Anyone know about electrical cables and fire?

[freedom fighter jh]

This morning I was trying to relate to a friend my perspective on 911, explaining the impossibility of the theory that airplane collisions caused the towers to collapse at free-fall speed. My friend then raised the possibility that fires weakened the building cores. The question of hydrocarbon fires has been examined pretty thoroughly, but my friend suggested electrical fires caused by short-circuited cables. Indeed, the buildings' utility cables did run in the cores. I don't know the first thing about electricity or electric cables. Is this plausible?

Does anyone know what can cause electrical cables to short circuit and how hot or long they are likely to burn? Is it possible that electric cables caused the cores of the WTC towers to burn so hot and so long on so many places as to weaken the columns and facilitate the collapse?

Does anyone know what else was in the cores besides columns and their bracing, stairwells, water pipes and air vents, and electric cables? My friend suggested gas but I believe William Rodriguez (WTC janitor for 20 years) said there was no gas in the building.

[hpot]

1. Two minor flaws

The cores had no flammable material and circuit breakers would have protected floors from major electrical surges. Still not enough to bend thick steel beams. There could have been isolated sections of live frayed wires but nothing more.

[DoYouEverWonder]

2. In WTC 7 fuel was a factor

There were four large storage tanks in the lower levels of WTC 7 for the back up power systems that were installed when Rudy Giuliani built his OEM bunker. These large tanks feds generators located on the 5th floor and other day tanks that were located on various floors inside the building.

The 5th floor system is very likely to have played a roll in causing the collapse of the building. Pressurized fuel lines ran the length of the 5th floor directly under the trusses and support beams that held up the rest of the building.

All 4 of the big storage tanks were found damaged but intact. However, two of the tanks were empty with no sign of contamination under them. The fuel had to have gone somewhere.

There was also a natural gas line in WTC 7 that ran all the way to a kitchen near the top of the building, that may have also played a role.

Funny thing none of these systems were part of the original design of the building. They were installed after the 1993 WTC bombing.

[dailykoff]

4. Didn't they find a lot of fuel in those tanks afterward?

I dunno, but if fossil fuel had had anything to do with the collapse, I think there would have been a lot more fire and spectacular explosions, and it would have taken longer to bring it down.

Building 7 dropped on 9/11 like a textbook demo and probably was.

[DoYouEverWonder]

5. There were at four main tanks

Two 12,000 gallon tanks which were pretty much full when they were recovered and two 6,000 gallon tanks which were found empty. The two 6,000 gallon tanks were the ones that provided fuel for the generators that were housed on the 5th floor for Rudy's OEM bunker.

March 2, 2002
Burning Diesel Is Cited in Fall of 3rd Tower

Massive structural beams that functioned as a sort of bridge to hold up the 47-story skyscraper known as 7 World Trade Center were compromised in a disastrous blaze fed by diesel fuel, leading to the building's collapse on Sept. 11, investigators have concluded in a preliminary report.

The tower was set on fire by debris from the twin towers and burned for about seven hours before collapsing in the late afternoon under previously unexplained circumstances. The analysis of its collapse is one of the first detailed findings by a team of engineers organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Society of Civil Engineers to understand the fate of all the buildings around the site.

As much as 42,000 gallons of diesel fuel was stored near ground level in the tower and ran in pipes up to smaller tanks and emergency generators for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's command center, the Secret Service's office and other tenants.

Investigators have determined that the burning fuel apparently undermined what is known as a transfer truss. The trusses, a series of steel beams that allowed the skyscraper to be built atop multistory electricity transformers, were critical to the structural integrity of the building and ran near the smaller diesel tanks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/nyregion/02TOWE.html?ex=1161576000&en=305ab6058ac5ba2e&ei=5070

How the fuel was set on fire and stayed lit in just the right places is the big question. I don't think it would have been hard to tap into this system and plug in a few blow torches?

[dailykoff]

6. My guess

is that if anything, they were hoping the diesel would produce a big fiery inferno and make a good cover story, but it didn't work out, LOL.

I don't think it's possible for diesel to cut steel, at least not in just a few seconds, so it looks like they used conventional explosives for that.

p.s. anything in the NYT re. 9/11 is sure to be bullshit. If a 9/11 reporter occasionally got something right (as Eric Lipton sometimes did), a fellow reporter (James Glanz) or editor was always quick to slap it down with a lie.

