Humint Events Online: Fireball in the North Tower

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Fireball in the North Tower

Via the Reopen 911 site, for the first time I watched the complete clip (from the Naudet brothers I assume) of the plane hitting the North tower.

What I never realized before is that there is actually a HUGE firebaall right after when "flight 11" hits the North tower.

Like the fireball from the South tower hit, this North tower fireball must have consumed a large portion of the fuel that was in the plane.

The North tower fireball is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of people have been saying that the South tower hit was very different in that the massive fireball from that hit consumed most of the plane's fuel, and therefore not so much fuel could be burned to soften the steel beams holding up the tower. Well, these people are wrong that there was a large difference in the amount of fuel expended in the fireballs from both hits. On the other hand, it seems you can make similar arguments about the amount of fuel that was around in both the North and South tower that was able to heat the steel beams.

At this point, I am strongly inclined to think the fuel from the planes had little to do with the collapses of the two Towers.

Looking at article #4 at this study done by MIT of the damage done by the planes to the two towers, I noticed something that I hadn't really heard before.

The authors of this piece, Tomasz Wierzbicki, Liang Xue and Meg Hendry-Brogan, do a lot of calculations to figure out how much damage was done to the towers JUST from the impact of the planes. What they conclude is interesting, and significant, I think. And intuitively this makes sense as well: the mass and great momentum of the planes penetrated not only the exterior wall of the WTC, a couple of floors but also very likely the planes damaged some of the INNER columns that are key structural elements of the WTC. This analysis therefore changes how we should think about the collapses of the WTC towers. For if the inner columns were damaged by the planes, this would seem to me to be more significant in terms of destabilizing the towers than fires from the plane fuel. Loss of integrity of this central core could be an important aspect to the collapses of these towers.

Nonetheless, we still cannot completely rule out some sort of planned controlled demolition of the towers as a "pre-emptive" strike to minimize problems associated with the towers toppling in unpredictable ways.

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