|
by Christopher
Bollyn
American Free
Press, 9/5/02
Two unexplained
"spikes" in the seismic record from Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of
energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers
immediately prior to the collapse.
American Free
Press has learned of pools of "molten steel" found at the base of the
collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy
source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York
seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained
seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse.
These spikes
suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked
the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.
In the basements
of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected
with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered
more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense
residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved
environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.
Peter Tully,
president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw
pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center.
Tully was
contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to remove the debris from the
site.
Tully called Mark
Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix,
Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the
innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion
of structures."
Loizeaux, who
cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma
City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan
for the entire operation.
AFP asked Loizeaux
about the report of molten steel on the site.
"Yes," he said,
"hot spots of molten steel in the basements."
These incredibly
hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main
towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said.
The molten steel
was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being
removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC,
which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
Construction steel
has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Asked what could
have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel."
Loizeaux told AFP
that the steel-melting fires were fueled by "paper, carpet and other
combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they
'pancaked' into the basement."
However, some
independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet
fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers,
cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an
oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
Eric Hufschmid,
author of a book about the WTC collapse, Painful Questions,* told AFP
that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down
at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be "a smoky smoldering
pile."
Experts disagree
that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
This is
impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be
reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F.
Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black
smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit.
The hottest spots
at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were
much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.
Five days after
the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging
Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots.
Dozens of hot
spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South
Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F was recorded.
This is, however,
less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
The foundations of
the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns,
connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the
structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were four inches
thick.
Videos of the
North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first,
indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very
beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP, "Everything went
simultaneously."
"At 10:29 the
entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and
began falling down," Hufschmid writes. "If the first event was the
falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of
columns?"
Asked if the
vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the
floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the
FEMA assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."
Loizeaux said, "If
I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement
to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."
SEISMIC 'SPIKES'
Seismographs at
Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades,
N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on
Sept. 11 that has still not been explained.
While the aircraft
crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with
unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.
The Palisades
seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second
collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the
8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.
However, the
Palisades seismic record shows that-as the collapses began-a huge
seismic "spike" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the
ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the
collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.
These unexplained
"spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive
explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.
A "sharp spike of
short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of
California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion
appears on a seismograph.
The two
unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other
seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the
East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.
Experts cannot
explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the
ground.
Asked about these
spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia
University's Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, "This is an
element of current research and discussion. It is still being
investigated."
Lerner-Lam told
AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold
increase in energy released. These "short-period surface waves," reflect
"the interaction between the ground and the building foundation,"
according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.
"The seismic
effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline
tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology Group
reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
One of the
seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs
register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.
These blasts are
caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes
between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did
not register on the seismographs because it was "not coupled" to the
ground.
"Only a small
fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into
ground motion," Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that resulted from
the collapse of the towers was extremely small."
Last November,
Lerner-Lam said: "During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling
debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures,
converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage-but not
causing significant ground shaking."
Evidently, the
energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times
more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling
mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?
While steel is
often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness
reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored
building assessment did no such tests.
Dr. W. Gene
Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the
Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed
the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.
Corley told AFP
that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from
the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion
had affected the steel.
"I am not a
metallurgist," Corley said.
Much of the
structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal
Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu
Schnitzer East.
Ratner, who heads
the New Jersey branch of the Chica go-based company, sold the WTC steel
to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel
to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner
paid about $70 per ton for the steel.
Other shipments of
steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports.
Ratner came to
Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading firm known as
SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.
Return to
Table of Contents
|
