More Thoughts on the Collapse of the WTC Towers

Following up on the previous post, several thoughts in no particular order.

First, I am only dealing with the physical evidence here, which I always thought was ambiguous. While I think there is physical evidence that is supportive of explosive demolition of the towers, what pushed me over the edge solidly into the explosive demolition was Webster Tarpley's section on the collapses of the WTC towers in his book, "9/11 Synthetic Terror, Made in USA". This chapter is available as a PDF file here. Basically Tarpley presents a good set of arguments and the totality of evidence is very convincing, particularly Giuliani's actions dealing with "ground zero" and the gag order on firemen from talking about bombs in the WTC.

But in terms of the physical evidence: though there is some controversy about the seismic activity that registered when the towers collapsed. 9/11 Review gives a rebuttal here to the impression I had about the timing of the seismic spikes (not specifically to me, but to the American Free Press article on which I had based my impression). I guess I am willing to concede the point that the timing of the seismic spikes is not clear.

I am less certain about their point about P and S waves. They say "Underground explosions would have produced strong P waves, but the seismic stations registered only strong S waves. P waves oscillate horizontally -- parallel to the direction of travel; whereas S waves oscillate vertically -- perpendicular to the direction of travel." From what I can gather, P stands for Primary and S stands for Secondary, and they are both measured as seismic vibrations-- the difference is the timing and how fast P and S waves move. It seems tome there HAD to be P waves, and perhaps there were S waves that merged right next to the P waves.

As far as I can tell, the seismographs are not inconsistent with underground explosions, but they are not terribly conclusive either.

As far as how the collapses occurred, the collapse of both towers started right above where the most damage was-- where the planes hit. Both for the South and North towers, the floors above where the planes hit, the ones that were on fire, clearly start collapsing down onto the sections where the planes impacted. While this evidence is basically consistent with the heated-steel-bending-pancake model, there is something very odd in how the upper sections above both plane entry sites cave in on themselves-- even floors far above where there was little burning seem to jump into the act and collapse for no clear reason. And then this top collapsed section starts pushing down the rest of the tower to make it collapse floor by floor.

I could understand some collapse of the floors where the damage was and the severe fires were-- but the complete systemic collapse starting at the top doesn't seem right, intuitively to me.

What does make more sense to me is a situation where the foundations of the central core have been blown. This will cause it the core to shift down, exerting pressure on the joists that hold the floors. The pressure will be the most problematic and dire where the plane and fire damage occurred, and so this is where the visible collapse starts. I can understand the massive systemic collapse that occurred in the context of a blown central core, but I can't understand the collapse happening so rapidly and so completely if the core was intact.

There is the fact of molten steel down in the basement where the foundations were. SOMETHING-- perhaps some sort of high-tech high-energy device-- melted the steel foundation of the WTC towers.

While there seem to have been other bombs placed around the building, the bottom line is that the foundation of the WTC is key to the global collapse that occurred.