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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.
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.
These
spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked
the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.
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.
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.
Tully
was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to re move the debris from the
site.
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."
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.
AFP
asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.
"Yes,"
he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements."
These
incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts
of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said.
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.
Construction
steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Asked
what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet
fuel."
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."
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.
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."
Experts
disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This
is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
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.
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."
"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?"
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."
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."
SEISMIC
'SPIKES'
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.
While
the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes
with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.
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.
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.
These
unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the
theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the
collapses.
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.
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.
Experts
cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit
the ground.
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."
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.
"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.
One
of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs
register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.
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.
"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."
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
"I
am not a metallurgist," Corley said.
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.
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.
Other
shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports.
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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