I know obviously of course he must be Jewish, as I learn from some moronicism from some moronic website:
How it might have been done.
The World Trade Center was leased by Westfield America and Larry Silverstein, on April 26th, 2001. Zim Israeli Shipping moved out of the buildings around that time. With a certain amount of shuffling of tenants from floor to floor, it should have been possible for the owners to gain access to various parts of the building. Critics of the demolition theory have often remarked on the difficulty and expense of explosive demolition, requiring tens of thousands of pounds of explosives, drilling into structural members, and months of time. However, a particularly diabolical structural engineer with a clear understanding of the unique flaws of the WTC architecture, might have hatched on the plan of exploding the trusses supporting a single floor. This would have been sufficient to bring about the sequence of events which destroyed the towers, with the added benefit that if an airplane strike had occurred, the upper stories would appear to fail at the location of the strike.
There’ve been some nice threads here with a bunch of professionals in the field of demolition, and this query is posed as just another one.
In real life, what is the largest skyscraper demolition ever done with real explosive (implosive) demolition?
So, could anyone supply a back-or-the-envelope sketch of such a diabolical plan using conventional modern techniques to bring the WTC down? Keep it general enough so you don’t blow your cover to the FBI.[sup]*[/sup]
[sup]*[/sup]MODS; THAT’S A JOKE. SO IS "HE MUST BE JEWISH” a comment similar to one I made in an old post, in a similar situation as satire, and which got me dinged and then undinged after review.
If you got dinged for such a remark, then why do the same thing again, even if you think it was “undinged”? (For the record, I find you were issued a warning for an anti-Semitic joke, but that the warning was not rescinded.)
Moderator Instructions
Please ignore the issue of whether such an engineer might have been Jewish, and just address the engineering question.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
PS. I edited the font in the quote to make it normal size. It was originally posted at a minuscule font size that made it very difficult to read. Please post using a legible font size.
Brace yourself: the reasoning presented on a nutty web site is itself pretty nutty. The whole “diabolical engineer hatches diabolical plan” thing is just incoherent hand-waving. It postulates some undefined “unique flaws” in the WTC’s design and then concludes that exploiting those imaginary flaws “would have been sufficient” to bring down the towers in exactly the way they fell.
The claims are nonsensical. I might postulate a plan to win the World Series, the Super Bowl and the Pulitzer Prize all in the same week by exploiting the unique flaws in the US election system, but that doesn’t make such a plan possible.
Of course it’s incoherent hand waiving. That wasn’t the query, merely the introduction to the topic of the post. My statement sarcastically inferred from the moron on the religion or ethnicity of the engineer was declaring what the thread was not about. Neither the totality of the conspiracy nor its imagined protagonists, pace the conscientious mod instructions, I believe would have ever been addressed except by me as declaring this thread is not for nut jobs.
I do understand, however, that the mods have to be prepared for drive by nut jobs.
ETA TO Colibri, since it’s now been addressed: i can’t remember any Jewish joke (I got a million of them) etc., but I didn’t mention my dinging (a warning, I think) but a few other Dopers did in ATMB when it was obvious to everyone, except the fastreading mod who apologized when he took a re-look, that I was mocking a moronic statement on Jewish culpability for something absurd.
ETA; Especially in 9/11 conspiracy debunking threads [which this is not]–in ATMB I remember a long back and forth of even entertaining them here any more–it is practically demanded that the lunacy (and often anti-Semitism) is mentioned at least once. So I did it in OP to get on with demolition.
Isn’t this exactly the plot of Star Wars? That’s how the Death Star was blown up.
There’s no refutation possible for this nonsense. There’s never any one place to strike that will send giant complexes to their doom. It’s idiotic fantasy. It can’t be refuted because there is no substance there to refute.
Some nut articulated some vague aspects of an imaginary plan, and your second question asked for “a back-of-the-envelope sketch of such a plan using modern techniques.”
My answer was that the text you quoted was so incoherent that it’s not really possible to provide a rough sketch that has any meaningful relationship to that text.
Why the rant? My post was a sincere attempt to answer your second question.
There’s also the problem that even setting up some kind of single floor demolition plan would still require dozens, if not hundreds, of people to ignore a team of people setting up explosives at multiple points on that floor without raising any questions at the time or mentioning it after.
Demolition engineering aside, it fails the same basic 9/11 conspiracy theory practicality test that even a single janitor or security guard would totally ruin the plan. Or anybody who saw something funny beforehand and might mention it later. I suppose that’s where a shadowy nefarious group gets involved to silence those people, but that also has practicality issues.