I learned this a couple of years back when the two of them appeared in a NYT online forum question-answer series to flog a book they'd co-written about the WTC, which was, predictably, full of bullshit.

[TheWraith]

7. Blow torches don't run on diesel fuel.

[DoYouEverWonder]

22. Not normally

but you can make a torch that uses diesel fuel.

Supposedly an air-diesel torch gives intense heat that cuts very quickly. There was an article about how to make one in Popular Science.

[seatnineb]

9. Don't forget the diesel tanks on the 88th floor of WTC2!!!!!!

That was the year the twin towers of the World Trade Center were completed and Braford was the construction superintendent for the electrical end of the project in the south tower. He said he supervised the installation of three generators on the 88th floor of the south tower.

Braford was familiar with many details of the building, telling how there were water tanks for keeping the generators cool and diesel fuel tanks there to run the generators.

http://www.unioneagle.com/2001/september/20connections.html

[DoYouEverWonder]

23. Nice find

I hadn't seen that one before.

Thanks.

[rman]

8. FEMA doesn't think so

FEMA (
World Trade Center Building Performance Study
WTC7
5.7 Observations and findings (page 31)
..."The specifics of the fires in WTC7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analysis are needed to resolve this issue."
http://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/fema403_ch5.pdf
http://www.fema.gov/library/wtcstudy.shtm

[DoYouEverWonder]

11. Well the NIST folks seem to think otherwise

• The two 6,000 gallon tanks supplying the 5th floor generators through a pressurized piping system were always kept full for emergencies and were full that day.

Both tanks were found to be damaged by debris and empty several months after the collapse. Some fuel contamination was found in the gravel below the tanks and sand below the slab on which the tanks were mounted, but no contamination was found in the organic marine silt/clay layer underneath.

• This finding allows for the possibility, though not conclusively, that the fuel may have contributed to a fire on Floor 5.


A majority of the 5th floor was not protected by sprinkler systems, with the exception of mechanical space to east and office area to north side of building; no evidence of sprinklers in enclosures on 5th floor (also on floors 7, 8, and 9) which housed OEM generators and day tanks. Seventh floor generator room may have been sprinklered, conflicting data.


Sprinkler systems on floors 1 through 20 were supplied directly from the city distribution system through an automatic pump located on the 1st floor; water supply could be interrupted by loss of power to fire pump or significant damage to underground city main in vicinity of building.

http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/WTC%20Part%20IIC%20-%20WTC%207%20Collapse%20Final.pdf#search=%22WTC%207%20floor%20plan%20NIST%22

Unfortunately, both the FEMA and NIST reports are of limited usefulness. Both studies were based on faulty premises, so they could only go down hill from there. None the less, there is some good data buried in these reports.

[rman]

17. Doesn't look like NIST concludes the fires caused the collapse

The NIST report (at least the part that you quoted) doesn't say anything about the fires causing the collapse of WTC7 - it just says the diesel fuel probably did contribute to the fire, but FEMA also says that.

The main difference between the reports re WTC7 is that FEMA says explicitly that the diesel fuel fires are very unlikely to have caused the collapse of the building.

The reports don't disagree on anything substantial, and both leave the collapse of WYC7 unexplained.

[DoYouEverWonder]

18. I don't think there was any fire

There was very little in the way of combustibles on the mechanical floors. That doesn't mean that they didn't use the fuel in some other way to bring down the building.

Don't they make blow torches that can use diesel?

[rman]

20. There are photos of fires in WTC7,

though not extensive fires by any stretch of the imagination.
And there's video footage of the south side of the building showing large amounts of smoke and/or dust pooring from all the windows - but no fires are visible.

As to the blow torches, i think it'd be to slow to work well for demolition.
If the perps could get access to the towers to prepare them for demolition, then why not WTC7?

[DoYouEverWonder]

21. I'm sorry I wasn't clear

I was referring to just the 5th Floor.

There was no concrete evidence of fire on the 5th Floor, even though this is the floor that failed first according to the NIST report.

The 5th floor did not have windows, so if anything was burning it would be more difficult to observe from the outside. However, the 5th floor had a masonry wall running east to west across the middle of the building, that should have prevented an 'accidental' fire from jumping to the other side. So if something melted or cut the bases of the main trusses it would have had to have been deliberate and timed so that they would all fail at the same time.

