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PAINFUL DECEPTIONS -- ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY & SCREENCAP GALLERY |
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Despite the fact that the fires in Building 7 were so small that the sprinkler system should have extinguished them, at about 5:30 in the evening, the building suddenly crumbled into a pile of rubble.
How did a few little fires cause Building 7 to crumble?
According to Bill Manning, Editor-in-Chief of Fire Engineering, a magazine for fire departments, fire has never destroyed a steel building. So how did a fire do what it had never done before? Perhaps you wonder if incompetent architects designed this building with delicate steel beams?
If so, take a look at the beam with the numeral "7" spray-painted on its end. To say the beams in Building 7 were massive would be an understatement. This building was straddling an electrical substation for the City, so it had some of the thickest steel beams of any building on the planet. At the upper left corner is a standard "I" shaped beam. It would be considered massive in most buildings, but it seems delicate next to the biggest beams in Building 7. As is typical in the design of buildings, bridges, and most industrial products, Building 7 was designed with more strength than it actually needed.
(Investigator, Professor Astaneh-Asl) So how did a building with such a massive steel framework disintegrate into such a tiny pile of rubble from a few tiny fires? A government agency, FEMA, conducted an investigation into why the buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed. However, the editor of Fire Engineering magazine became so disgusted by the investigation ... |
