Asphalt roads explode with oxygen - you don’t even need methane.
Quote from Mythbusters (even they are scared of LOX):
“Though there are a couple of stories we wanted to do, but couldn’t… and one of them is about a truck filled with liquid oxygen: supposedly, once it breeches and spills on the highway, it turns the entire highway into a bomb. It’s the interaction between liquid oxygen and the asphalt. We started doing some testing on this—small tests, without filming—but it was enough to discover that liquid oxygen is the scariest shit on earth. It can really turn an oily rag into a high explosive.”
This is consistent with what I mentioned upthread re: soaking charcoal briquettes in LOX: solid fuels, ground fine enough and interspersed with oxidant, can produce a mixture that is prone to detonation.
As I understand it, all the terrorist would need is to buy or steal the right kind of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. I’m actually not sure if that stuff is still trivially available, but it almost has to be (what else would farmers use?)
Feed stores today probably ask for ID and proof that someone has a farm. They’d probably call the cops if a young middle eastern man tried to buy some. But the terrorists could simply break in at night and steal the stuff, I suspect rural feed stores don’t have bank vault grade security.
Then it’s trivial. They just need to buy a used dump truck, dump all the fertilizer into the drum, and fill a fueling truck with enough number 2 diesel. They would turn the drum on and spray the fuel from a hose from the fueling truck into the dump truck, mixing it up. Wikipedia contains the recipe with the proportions.
All they need is a smaller bomb to set it off. This was basically what a group of terrorists tried in one Tom Clancy novel. They were caught because of the smell.
This may be off topic, but I think the damage to the WTC was so great that even if they hadn’t collapsed, they’d have to be demolished and torn down later anyway.
Conversely, this thing File:Cement mixer.jpg - Wikipedia with a rotating drum is a cement mixer truck, cement delivery truck, or just plain cement truck.
Where do you live, and what are the terms of art used there?
Sorry, I meant cement mixer. Out of curiosity, is pure ammonium nitrate fertilizer still commonly available or have the manufacturers all transitioned to a non exploding type? I’ve read that this is chemically possible : that you can change the mix to make it not as kaboomy without raising the cost of the fertilizer by very much.
Don’t want to start a GD (13 years after the facts) but I disagree. I don’t believe the impact of the aircraft alone would have done (or did) significant structural damage. Sure they were traveling at 500+ mph but an airliner is just a big aluminum beer can. It can’t destroy steel girders thru kinetic energy alone. In fact when the WTC was designed I believe the structure itself was expected to survive at least a 707 impacting it. Witness what little damage the B-17 did to the Empire State Building in 1945.
It was the chemical energy of all that fuel and the lack of fireproofing left on the steel. What annoys me the most is how the stupid ignorant sand monkey terrorists are no engineers and had no idea of any of this potentially happening. It was just a blunt force attack with an undefended civilian aircraft on an undefendable civilian building. Same as ramming a fuel truck into a schoolyard. Pure savage barbarism…
I realize this is a hot button topic for some folks, but let’s keep the racial slurs out of GQ.
No warning issued.
Moderator Action
This thread has strayed away from the OP and is evolving into more of a general 9/11 discussion, of which there are numerous other threads. Since the OP has probably received about as much of a factual discussion as is possible, I am going to close this and direct further 9/11 discussions to the appropriate threads and forums.
