermined what is known as a transfer truss. The trusses, a series of steel beams that allowed the skyscraper to be built atop multistory electricity transformers (NYC: belonging to Con Ed), were critical to the structural integrity of the building and ran near the smaller diesel tanks.

A failure of the same type of structural bridge contributed to the collapse of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City when it was bombed in 1995.
...
Jerome M. Hauer, who was the director of Mayor Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management at the time the command center was opened at 7 World Trade, said several teams of engineers reviewed plans to open the office there.

But no one ever mentioned any hazard associated with placing fuel tanks above ground, near a transfer truss, he said.
"There were a host of people who looked at this," said Mr. Hauer, who is now a managing director of the crisis and consequence group at Kroll Worldwide, a security consulting company based in New York. "We relied on their judgment."
...

... 275-gallon diesel tanks sat on the fifth, seventh and eighth floors and were fed through pipes from the larger tanks near ground level. The team member said that while the diesel fuel remains the most likely candidate for feeding the fires, it was still unknown whether there could have been other sources of fuel in the building, kept there by tenants like the Secret Service that have disclosed little of what their spaces contained. (NYC: I had thought Giuliani’s bunker was on the 8th floor.)

... Oklahoma City, during the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building, a large transfer girder on the building's third floor gave way, helping to precipitate a progressive collapse that later analysis showed was responsible for most of the 168 deaths.

... http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/nyregion/02TOWE.html?pagewanted=1

NO NYT LINK FOR THIS:
NY TIMES
December 20, 2001
City Had Been Warned of
Fuel Tank at 7 World Trade Center

"Fire Department officials warned the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1998 and 1999 that a giant diesel fuel tank for the mayor's $13 million command bunker in 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story high-rise that burned and collapsed on Sept. 11, posed a hazard and was not consistent with city fire codes.

The 6,000-gallon tank was positioned about 15 feet above the ground floor and near several lobby elevators and was meant to fuel generators that would supply electricity to the 23rd-floor bunker in the event of a power failure. Although the city made some design changes to address the concerns - moving a fuel pipe that would have run from the tank up an elevator shaft, for example - it left the tank in place. But the Fire Department repeatedly warned that a tank in that position could spread fumes throughout the building if it leaked, or, if it caught fire, could produce what one Fire Department memorandum called "disaster."
http://www.baltech.org/lederman/giuliani-wtc-collapse-3-01-02.html

NYC: Do you know who Robt. Lederman is? He’s the artist with Hitler on the Hudson, Mussolini in Manhattan. Sometimes a bit off, I would say.

Bunker built 1998 on 23rd floor, according to this:
One of the running gags of the Giuliani years was ‘‘the bunker’’ — press shorthand for the $15 million Emergency Command Center the mayor built on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center in 1998.

NYC: It was originally supposed to cost $8, but apparently wound up $15.

But i found something new (i saw it before only in the HBO video, which showed another angle):
Here's an animation of the "collapse" of Building 7:

http://images.indymedia.org/imc/ontario/wtc-7.gif

(*Thx to Plaguepuppy)

i'm still looking for better maps and videos as well.
There is one lousy study around at http://www.house.gov/science/hot/wtc/wtc-report/WTC_ch5.pdf , who analysed the collapse of building 7, but also didn't come to any straight conclusion.

from that report:

"WTC 7 was located north of the main WTC
complex, across Vesey Street, and was linked to the WTC Plaza by two pedestrian bridges: the large Plaza
bridge and a smaller, glass-enclosed pedestrian bridge. The bridges spanned 95 feet across Vesey Street,
connecting the Plaza and the 3rd floor of WTC 7. In addition to the office occupancies, WTC 7 also
contained an electrical substation, and the WTC Complex shipping ramp, as shown in Figure 5-1..."

Later they even revealed on Page 13, Point 5.4 "Building Loads", that, "the degree of impact damage to the south façade could not be documented. However, damage was evident from review of photographs and video records...."

But the study complained, that noone, including TV stations did send them any video material.

Also very funny:

"At the east end of the 5th floor...the fuel oil distribution pipe ran above this door several feet to the north of the masonry wall. The type, quality, and hardware on the door set are unknown. The position of the door (i.e., open or closed) at the time of the incident is also unknown. Also, no information was available
in regard to the size of the undercut on the door..."

But i know from the study that on the 5th floor, we only had generators and no gas tank.

Also interesting:

"...Con Ed reported that “the feeders supplying power to WTC 7 were de-energized at 9:59 a.m.” It is believed that the
emergency generators came on line immediately.
It is also believed that some of them may have stopped
operating because of the contamination of the intake air flowing into the carburetors and radiators.