Any plan involving engineering that doesn’t include the human factor is not a well designed plan. That’s true especially for engineers who absolutely must include logistical considerations in how to implement those plans.
The problem with the theory is where it still involves an airplane striking the World Trade Center. Why go to the trouble of setting up explosives AND have an airplane ram the building?
That’s like saying that John F. Kennedy was killed by poisoning, but that Oswald had to be hired as a sniper to shoot JFK so that people would think he died from a bullet to the brain. What for…?
So you are all saying that there is no way, as a matter of the physics and engineering of expert demolition work, for such a skyscraper to be demolished?
Not the WTC as it existed in the reality of ongoing life in NYC on 9/10/01.
Let me reframe the question this way: The WTC and entire island of Manhattan within two miles is cleared of all people, and the WTC stands as built. Hell, all of the financial district is devoid of all buildings except the WTC, standing alone with the rest of the structural base of the city, the paved roads, intact.(Makes the job even easier [?}) Full access and detailed blueprints are given to the engineers and crew. Money is no object. Could an expert building-demolition firm bring it down, using procedures more or less performed in other massive de-construction projects.
Any examples of the biggest real-life demolition projects was my first query.
Of course it COULD be brought down by explosive demolition. It WAS brought down by explosive demolition caused by a plane exploding within the building.
I would think it would be a trivial matter, knowing what we know now about how the buildings actually collapsed, for a demolitions expert to recreate the scenario. Would they have been able to do it prior to 2001? I have to think it’s not all that different from the demolitions of similar structures that had been taking place for years prior.
But just because it was technically possible to bring the towers down with explosives doesn’t lend any more credence to the theory that it was done that way.
This is clearly the best way to bring them down with the least trouble. Convince some nutjobs to hijack some planes and fly them into the buildings. And it will match the actual events: planes hit buildings, balls of flame (note!), time passes, buildings fall down.
It would take incredibly weird explosive engineering to simulate that. You have to time the explosion with when and where the plane hitting, mask the explosion with flames (which means the building had tanks of fuel stashed around the right floors as well), then delay for some time, then bring down the buildings.
Note that you can’t trust the explosives to go off at the time of the building collapse. The impact and fire from the plane hitting the building would either set some of them off or destroy the ignition systems. So they have to go off exactly right at the time of the crash.
The back of my envelope says “You’re too stupid to understand the most basic concepts involved so why bother?”
It would be like trying to explain dark matter to a flat earther.
Of course, it is physically possible to bring down a building with explosives. It’s physically possible to do a lot of things.
But as an engineering (vs theoretical) matter, the reality of doing so must consider the real world constraints that surely exist. And one of those challenges in the case of 9/11 conspiracy theory is the rather non-trivial challenge of just how such explosives would be planted clandestinely and how they could be set off clandestinely without anybody raising any red flags beforehand, and if that was accomplished, how to stop them from raising red flags after the event. Positing a situation where the island of Manhattan is cleared is akin to solving astronaut medical issues by assuming the human body is a uniform sphere. And when we get to the point where unrealistic assumptions are requested, asking for realistic conclusions based on those unrealistic assumptions is sort of silly.
As noted, buildings are demolished all the time. It’s not exactly ‘simple’ but it is not something that is a uniquely difficult challenge. The engineering difficulty in all the 9/11 conspiracy scenarios is accomplishing the demolition without leaving residual evidence and without people noticing a demolition team planting literally tons of explosives. I’ll grant the better conspiracy theories take this into account by positing a conspiracy involving thousands, which has its own problems as thousands of people can’t keep anything a secret for long, but at least those theories try. There’s also the further difficulty of explaining why then an airplane had to simultaneously be hijacked and flown into the tower.
Since this was reported as a personal insult, I’m going to say that I interpret “You’re” as being directed at conspiracy theorists, rather than anyone in this thread, and so not a personal insult.
It’s all just too stupid, these elaborate theories.
You know how you could have brought down the WTC with explosives? A large enough explosion in a corner of the parking structure that weakens/destroys the base wall and causes the upper floors to become unsupported. Then part or all of the building collapses.
Ramzi Yousef et al came close in 1993. Just how close is a matter of some debate.
Make the device something like 5 times the size, with higher brissance explosives like e.g., PETN or HMX, with better tamping and placement, and maybe he could have undermined the structure.
