- Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from
Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the
World Trade Center's twin towers immediately prior to the
collapse.
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- American Free Press has learned of pools of "molten
steel" found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the
collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has
yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of
energy, which caused unexplained seismic "spikes" at the beginning of
each collapse.
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- These spikes suggest that massive underground
explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations,
causing them to collapse.
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- In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47
central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of
"literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the
collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the
surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these
crucial structural supports failed.
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- Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of
Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw pools of "literally molten steel"
at the World Trade Center.
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- Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to re
move the debris from the site.
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- Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled
Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing
the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the
controlled demolition and implosion of structures."
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- Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days
later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation.
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- AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on
the site.
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- "Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the
basements."
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- These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms
of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement]
levels," Loizeaux said.
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- The molten steel was found "three, four, and five
weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said
molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in
the late afternoon.
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- Construction steel has an extremely high melting point
of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
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- Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully
said, "Think of the jet fuel."
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- Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were
fueled by "paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator
shafts by the tower floors as they 'pancaked' into the basement."
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- However, some independent investigators dispute this
claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles
normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt
steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep
basement.
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- Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC
collapse, Painful Questions,* told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen,
paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator
shafts would probably be "a smoky smoldering pile."
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- Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate
such heat.
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- This is impossible, they say, because the maximum
temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in
air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as
evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach
this upper limit.
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- The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where
abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel
found in the basements.
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- Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne
Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the
site's hot spots.
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- Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in
the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees
F was recorded.
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- This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten
steel in the basement.
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- The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep.
At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported
the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these
lower box columns were four inches thick.
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- Videos of the North Tower collapse show its
communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support
columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux
told AFP, "Everything went simultaneously."
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- "At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower
had been severed from the base and began falling down," Hufschmid
writes. "If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that
progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?"
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- Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before
the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a
structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, "That's the
$64,000 question."
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- Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I
would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building
to help collapse the structure."
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- SEISMIC 'SPIKES'
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- Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC,
recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been
explained.
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- While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth
shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the
beginning of each collapse.
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- The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude
earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04
and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at
10:28:31.
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- However, the Palisades seismic record shows that-as
the collapses began-a huge seismic "spike" marked the moment the
greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all
registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling
debris struck the Earth.
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- These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend
credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers
caused the collapses.
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- A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist
Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an
underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.
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- The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the
amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and
occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to
fall.
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- Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked
before the towers actually hit the ground.
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- Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur
Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University's Center for Hazards and
Risk Research told AFP, "This is an element of current research and
discussion. It is still being investigated."
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- Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave
amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These
"short-period surface waves," reflect "the interaction between the
ground and the building foundation," according to a report from Columbia
Earth Institute.
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- "The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable
to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983,"
the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
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- One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that
the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a
quarry 20 miles away.
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- These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium
nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said
the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs
because it was "not coupled" to the ground.
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- "Only a small fraction of the energy from the
collapsing towers was converted into ground motion," Lerner-Lam said.
"The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was
extremely small."
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- Last November, Lerner-Lam said: "During the collapse,
most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and
the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or
causing other damage-but not causing significant ground shaking."
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- Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground
beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential
energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What
was that energy source?
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- While steel is often tested for evidence of
explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the
towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment
did no such tests.
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- Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the
government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco
and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering
assessment of the WTC collapse.
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- Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on
the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know
about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel.
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- "I am not a metallurgist," Corley said.
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- Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to
Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New
York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East.
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- Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chi ca
go-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly
selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known
as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the
steel.
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- Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India
and other Asian ports.
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- Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years
with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney,
Australia.
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