WTC tower, what if it did not collapse?

An adjacent building. Or they would have constructed a platform and then built a crane up from that.

If they had been able to put the fire out early the floor trusses would not have sagged. The remaining outer supports would not have been compromised which means they could have reinforced the building and saved it.

I am not a structural engineer, but I’d guess that the horizontal shear strength (if I am using the right term) of the towers was nowhere near as strong as their vertical load-bearing capacity. The enormous weight of the towers could be supported only vertically – they were not rigid enough to behave like a tree trunk. If you tried to tip them over sideways, they would not remain intact and tilt, but crumble as they started to tilt – as the top part got displaced from the vertical, the load bearing structures would break – and they would and come almost straight down anyway.

Yeah, that’s about what I was getting at when I said that there’s only one way they could come down.

I guess for fun, one could perform my experiment in the shower…

I was just a few blocks from the 1993 explosion (afterwards, I figured out I was at B’way and Chambers St). When I read that had the exploded truck been just ten feet nearer the pillar, the building would have toppled. I tried to imagine lower Manhattan with a tower a fifth of a mile long lying across it. But now I realize that it would basically have collapsed, more or less as it did.

By the way, what is the easiest way of shutting up one of these 911 truthers?

Duct tape.

Some time ago, in a 9/11 Truth thread, someone posted a picture of a skyscraper in… I want to say Brazil… that had just tipped over like a tree, instead of coming down the way the WTC did. (This was meant as proof that the WTC must have been a controlled demolition.) IIRC, it looked like an older style of skyscraper, like the Empire State Building, and was much shorter than the WTC.

As I understand it, there was no chance the WTC would have tipped over like that, because of the way it was built. I am not an engineer, however, so take that for what it’s worth.

Just make sure you get the hands, too, or they’ll just pull it back off.

[snipping mine] Using explosives wasn’t an option. The use of explosives for demolition in NYC is illegal because of the “hollowness” of the ground beneath (electrical conduit, steam tunnels, sewage, super-old water lines, and subways, for example). It was discussed and dismissed. Wrecking balls were used on some of the smaller buildings, but only to “drop” the balls, since there’s no room for swinging them. There was a 10,000 ton crane on site (if I recall the tonnage correctly), but the ground was too unstable to make it be of much use. The biggest concern was damage to the slurry wall, or “bathtub,” which did partially fail and was a serious concern. A catastrophic collapse of the pit’s integrity would have flooded out much of Manhattan, Jersey City, and Hoboken.

Using iron workers, carefully cutting into the I-beams and box beams to weaken them. And, in most cases, we tied a bunch of tracked vehicles to the weakened structures to pull them down sideways… always on the lookout for the snapping cable that will take your head off.

GiantRat, you seem to be referring to something that didn’t actually happen as though you were one of the ones doing it. Are you talking about the demolition of some other structure, or the clean-up of the WTC?

This was the intent of the 1993 bombing, NOT turning them into quarter-mile high smokestacks.

The truthers were fond of those pictures, but what they were was solid concrete structures whose foundations had shifted dramatically underneath the building due to an earthquake.

Fly an aircraft into them?

Going in, I thought this was going to be a historical “What-if”. As in, “Well…I don’t think Iraq would have been invaded…etc…”

Perhaps the buildings would have been abandoned and left as a memorial to the people killed and to the US’s resoluteness. Cue a million T-Shirts with Uncle Sam giving two middle fingers, and the towers as the fingers.

How would the pit flooding have affected Jersey City & Hoboken? Is it that the subway tunnels would have flooded up into Jersey?

It would not have been possible for the buildings to fall over like a tree.

None of the column/beam connections could have resisted loads so far off vertical.

Now, let’s say the aircraft hit, there were no fires, and the buildings did not collapse, or that there were fires, but as severe as what happened.

The structural integrity of the buildings would have to be evaluated and then the cost to repair assessed.

If a repair was decided on, cranes would have to brought in to access.

So, what kind of cranes? Perhaps self erecting tower cranes. Or a mast climbing structure fixed to one side of the building would need to be designed. Or, perhaps a winch system could be erected on top of the building used to bring down damaged material, and bring up new material.

In the end, it would be costly, but by no means impossible.