Ed Pfister, a veteran of three hurricanes and two flood relief efforts, and a member of the elite Disaster Medical Assistance Team, wrote in his diary "deep below ground a portion of the pile was still on fire and boiled with molten material. Sometimes, open flame would erupt as a crane pulled debris out and air rushed in. Fire hoses constantly poured streams of water causing huge billowing steam clouds to rise up over the site into the huge lights above." NIH
Guy Lounsbury, with the 109th Air Wing of the New York Air National Guard wrote, "The men who work on this must constantly change their boots as the heat melts them. Two weeks after the attack, one fireman told us that there was still molten steel at the heart of the towers' remains."
Apparently, though, John Gross of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in a lecture at the University of Texas outright denied these "obvious truths" existed, and the NIST investigation into what initiated the collapse sequence, upon which so much of the official conspiracy theory is based, made no mention of any of this.
This "obvious truth" is also difficult, apparently, for The Economist to face up to. It is better to relegate it to asinine comparisons to Elvis sightings and reptilian rulers (though I might venture your former PM, and our current cowboy just might...)
The significance of molten metal in the basements of three completely separate, distinct collapse events...? Taken together with USGS findings of once-molten micro-spheres of molybdenum (pdf) (2726C) and iron (1500C), and RJLee's (pdf) study for the Deustche Bank damage assessment report, also finding once-molten micro-spheres of iron, but also boiled alumino-silicates (2750C) and vaporized lead (1740C), or Worcester Polytechnic Institute's fire investigatory study examining steel taken from the collapse site and finding "swiss cheese" like holes in inch thick steel flanges, with edges that curled like a scroll and thinned down to razor sharp edges...THIS taken with the maximum temperature of a controlled hydrocarbon burn in air of about 1200C, and the at least 118 eyewitness reports (pdf) of multiple, chaotic explosions throughout the buildings well prior to the collapse, carefully differentiated and categorized from the Oral Histories collected by the NYC Fire Commissioner's office... and the video and photographic documentation of explosive characteristics... and the seismic record of seismic events well in advance of the actual collapses... and the sulfidation of steel (FEMA), indicative of explosives residue, along with other residues common to variants of military type explosives... taken together there is some pretty hard, factual evidence behind the hypothesis that something other than damage, fire, and gravity completely collapsed those towers.
Perhaps one of your "crackerjack" investigative reporters there at The Economist could take a hint and investigate these "obvious truths" and help get to the bottom of this conspiracy. Then again, maybe it is simply safer to make juvenile comparisons to reptilian leaders from outer space and dismiss the whole business as a public hunger for far-fetched theories.
A big acknowledgment to the site: nasathermalimages.com
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