I was having a conversation about 9/11 and the tower rebuild when the subject of the power/force of the collapse came up.
Now I do not live in the area and have never been there previous to 9/11 but common sense suggests that the sheer amount of “stuff” that was present on all the floors prior to the collapse was immense. 100+ floors of desks, chairs, file cabinets, electronics and computers, cubicle walls, copiers and literally thousands upon thousands of general goods… all reduced to powder and twisted unidentifiable metal as it compressed into a few basement floors.
Notwithstanding the loss of life, to me this is simply amazing. While I realize the compressed force was immense, it is still hard to imagine all those items being reduced to nothing.
Wasn’t there a mall in the basement as well? Vehicles?
Was anything recognizable pulled from the rubble? (I do recall that photos, papers and other very light items were untouched as they fell).
The basement was larger than you think. The WTC basement was 8 floors deep, and extended to an area much wider than the footprint of the towers themselves. There was a lot of space to fill with rubble.
Also **each **of the floors of TWC towers were made of a big slab of concrete. Imagine the compression force of 110 massive concrete slabs all falling one on top of another. As for recognizable items, obviously the higher up they were the less damage they would have had. The hands of one of the flight attendants was found in the top of the wreckage, still bound with nylon ties by the hijackers (and severed by the impact).
The aircraft did not “disappear into atoms.” Parts of the aircraft were clearly visible in photos of the debris and, as Hail Ants posted, a pair of stewardess’s hands was found.
This is often cited by the whoo-whoo crowd. “No airplane parts were found because the government blew up the buildings.” Tons of people saw the second plane it, and parts of the planes were found. Disappeared my ass.
Well I tried to - clearly - illustrate no conspiracy theory as I believe even the possibility to be absurd on the highest order of magnitude. Also my “disappeared into atoms” was mostly hyperbole and not meant to be factual.
I was just commenting on and asking questions about the force of the collapse. :rolleyes:
The Bank of Nova Scotia recovered a significant amount of precious metals from one of its underground vaults. I don’t believe the vault was under the two main towers, though.
So lets say that you had a high quality floor safe with your (insert valuable here)…
was the force of the collapse enough to completely destroy a class 350 safe? What about a TLx class?
I assume that a TXTL class safe would survive, but then again I would not be surprised if it did not.
Links on the right side of that page to the reports on the collapses of WTC1&2 plus WTC7. A little while back I started a thread on the WTC7 report to see what the conspiracy folks thought, you might want to search for that to see some common questions and replies.
Going back to the specific question of how all these things could collapse: buildings may look solid and impressive from the outside, but the reality is that they’re mostly hollow. Even an individual wall is just two thin sheets of drywall with a framework of studs inside, and a modern skyscraper is a steel framework with floors and walls hanging onto it. We can build so big because we build so light.
Most furniture is also primarily empty space. If you’ve ever assembled a small box of panels into a large desk, you know just how much empty space there is. Doing a rough estimate, I’d say my desk takes up 300 cubic feet assembled, but the original parts were only about 12 cubic feet.
Given that the buildings only had to compress by about 90% (100 floors into 10), and that many of the components were flammable, it seems very reasonable to me that they collapsed the way they did.
(You also mention vehicles: Even these are mostly empty space. Just Google car crushers at junk yards.)
Looking at debris fields of pretty much any aircraft crash ever, anywhere,it’s not really a surprise that the planes that hit the WTC and Pentagon were so significantly destroyed; planes break into lots of little parts (they are made of lots of little parts!), many of which can be further crushed by falling bits of building or mangled by fire. Heck, even a regional prophitting a house didn’t leave much of either behind!
chargerrich - people might be a little blunt answering WTC and 9/11 questions around here because, believe me, over the past 11+ years we’ve discussed it all, debunked it all, yelled at each other over it all and are generally burned out on the topic, since this site does tend to attract conspiracy theorists and trolls who want nothing more than to “prove” that Miss Piggy brought the buildings down on the orders of Martians or whatever. Don’t take it personally - it’s really just burnout and impatience with the topic. Your question is actually interesting (forces involved), we just mostly don’t feel like thinking about it any more! Sorry!
This was particularly true of the Twin Towers - most building have interior bearing walls - they didn’t. All the load was carried by the skin (except for some bearing columns around the elevators).
Next, there were 7 basement levels, not 2. Next, about half of the WTC site above ground was physically empty, because it was made up of enormous plazas. The debris from the Twin Towers filled an area much larger in footprint than the towers themselves.
It’s also untrue that all the debris landed on the WTC site. Buildings for blocks around were covered in chunks. And an enormous dust cloud emanated from the site – it looked kinda like this if you recall.
The numbers that I’ve seen say that the perimeter columns bore about 55% to 60% of the load, while the core columns took about 40% to 45%. But that doesn’t tell the whole story, because the perimiter columns were especially dependent on the floors holding them in place horizontally, so that they could bear the vertical weight. When the floors gave way, there was nothing to hold the perimiter columns in place and they got thrown out easily.
However, with both towers, there was a very large height of the core columns still standing right after the collapse of the floors and perimeter columns, then those core columns collapsed as well (they also needed the floors to be stable, but they were in more of a frame configuration and could stand for a little longer.
