Patricia A. O'Malley
Social Policy & Programs Consulting ~ Community Matters
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Established 1993
Patricia A. O'Malley
Social Policy & Programs Consulting
Training and Services for agencies working toward social and economic justice
Random Affairs
September 5, 2023
The Science Behind The World Trade Center Collapse
You’ve never heard this before.
Monday will be the 22nd anniversary of what we’ve come to call 9/11.
An engineer explains what happened when the towers fell.
My son is a state-licensed civil/structural engineer and bridge inspector, and a federally certified tunnel inspector.
He studied the World Trade Center collapse, including Building 7, in his college engineering classes.
This is what he told me.
THE TOWERS
When it was built, the entire WTC site was excavated as one giant hole, similar to a giant concrete bathtub.
All of the buildings sat inside that tub area.
When the planes hit the towers, the resulting fires did not melt the steel to liquid.
They softened the steel columns and beams to the point where the steel lost its strength and could no longer hold up the weight. CRASH.
The puffs of "smoke" that you see escaping from the buildings as they collapsed are not smoke.
It is the air, dust, walls, ceilings, insulation, and other stuff bursting from the openings as the windows break from the pressure of the collapse above them.
Just like when you stomp on a balloon filled with powder.
The smaller explosions and fires in the towers are not bombs.
There are countless flammable and combustible things in an office
building.
Copy machine toner cartridges explode when overheated.
Fluorescent light tubes explode when broken.
Thousands of those were in the buildings.
Photo Credit: Patricia A. O'Malley. July, 2000.
There was also an unknown amount of aerosol spray cans of stuff, cigarette lighters, and gallons of flammable cleaning solutions.
According to the 911 National Memorial, there were between 16,400 and 18,000 people in the towers when the planes hit. 2,603 people, including 343 firefighters and 71 police officers died in the attack.
Between 13,000 and 15,000 evacuated safely because they had all been taught fire evacuation procedures in grade school fire drills.
And that’s why we need to hold active shooter drills in schools now.
Until we stop the shooting.
BUILDING 7
Maintenance people had reported foundation problems on Building 7 months earlier.
Management and engineers were trying to figure out a solution before 9/11 happened.
When the towers collapsed, it sent shock waves, in the form of vibrations, deep into the ground, like throwing a pebble into a pond.
Because the entire site was a giant concrete bathtub, the vibrations bounced back and forth throughout the site all day long.
They couldn't dissipate into the earth beyond the concrete tub walls.
Those vibrations kept shaking and shaking and shaking Building 7 until CRASH.
THE PENTAGON
Plenty of people whine that a plane did not fly into the Pentagon as there’s no photo of it.
There is no camera taking my picture as I write this now, but I am writing it.
The nearest camera was a still camera at the parking lot entrance.
It took one photo per second.
The plane travelled at several hundred miles per hour.
The camera didn’t have TIME to get a photo as the plane passed by.
More absurd claims assert that the Pentagon was bombed by the US military because the hole in the building was round, and not plane-shaped.
You won't get an airplane-shaped hole in the wall.
This is not a Roadrunner cartoon; we are not Wyle E Coyote.
When the plane slammed into the wall, THE WINGS BROKE OFF.
Yes, they were found in the wreckage.
Popular Mechanics magazine has an excellent re-creation video that explains it all.
If you don't watch the video, then you don't really want to know the answer.
You just want to whine.
It's not magic.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's just good old-fashioned physics.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Popular Mechanics Magazine: Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report
9/11 Memorial and Museum
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