WTC 7 was a controlled demolition

Q1. What is the authoritative source for the list of ten characteristics of controlled demolitions claimed? Specifically justify the ones I claim not to be characteristics, such as having explosives on upper stories and cutting beams to small length. Q2. In particular, what authority claims that *only* controlled demolitions have the claimed characteristics. Q3. Is there any evidence that thermite has ever been used in a controlled demolition anywhere? Q4. Pro, did you read the NIST report on WTC 7? Do you understand it? 1. The onset was not at the base, it was inside the structure on about the 7th of the 47 floors. The NIST simulation was consistent with the photographic evidence. Note that the penthouse on the top moved before the rest of the structure. There was a bulge in the side of the building. Controlled demolition is inconsistent with those events. 2. I did not say all buildings fall straight down. Pro should read my argument and respond to it. 3. No, the videos only show the outside of the structure, not the inside where the failure began. The office fire did not cause simultaneous failure. The NIST report explains the mechanism of progressive collapse in detail. Pro should read it. Pro claims the timing given by simulations is impossible, but he gives no qualified authority who supports his claim. A qualified authority is a structural engineering familiar with the types of simulations used in such analysis. NIST had over 200 of such qualified experts, and independent reviews by the engineering departments of major educational institutions verified the analysis. The Wikipedia article I referenced pointed to the independent reviews. The NIST report explained the mechanism of collapse of WTC 7 and I summarized the analysis. Pro should at least read my summary. Unlike WTC 1 & 2, WTC 7 did not collapse because the fire weakened the steel. WTC 7 collapsed because the heat expanded the steel near the fire. Thermal expansion creates a tremendous force that distorted the structure. The bending caused failure of column 79 by buckling. WTC 7 had an unusual design because it was initially designed as having a smaller footprint, and they patch on a periphery late in the design process. The collapse was a product of this unusual design. Pro should read the report, which explains it in detail. Fires in high rise buildings in which the sprinkler system is inoperative are quite rare. NIST cited two others, and those did not collapse, because they had different designs. Pro supposes that there should be a long history of structural collapses due to fire. That idea supposes that bad designs are repeated. We expect every major design failure to be corrected in future designs. The analysis of the WTC 7 was performed so that future designs will avoid that flaw. Engineering designs do fail; not only buildings, but bridges, dams, airplanes, satellites, antennas, and space shuttles. The goal is for each failures not to be repeated, and that is pretty much what happens. Failures due to shoddy construction recur, but design failures are usually corrected. The space shuttle exploded due to an O-ring failure due to low temperatures. That never happened before? What would be difficult to explain would be it happening again. Unique failures are what we expect. We don't expect and future building to fail by the WTC 7 mechanism. 4. Pro asks, "Well yes gravity is gravity, but how do you make a building fall at freefall speed?" It is because there is nothing in the building strong enough to resist the fall. The steel doesn't squish like a spring. Tempered steel is strong but brittle, so it snaps when overstressed. It shatters like glass, which is very fast. Cracks propagate at something like 20 times the speed of sound. However, even if you don't understand it, there are no explosives involved so we expect it to be the same in all collapses. 5. The number of 4000 occupants is given in the NIST report. Wikipedia has a good article on WTC 7 http://en.wikipedia.org... with many references. It says, "In all, 7 World Trade Center had 1,868,000 sq ft (174,000 mï¿½) of office space." That is about half the floor space of the Empire State Building. For comparison, the Empire State Building site says, http://www.esbnyc.com... "More than 15,000 people work in the building and another 10,000 to 20,000 people enter the building each day to visit tenants, patronize our stores, banks or shops, or go the our Observatories." Half that many workers for WTC 7 would be in the ball park, although WTC 7 would not have any tourists. If there were 4000 occupants, that would be about 450 sq. ft. per occupant. That includes hallway and utility space, but even so it seems quite generous, given that office cubicles are typically 100 sq. ft. or less. Nearly two-thirds of the building was occupied by a brokerage firm. The government agencies cited by Pro occupied less than 2% of the total space. No one saw any preparations for controlled demolition, and those preparations would be elaborate. 6. Pro admits that substantial debris was outside the building footprint, contrary to his asserted characteristics of controlled demolition. Pro asks "Haha but i guess office fires did that too rite?" [sic] No, kinetic energy from about 500,000 tons of stuff falling an average of 250 feet does that. 7. Pro did not respond. 8. Pro claims, "I have asked you twice now were you got the information that WTC 7 has the potential energy of 2500 tons of tnt, and you have yet to tell me were your getting that statement ..." I gave the reference to Prof. Greening's paper that gives the energy calculations in detail. Greening shows the energy is ample to pulverize concrete. The energy given in joules can be converted to tons of TNT http://en.wikipedia.org... 9. I agreed there was molten metal. I asked Pro how thermite, or anything else, could melt metal in one shot so that it stayed melted for weeks. Pro ignored my question and wasted space reasserting what was agreed to. The metal would rapidly resolidify without a continuing heat source. NIST explained it as a natural furnace effect in the heaps of debris. 10. "Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide, which produces an aluminothermic reaction known as a thermite reaction. It is not explosive, but can create short bursts of extremely high temperatures focused on a very small area for a short period of time." http://en.wikipedia.org... It is not an explosive. Pro says, it reaches high temperatures in *2-3 seconds* Two to three seconds is not an explosion. Pro's reference 12 is a text slide. Pro should explain why natural processes can be excluded from producing such common substances as iron oxide in the dust. Repeating that it might be thermite is not convincing, because the materials are so common, thermite is not used in controlled demolition, and preparing the building for controlled demolition without any of 4000 people noticing is inconceivable. 11. Pro notes a story that two months after 9/11 that engineers were baffled over the collapse of WTC 7. That's true. Conspiracy theorists concluded within days that it was a conspiracy. By contrast, engineers need substantial work to derive the real reasons. Plane crashes, for example, usually take a couple of years to come to a conclusion. In this case WTC 1 & 2 were given higher priority. Quick conclusions about difficult problems are a sign of gross incompetence. 12. Pro says, "Up to 400 trucks a day came and removed the steel from the WTC crime scene and shipped it over seas to china. That is called destruction of evidence and it is illeg[al]" Recovering the bodies was a higher priority than preserving the rubble heap, so they cleared the rubble as fast as possible. That's common sense and exactly what should have been done.