9/11 - The Twin Towers and Common Sense

By Frank Legge, Ph.D.

Before the roof of the North tower of the World Trade Centre became hidden in dust it was falling at a rate which would have brought it to the ground in 10.5 seconds. The US administration expects us to believe that this fall rate is reasonable for a fire and plane damaged building. For comparison the roof on the right in this drawing, freely falling in a vacuum, would take 9.2 seconds.

Data published by NIST shows that the steel was not hot enough for the collapse to begin. There are also engineers who have worked out that, even if collapse did begin at the damaged level, it would not continue, but would quickly come to a halt.

That may be hard to validate, unless you can deal with complex calculations, but what about this time difference, just 1.3 seconds? Does not ordinary common sense tell you that the block on the left will be slowed down if it has to crush its way through over 90 storeys of cold steel and concrete? Would it not take more than 1.3 seconds longer than the one on the right, freely falling?

Does this not imply that the undamaged, unheated lower part of the building suddenly lost structural strength in some way? Is there any explanation other than explosives that could account for this sudden loss of strength?

No steel framed building has ever collapsed due to fire except on that day, when three tall buildings came down, and they came down impossibly fast. →