End Your Day With A Bang!

No wonder rents are going up....

Couldn't watch more than 2 mins. - too upsetting. Years to build, seconds to destroy.

...even so, you have to admire the skill of the engineers, bringing the buildings down, mostly within the footprint of the building.

Yes indeed - incredible.

It sure beats the old wrecking ball.

Sadly, a search for "wrecking ball" images now brings nothing but images of some naked slut.

I checked it out - you are absolutely right. Perhaps I'm being naïve but it's a very tenuous connection. Has Google images gone completely mad?

Yeah, but if you notice some of the stuff off to the right (or just Google it) you can get the Busby Berkeley classic "The Lady in Red", with Wini Shaw and Judy Canova.

For those who haven't yet had the pleasure of seeing "The Busby Berkeley Disk", let me recommend it with high enthusiasm.

This got my attention: St. Maarten takeoffs, landings & Smokin' chick in bikini

Funny how the twin towers went down in such a similar way.

Gravity will do that. Remember that most of these demolitions are for structures no where near the height (and vertical loading) of the Twin Towers.

The towers were so high that weakening the structure by intense heating of the beams at the levels where the airliner impacts were was enough to start bringing down the upper portions then a cascade failure will take place by overloading the the remaining structure as momentum builds. The towers were made for a static vertical loading of X. The upper portions collapsing produced a dynamic vertical (and off-axis) loading of probably 2-3 X. Metal frames will fail under those conditions.

I hate the conspiracy wingnuts who keep attempting to say that the twin towers were rigged to implode and the whole incident of was some kind of giant set up for war. Bull crap. Ignorant people who start rumors as this should be subjected to the consequences of their words. (Maybe a week in the stocks would be a suitable punishment, or just cut out their tongues and feed them to wolves). But there again, I am one old hateful s.o.b.

Agreed!

The terrorist pilots were instructed by an architect at what level to fly into the buildings to collapse them.

I forget the exact phrase he used but it was a reference to a part of the human body.

I seem to remember an interview with someone at the time who said the towers were not meant to collapse as they did. The planes impacted at an angle on the side to cause the upper stories to fall like a tree. The fact that they fell totally was just a bonus to the planners. By the way, at the time of construction, the builders stated that the design would take the impact of an airplane, as the Empire State Building did. And it wasn't the impact that caused the failure.

They didn't say which airplane either.

In the newspaper recently:

'Blame us for 9/11 and face the consequences' Saudi Arabia issues warning over terror link

SAUDI Arabia has warned the United States of serious consequences if a ruling is made holding it responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Saying SA is responsible is like saying (sort of) that America is responsible for the Jim Jones Kool-Aid massacre. We might state on the other hand that terrorists with Saudi Arabian ties (to Bin Laden) were involved. This in no way states that any of the Saudi Royal family would ever sanction such an attack or support it in any way.

I couldn't agree with you more! At least once or twice a month I do battle with the ignorant twin towers conspiracy wingnutz on Facefuk....it gets tiring and old hat very quickly to repeat myself.

Not one of them have ever bothered to read the official reports, particularly the ASCE one, and if they did happen to read it none would necessarily understand the structural mechanics of the failures. SMH...

Now with the help of that eventful, unexpected, and uneducated form of reversed engineering, architects and engineers alike learned the weaknesses and design flaws of the demolished twin towers! By having done so, taught them how to improve, strenghten their design strategies, together with strength of materials knowledge!

Whether the event was a conspiracy or really is not an issue, but whether backward or forward engineered, it does always matters for continued improvement! And that event showed them all the weak areas that technically needed improvement!

In my experience it was really difficult to mix any technical matters with politics !!

Understanding even rudimentary engineering and physics should teach the trained observer, that this (the Twin Towers) was no demolition shot, and was not a government conspiracy. I am simply going to disregard people who ascribe such Machiavellian characteristics to our leaders of government. I know that such principles are useful in government, and can be for the best outcome (especially in times of war), but never in any sense could it be allowed, permitted, or postulated to rise to such a level as to conspire directly against the lives of so many people at once. To suggest such a thing simply requires suspension of sanity and reality.

There was nothing, "uneducated" about that operation. It had been in planning for years!

