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by Christopher
Bollyn
American Free Press
http://americanfreepress.net
August 28, 2002
Two unexplained "spikes" in the
seismic record from September 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the
ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers — just as the
buildings began to 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.
"MOLTEN STEEL"
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, could explain how these crucial structural supports
failed.
Peter Tully, president of Tully
Construction of Flushing, New York, told AFP that he saw pools of
"literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted
on September 11 to remove the debris from the site.
Tully called Mark Loizeaux,
president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland, 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
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived on 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° Fahrenheit (1535° Celsius). 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."
Kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or
the other combustibles normally found in the towers, however, 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, Time for 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 1520° F (825° C). 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 of 825° C.
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
September 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
1377° F (747° C) 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 4 inches thick.
CENTRAL COLUMNS SEVERED
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, New York, 21
miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on September 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.
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 Univ. of California at Santa Cruz told
AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.
The two unexplained spikes are more
than twenty 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.
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 January 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
lbs. 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.
Experts cannot explain why the
seismic waves peaked before the towers 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."
"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 huge towers.
TEST FOR EXPLOSIONS?
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," he said.
SELLING THE EVIDENCE OVERSEAS
Much of the structural steel from
the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, New
Jersey, and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East. Ratner,
who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chicago-based company, quickly 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 Sydney-based (Australia) metal trading firm
known as SimsMetal.
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