That's why I think there was some built in mechanism that was triggered, probably after the day tanks ran out and the pressurized fuel system kicked in. Funny thing, when the building was abandoned these systems were supposed to have been shut down but they weren't.

Even if blow torches are slow work, maybe that's why it took all until 5:20 PM for the building to come down?

There are a couple of reason why I think they may have used components of this backup power system to take down the building. It was installed after the 1993 bombing and was supposedly designed by Jerome Hauer and installed on his insistence despite warnings from FDNY that this system could cause a catastrophic failure of the building.

Second, such a system could be installed in broad daylight, without anyone suspecting it's ultimate purpose.

Third, such a system would leave little evidence behind, since it used mostly materials already within the building.

[dailykoff]

3. Not a chance.

I believe that after the '75 fire, which started in a junction box and spread to several floors through raceways cut through the floors for electrical conduits, they started putting firestops in all the raceways, which they should have done in the first place.

p.s. the '75 fire was pretty bad but it did no structural damage whatsoever.

[LARED]

10. Hummm

Electric arcs can burn very hot, and would be a prime suspect in igniting the jet fuel. Electric arc flashes that occur at the moment of a short (before any protection trips the circuit) can be as hot as 10,000 deg F setting combustibles nearby on fire. It is nearly impossible that electric cables continues to arc as there are circuit breakers and fuses to prevent that from happening.

The WTC had a restaurant on the top floor so it is likely at least one of the towers had gas running to the top. Also each tower had two or three mechanical floors where HVAC units would have provide hot air. They likely would has used gas as well. I have not verified what type of heating systems were in the building.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. I remember reading

that the towers used steam heat provided by the City.

That's on my to do list, to figure out how the heating systems worked.

If I wanted to take the buildings down, wouldn't one of the easiest and best ways be, to use the fuel systems & sources already in the buildings?

[LARED]

13. Steam would make sense

If I wanted to take the building down, I would simply blow out the foundations. I would not bother hijacking planes, setting the building on fire, planting controlled demolition devices, etc, etc.

[Ezlivin]

14. "I would not bother hijacking planes..."

Not unless you were trying to "sell" another story. After all, if the buildings had been openly demolished, we'd not have the tragic cellphone calls, the "Let's roll" heroism or handy photos of the Middle Eastern terrorists to blame.

[LARED]

15. Do you actually beleive that if radical Islamist blew up

the WTC building's rather than flying planes into them, Americas response would have been different?

Really?

[DoYouEverWonder]

16. The American's may have responded the same

But the victim's families and insurance companies would not have.

It would have been a huge security breach if anyone got into the buildings with bombs again. Same thing with the planes, that's why they needed the boxcutter myth. If the hijackers had smuggled on a bomb or guns the Airlines would have been held liable.

Why do you think BushCo was so quick to make sure the airlines and the victims families got well taken care of?

[Ezlivin]

24. Yes

Because Americans' response would have been tempered by the pace of a full-fledged criminal investigation. The months or years that a proper investigation would have taken would have prevented the rush to pass the Patriot Act or to invade/bomb Afghanistan.

[LARED]

25. Why do you think there would be a full-fledged criminal investingation

if radical Islamists blew up the WTC rather than flying planes into them?

[Ezlivin]

26. Because there would be no "shock and awe"

The enormity of the events on 9/11 allowed critical evidence to be discarded. The recent reports of human remains being discovered indicates that the area was not treated as a crime scene; the urgent rapidity of the site clean-up prevented it.

If "radical Islamists blew up the WTC", a large-scale investigation would follow, concerning itself with how the buildings' security had been breached and the identity of all involved. Since everyone "saw" planes flying into buildings, it was a lot easier for the government to "fill in the blanks" and steer the subsequent (and inadequate) investigations.

[freedom fighter jh]

19. Thank you to all contributors

Sorry for the delayed feedback. As you can see, I'm new to DU. This is my first thread, and it took me a very long time to find it after I posted it.

Thank you, all contributors. You have given me much to consider. I will forward your thoughts to my friend. This friend is just the kind of person you want to talk to: She had never considered the possibility that the OCT might not be true, but when I spoke to her about it her responses were reasonable and on the level, and she never once even hinted that I might be out of my mind.

Thanks again.

jh