Except for the SSB (=credit institute) system, where it is understood that a UPS system provided backup power to the 75-gpm pump,
the flow of oil would stop and, as soon as the day tanks were empty, the involved generator set would stop
running..."

But "the SSB generators did not use day tanks."
SSB was on the 28th to 45th floor.

And more indices, that something stinks:

"...If the Silverstein pump had started pumping at 10 a.m.,
when Con Ed shut down power to the building immediately following the collapse of WTC 2, and continued pumping until the collapse of WTC 7 at 5:20 p.m., less than 2,000 gallons would have been
used. The residual 20,000 gallons found in the two 12,000-gallon tanks, therefore, can not be used as an indicator of whether or not the Silverstein generator sets were on line and running..."

Then the report continues, that "the SSB tanks will be pulled from the debris in the near future..."

But i never heard of them again. They are probably already part of indian jewelry (sarcasm).

Important to know, that "if there is evidence that the majority of diesel fuel was still in the tanks, it can be concluded that the SSB system did not discharge diesel oil.."

The report also implied, that we had some phantom fire inside the building, which means, noone knows, how and why it started:

Floor 2, most important part for me:

"...Currently, there are no data available on the post-collapse condition of the OEM 6,000-gallon tank located between the 2nd and 3rd floors.

Floor 7:

"....The OEM system also included a 275-gallon day tank located on
the 7th floor..."

No pipes connected to...

"...The 275-gallon tank associated with the American Express generator was located at the west end of
the 8th floor. If full, the 275 gallons represent a potential of about 600 MegaJoules, which would be enough to cause a serious fire that could spread to other fuels, but not felt to be enough to threaten the
stability of the building’s structural elements..."

The bridge was mysteriously still standing:

"...the collapse of WTC 2 did not significantly affect the roof, or the east, west, and north elevations of WTC 7. It is unknown if there was any damage to the south elevation after WTC 2
collapsed, but both the covered, tubular pedestrian bridge (see Figure 5-13) and the Plaza bridge were still
standing after the collapse of WTC 2..."

Which brings me to another question:
Which phantom debris was able to hit b7, after both towers already collapsed?

The last chance was at 10:29

"At 10:29 a.m., WTC 1 (the north tower) collapsed, sending its debris into the streets below. The extent and severity of the resulting damage to WTC 7 are currently unknown...."

..."Edminion, come to Tampa, I'll take you in the lab for the structures classes, and we'll do some stress tests on some various models that Mr. Schnurr can mock up for you, so that you can see for yourself how physics works in the real world.

You mentioned that little shpiel about gravity, and frictional loads. Have you ever seen a load test performed on a scaled structural system (obviously can't test a lifesize one)? If it has been designed and fabricated properly (for maximum structural efficiency, as in the case fo the WTC), when you load test it to failure, almost the entire structure will fail simultaneously (and this isn't hard to do. I've achieved this same total pulverizing using balsa and glue for my structure. When the structure fails, it simply shatters). You have to realize that supertall towers like the WTC pushed the envelope of what was possible. Thier high structural efficiency was part of the design, but also left a bit less "margin for error", so to speak. A tube within a tube superstructure like that of the WTC will not slowly deform, lean to one side and topple like a normal post and beam or caisson structural system might. It will collapse inwards and outwards upon itself (think of a cantilevered accordian)...The building behaved exactly as it should have, given the nature of the stress, and the design of the superstructure. Basically the only variable was impact hieght vs. time until failure. The lower the buildings were struck, the sooner they would collapse. This was also consistently evident in the collapse of the towers. If there had been other, lower detonations directed at the structure (like in the basement or whatever), then the building's time until failure would have been very simular in duration, instead of unmistakably dissimilar, as was the case.

I mean no disrespect, but you just have no idea what you are talking about. I barely have a clue, and this is after hearing my professor ramble on about it for months... I suggest that you just get over it, because not only is concern futile, but you are just plain wrong."...

I say none of the folks there want to even consider (let alone answer) my questions.
They just post stupid "answers" and make fun of me and conspiracy theories.
They use childish phrases all the time, like calling me Edminion, Edmonion, or "my proffesor says..."
(My nick name has nothing to deal with my Croatian language, it is a character from a movie).
So, what to do?
Should I leave them in The Middle Age? Or, to fight for the true? :)
If you want, you can help me beat these particles of ignorance. I saw you're almost everywhere where a discussion about 9/11 goes on.
I admire you, really. Good job!

p.s.: I can't estimate the damage on B7 after 2nd collapse well. I can just say: If the old rocky Verizon survived, WTC7 should, too.
That oil leaking can't be responsible for collapse.

