One person took the trouble to look at my critique of the 9/11
Conspiracy Hoax and answer it. I did not ask (nor did he offer) permission
to publish his private email, so I cannot post it in its entirety. I will
instead summarize his main points and quote relevant excerpts. Apart from
the ad hominem characteristic from one side of this debate, he makes
two points, first about the amount of incendiary
needed, and then about the energy to melt steel.
Derrick Grimmer says:
"...between 6 to 12 tons of HE were sufficient to do in a WTC tower."Mr.Grimmer is absolutely correct that 35 tons of thermite per floor is not needed to take down the WTC towers. In fact, I argue that 10,000 gallons of jet fuel is adequate, and no "HE" is needed at all.
It's unclear what Grimmer means by the unexplained abbreviation "HE"; the initials could stand for "high explosive", but his calculations were for thermite (which is not an explosive in normal usage), and not for any explosive substance. Explosives deform steel, not melt it. These are the kinds of inconsistencies that suggest the C911ers are either disingenuous or ignorant.
Mr.Grimmer's original calculation came up with 3/4 ton (762.5kg) of
thermite to take out a one-foot segment of a steel column the size used
in the WTC tower. There were 47 supporting columns, and if the structure
was over-engineered by a factor of 6 as reported in the C911 sites, then
you need to take out 40 columns to destroy the tower in one floor. That's
30 tons, not six or 12. Perhaps Mr.Grimmer assumes (he nowhere says), that
it is sufficient to take out only 20% of the structural columns, and let
gravity do the rest (he did say that). Numbers that small are pretty close
to what the airplane damage obviously did, making the thermite unnecessary
at all.
"...this energy released is dissipated too fast to allow a temperature to build up to melt or even soften steel."Mr.Grimmer does not seem to have thought through the entire problem, nor even read my analysis very carefully. The energy released from collapsing floors hitting the next floor down is indeed going to be dissipated long before enough of it accumulates to raise the temperature of steel to melting point. I already allocated that energy to creating the dust cloud of (hot) dehydrated concrete, both of which consume large quantities of energy.
What Mr.Grimmer ignores is the stated "near free-fall" velocity of collapse, which would be something like 200mph when a huge mass hit the ground, releasing vast amounts of energy in a very short time in a very small space under high pressure, with little or no time to dissipate through the rubble before more mass added the kinetic energy of its sudden stoppage to it. The reports of molten steel were on the ground, not up in the air before it hit.
Furthermore, Mr.Grimmer should know that chaotic reactions like the
collapse of a building do not generate uniform temperature gradients. The
energy would be distributed non-uniformly in clumps, some places hotter,
some places cooler. After sitting there in a pile for a few weeks the temperature
evens out. A tornado does not on the average have enough power to drive
wheat straws through trees, but clumps of higher energy have been known
to do it, "HE" not needed. We do not know enough about
large building collapse to rule out local build-up of power sufficient
to melt steel.
"Who does he want to believe: Bush or his lying eyes?As in his original calculations, Mr.Grimmer ignores significant parts of the problem. From the flavor of his curiously illogical ad hominem conclusion, I have to believe that Derrick Grimmer is politically motivated like the rest of the C911 team. Mr.Grimmer admits to giving only a "glance" to my mathematics; it shows. Because the technology is not his primary motivation, he has little interest in following all the factors. I didn't vote for Bush, and I'm not asking Bush's opinion. Politics is not my agenda here; truth is. The C911 crowd, Mr.Grimmer included, obviously have other priorities.
Derrick Grimmer"
Tom Pittman
2007 October 2