Perhaps you missed the part where the pilots were instructed by an experienced architect. Bin Laden's family was heavily in to construction and no doubt had many architects on staff who would help.

The planes were all fully fueled for transcontinental flights and had just taken off.

None of this was by chance.

Some things are diffucult to plan for.

Japanese planners didn't plan for the tsunami that took out their nuclear power plant either.

I agree Lyn, "Uneducated", may be a wrong choice of word. "Unorthodox" probably is a more preferable word to describe the methodology used in bringing down the towers...

At any rate, I was just across the East River, where my Brooklyn office windows was directly facing the towers when that tragic event took place! The haunting memories more so with the helplessness and hatred that lingers ......conspiracy or not!

I watched it on TV, but the image of that second jet banking sharply at the last minute still comes back sometimes when a plane flies over.

My wife and mother-in-law were stranded in Estes Park Colorado for two days. They were on their way to Denver to fly home when all the planes were grounded.

You do realize that Bin Laden was a degreed Civil Engineer, and there are quite a few books that a go into the exact way that it was designed and built. I watched it go up, and I watched it come down, plus I got within a block of "The Pile".

I always argue against the conspiracy theorists, but the one thing that I cannot explain is how it fell faster than gravity would have pulled a billiard ball released from the top at the instant the tower started falling.

In my perspective the following logical reasons may have been mostly the contributing factors in that tragedy!

1) the amount of jet fuel burned within the building which caused immediate and unmeasurable degradation of all surrounding building materials. Materials that were all weakend, melted mainly due mostly to exposures to extreme temperatures...

2) the critical point, floor level where the tower was hit and where the jet plane got stuck, burning all of its fuel...

3) the weight of the upper floors that fell onto the lower floors, serving as a huge pile of reinforced concrete being driven down to an already weakend lower part of the tower! Similar to a domino effect as triggered by the melting of steel beams and evaporation of several floors together with the jet plane...

I guess you add to that the weight of an aircraft & passengers.

Plus all of the building occupants (RIP) that were not able to escape!

I think you already have your answer to the faster than gravity statement. It is because there are impacts driving the failure below the falling material, and these transmit very quickly. Think of a giant landslide.

Does a landslide have to necessarily have the material at the top reach the bottom at the same time as the lower portions of landslide? NO! It self propagates similar to a wave, where the impinging material from above induces release of material much farther down, then the whole mass begins to move in unison. Otherwise, I do not believe pyroclastic flow could reach as high a velocity as it does.

People that believe in the conspiracy do not understand the days & weeks of preparation required for a successful demolition. A lot of material has to be removed & weak spots created to allow the charges to make the final cut.

As we used to say: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." I have seen these gigantic egos coming up in the younger generation, and it follows from not having been broadly educated, but rather educated within the humanistic framework, where there is no higher power to be responsible to.

My Bible still contains the verse about rightful self image:

Romans 12:3

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.

Thus it should be clear that we are put here to serve one another (lovingly) in humility, knowing that the greatest engineer sees and knows our plight, and is mindful of our frame.

"Sober judgement" may be hard for some people to come by.

Vanity being what it is and keeping in mind:

No, there's not a reverent bone in my body.

Not really in mine either, but I was raised by a sweet mother who was natural gardener, who seemed reverent in her ways, and had respect for God, so I must be related to her somehow.

Any manmade event do need some thoughts and careful planning to succeed! The end results and lasting effects of such planning is what people normally accepts and believe!

Speculations and theories are always developed and made specially when the event turned into a tragedy! Anyone may or may not label them as conspiracies depending on their level of understanding, emotional involvement, etc.

Considering that some people have never been to a city, and others have never been out of the city, there can be a broad spectrum of personal beliefs about the possible, likely, and impossible.

now-a-days with the worldwide internet availability, only a person's knowledge and understandings are the only factors that should limit his/her bounds! Having said that, anything is possible, as one is only be limited by his/her own imagination and perception!

An engineering marvel! Highlighting the reversed engineering segment of it!

Yeah, now go and play the thing back in reverse and see what it says.

Then there are the epic failures!

epic failure of demolition

FREAKING AWESOME!!! The Sapper in me got a charge (sarc.) watching those Shaped Charges slicing through columns and shear walls like a hot knife going through butter.

Grab a beer and a bucket of popcorn folks!

Got wood for a month now...