What it is really "funny" is the fact that no reporters in their stupid bug-like helicopters were flying over ground 0 to see what's left.
When there are falling people to shoot with cams, we have a whole network of reporters on the way with their fancy palms and laptops. BUT, when important events are happening, "there is no enough footage".
blah....

Planes May Have Almost Toppled WTC on Impact (part II) -in reality pt.26.7 of many other similar threads on DU:)
A MUST to read for pro-controlled demolition supporters!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=4840&forum=DCForumID43

But the real question is: Was the collapse controlled?

(*Thx to NL and 2muchBS, DU)

"...Con Ed and Insurers Sue Port Authority Over 7 World Trade"

http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/11/nyregion
/11BLAS.html

You will have to register for that.

Con Ed lost a substation below WTC 7 in the collapse. They say it was
the diesel
oil, mainly held by OEM, which caused an explosion and therefore the
fire, later
the collapse. The 23rd story fuel storage "was cited as unsafe by Fire
Department officials in 1998 and 1999, but the Port Authority..." has
claimed it
met the fire code. Con Ed had to file suit to get it in during the
one-year
period. The question is, can we potentially submit supporting documents
to the
suit, or an independent opinion, without anyone asking us?! Or convince
Con Ed
to consider evidence of a demolition!?

Remember, Building 7 contained: SEC (paper evidence for 100s of insider
trading
cases and stock scams), CIA (largest "recruiting" station in U.S.
outside DC),
Secret Service, DoD, and the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management
(OEM), i.e.
Giuliani's emergency bunker, for which he was mocked, and which had the
largest
of the illegal above ground fuel tanks on floor 23. Also the offices of
Silverstein Properties, i.e. owner of WTC....

NOTE by NL:
"...A good
shot of the
collapse (top part of it) was in the 9/11 documentary by CBS (the
French
brothers who were filming firemen and got the footage of the first
plane crash).
It sure looks just like the footage of other skyscraper demolitions I
have seen!
It doesn't fall apart anything like the towers, it comes down very
smoothly,
without massive smoke, with the center section going down just ahead of
the
wings. You see it crumpling, then the wings follow..."

So, what do you think?

p.s.: Am I on a wrong thread in DU, or what? There are no posts about the towers. I hope everybody didn't gave up on this. 2muchbs said he is tired of all this BS.
But we have to keep discovering. When I look at my 770 pictures collected and 114 movies, I almost always see something else, something new.
I know you and Jeff won't gave up.

http://homes.wsj.com/columnists_com/bricks/20020710-bricks.html
"...But it's not clear whether Mr. Silverstein can use
those proceeds to start building without first
reaching an agreement with the mortgage holder on 7
World Trade Center, Blackstone Real Estate
Advisors...."

http://www.blackstone.com/news/press_releases%255C7_world_trade_oct_2000.pdf
"New York, NY October 17, 2000: Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, the global real estate investment and management arm of The Blackstone Group, L.P., announced today that it has purchased, from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, the participating mortgage secured by 7 World Trade Center, a commercial office complex controlled by real estate developer Larry Silverstein"

(CEO is currenltly sitting on a commission headed by Peterson at The Conference Board)
http://burningbush.netfirms.com/TIAA-CREF.html

info on tenants (which include CIA/DOD, 24th floor):
http://burningbush.netfirms.com/7WTC.html
(*thx to JohnHorne)

Blackstone is owned by the TRW Group, who just mergered with Raytheon. They have ties with the Carlyle Group and Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger-Blackstone Connection

Blackstone is official partner von Kissinger Associates,
Pete Peterson is "Foreign Affairs Bureau of New York".

American International Group, Inc.
1. Henry Kissinger chairs both AIG's International
Advisory Board and the advisory boards of several
AIG-sponsored Infrastructure Funds
2. AIG has an ownership interest in Blackstone and is
an investor in several of Blackstone's private equity
funds
3. AIG and Blackstone have a joint venture,
specializing in restructuring and M&A advisory
services in selected Asian countries
4. The AIG-Blackstone-Kissinger Associates venture
recently completed its first advisory assignment on
behalf of a New York Stock Exchange listed U.S.
company

October 3, 2002 --

"...A legal action that charges the city's negligence is partially to blame for the collapse of 7 World Trade Center can go forward, a judge said yesterday.
The action by Con Edison and its insurers charges that one of the reasons the building collapsed after the attacks on the Twin Towers was that the city had stored a large amount of diesel fuel inside the building..."