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a new investigation.
In light of public and expert doubt of various explanations, evinced by such a significant call for a scientific and technological investigation, this Act would initiate the most thorough examination of all known and discoverable evidence to date as to what caused the catastrophic structural failures of the buildings.
(b) Functions - Areas of scientific and technological investigation shall include the following theories:
(1) That collapses of WTC 1 and 2 were attributable to commercial aircraft strikes on the buildings, loosening asbestos wrappings of the steel framing which then weakened the structures.
(2) That collapses of WTC 1 and 2 were attributable to the softening of key columns both by aircraft strikes and subsequent jet-fuel fires that ignited office furnishings and materials in the first and only instance in 100 years that fires cause the collapse of steel-framed high-rise buildings.
Skyscrapers around the world have burned for hours without collapse. In fact, no high-rise building in the world has ever collapsed because of fire. The most recent has been the August 18, 2007 seven-alarm, nearly eight-hour fire at the 43-story Deutsche Bank building across from the South Tower site. The bank was completed in the same year as the Towers (1973) and was being demolished floor-by-floor until a workman’s cigarette ignited the mid-afternoon blaze. Unlike the three WTC buildings, the bank’s structure was open to inpouring oxygen because of its deconstruction. Yet its steel beams did not soften or collapse.
(3) That compressed air was created as each floor collapsed onto those beneath it. This theory rests on the view that “pancaking” of floors was a factor in the collapses, a phenomenon that experts estimate would have reached a 14-story pile of concrete and steel rubble——or 12.5% of a 110-story building——not five feet of dust from the Twin Towers and five- or six-story high pile of rubble from Building 7.
(4) That the phenomenon of Martensitic Transformation (phase change) was present whereby steel heated above 1,335ºF recrystalizes as austenite and softens and/or melts as temperatures increase. Thus, jet fuel from the aircraft was said to have caused fires hot enough to reach those temperatures simultaneously and throughout the Towers 110 floors of steel columns and beams.
In the case of the 47-story Building No. 7, minimal fires said to be from Tower debris never reached temperatures sufficient to blow out the windows, and FEMA could not single out a definitive cause for the collapse.
(5) That steel floor trusses were of a lighter weight than the columns and beams and therefore subject to a more rapid Martensitic Transformation from the jet-fueled fires. The theory provided suggests that when heat rapidly expanded the trusses, it caused “thermal bowing.” That, in turn, exerted “pull-in forces” on the exterior columns thus compressing the trusses. Compounded by shear forces within the trusses, the “diagonal struts” buckled, setting off cracking and buckling of an exterior column wall. The “explosive” sounds were attributed to the snapping of columns and beams.
That supposedly set off a chain-reaction, forcing tilting of the Towers, which then spread buckling to all walls and into the structures’ core. The combination of tilting top sections and their overwhelming weight then were to have led to the buildings’ rapid vertical collapses nearly into their own footprints. This phenomenon is called “progressive failure” (pancaking).
The phenomenon of dust instead of concrete rubble was explained as an ongoing energy transfer sufficient enough “to have crushed more than 90% of the floor concrete to particles well within the observed particle size range.” Too, doubts about the concrete quality were raised about the possibilities of “freezing during curing or too much air or water being added during construction.”
The volcano-like plumes of smoke were attributed to compression of air in elevator and air-conditioning shafts as floors collapsed. The “squibs” (ejections of materials) seen in photographs and videography were said to be light reflected from broken bits of aluminum cladding from the buildings’ exterior.
Further, the broken windows and detached marble panels in the lobby and witness accounts of explosions first occurring in the basements were attributed to “torque forces” from aircraft strikes above the 92nd floor in No. 1 and the 78th floor in No. 2.
As to molten metal that reportedly burned for weeks under the sites of No. 1 and 7, the cause was said to be the WTC’s still-operational continuous battery systems.
(6) That NIST panelists admitted in their 10,000-page WTC report (October 2007) the free-fall vertical collapses of the Towers——by symmetrical progression——in less than 11 seconds just outside their footprints, was “inexplicable.”
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