The 9-11 Commission Report states, on Page 305, that “At 9:58:59, the South Tower collapsed in ten seconds” Well, yes, it does. The 9-11 Commission Report was tasked with looking into events leading up to attack, responses to the attack, and possible changes in procedure and policy to deal with future terrorist activities. What it does not contain is technical information about the causes of the building collapse, that was left up to the NIST report. But because truthers are by their very nature sheep incapable of independent thought they take everything they are told as gospel. Truther like to defend the party line as it comes down from the conspiracy theorist kingpins like David Ray Griffin and Alex Jones, and they wrongly assume people who are debunking them are equally as constrained. As I debunk the bunk from the nincompoop brigade I find I almost never have to reference the 9/11 Commission Report, there is plenty of real world science and just general logic to lampoon truther loons with.
This tactic of picking a small error in a papers is very familiar to anyone who has had to deal with creationist. Anti evolution people love to point out that Darwin believed evolution was a slow and steady progression, as it turns out species tend to evolve in jumps a spirts. It doesn’t negate the fact Darwin has the basics of evolution right.
But then the 911 Commission Report was not a scientific paper and insisting that ten seconds is meant to be a scientifically definitive statement shows a complete lack of critical reasoning skills.
Technical information on the building collapse is in the NIST reports, Like this chronology of the collapse once the buildings began to fall, but the NIST site has the pertinent information.
“The seismic spikes for the collapse of the WTC Towers are the result of debris from the collapsing towers impacting the ground. The spikes began approximately 10 seconds after the times for the start of each building’s collapse and continued for approximately 15 seconds.”
So according to the seismic record, the first impacts are about ten seconds after the onset of collapse. That would be the free-falling debris. Seismic signals continued for 15 more seconds. So it took at least about 25 seconds for the buildings to totally collapse. The fact dust obscured the last few seconds of the collapse the seismic records is the best way to judge the total collapse time. When I first heard the 10 second claim I did what any skeptic would do, I watched some of the videos and “counted” and it confirmed what I suspected. it took more than twice as long for the buildings to fall than the conspiracy kook tell you.
From video evidence, significant portions of the cores of both buildings (roughly 60 stories of WTC 1 and 40 stories of WTC 2) are known to have stood 15 to 25 seconds after collapse initiation before they, too, began to collapse. Neither the duration of the seismic records nor video evidence (due to obstruction of view caused by debris clouds) are reliable indicators of the total time it took for each building to collapse completely.
In other words, the momentum (which equals mass times velocity) of the 12 to 28 stories (WTC 1 and WTC 2, respectively) falling on the supporting structure below (which was designed to support only the static weight of the floors above and not any dynamic effects due to the downward momentum) so greatly exceeded the strength capacity of the structure below that it (the structure below) was unable to stop or even to slow the falling mass. The downward momentum felt by each successive lower floor was even larger due to the increasing mass.
9-11 troofers are a lot like some Biblical fundamentalists. Anything that they want to believe is to be taken with absolute literalness, and anything that contradicts what they want to believe, they just ignore.
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