Office equipment prolonged 9/11 fire

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/27/office_equipment_prolonged_911_fire/

Computers and other office equipment fueled the World Trade Center fires long after the jets that crashed into the towers incinerated, suggesting a need to consider new fire codes for modern office buildings, federal investigators said yesterday. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is investigating the cause of the buildings' collapse on Sept. 11, 2001, re-created the World Trade Center fire in a mock cubicle.

Investigators discovered that while the jet fuel and the planes' contents burned up in a matter of minutes, the contents of the buildings, including the many office cubicles on the upper floors, continued burning until the structures collapsed.

The institute, a part of the Commerce Department, is conducting a two-year inquiry to create a computer model of the tragedy. The goal is to understand exactly how the fire evolved in the towers, and the specific factors that contributed to their collapse.

"What we are ultimately trying to model is the spread of a fire through the building," said Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the institute's investigation.

[frylock]

1. if true, then it makes it even harder to believe that fire was the cause..

of the collapse of those buildings.

[gandalf]

2. That's what FEMA claims, too

and it means that the fire that finally was (according to FEMA) responsible for the collapse of the building was a normal office fire (for which the WTC was prepared).
The FEMA hypothesis is based on the cumulative effect of both plane crash and subsequent fire.
It is not more than a hypothesis, as NIST states.
Every statement about how obviously the official explanation is correct (such statements abounds on the other WTC thread) is therefore premature.

[DBoon]

3. Finally proof

That cubicles are in fact very dangerous.

Another reason to telecommute.

[Dancing_Dave]

4. Media plays SPIN THE STUDY

A strange thing about this article is that it conveys an extremely misleading impression of the study it's about. Perhaps it was just an accidental slip from some overworked journalist. What the research really shows is that the jet fuel burned up quickly, but a regular office fire continued on...until the buildings were demolished by whatever means. Yet I think an unspecialized reader might come away with the mistaken impression that these office fires caused the disintigration and collapse of the Twin Towers. But what it really shows is exactly the opposite, because office fires like this happen all the time, they get no where near hot enough to melt the steel structures, and no matter how many floors are gutted by such fires (in the very worse cases) they never ever cause any disintigration or collapse of a steel framed building.

And notice that the article doesn't say "continued burning until the fires caused the structure to collapse" -- That would have been an outright lie! It say "continued burning until the structures collapsed". Technically, that is correct. The fireman in the south tower who made it up to the floor where the plane had struck found a few little pockets of office fire still going on, and asked for the help of a few more guys to put the regular office fire out. Urban fireman do this kind of thing all the time. But then buildings and the fireman were suddenly blown to smithereens by an unexpected series of explosions...

[LARED]

8. Unspinning Dancing_Dave

Yet I think an unspecialized reader might come away with the mistaken impression that these office fires caused the disintigration and collapse of the Twin Towers.

I'm pretty sure most so called unspecialized readers would correctly come away with the impression that the office fires were correctly an element of the the collapse of the WTC's. Are you a specialized reader Dave? Your specialty seems to be propaganda. If not, what is your specialty?

But what it really shows is exactly the opposite, because office fires like this happen all the time,....

Really? Please show me some office fires that were started by large quantities of jet fuel after a large jet crashed into the building that destroyed fire safety systems like sprinklers and fire-stops.

....they get no where near hot enough to melt the steel structures,....

Most specialized readers already know that the steel did not melt and the fires were not hot enough to melt the steel. The steel does not even need to get close to its melting point to reach the point where its loss of strength compromises its ability to carry loads.

...and no matter how many floors are gutted by such fires (in the very worse cases) they never ever cause any disintigration or collapse of a steel framed building.

This is a bogus argument. First off there have been small multi-story steel structure that have failed due to fire. Even if that isn't true it makes no difference as there has never been a structure like the WTC building to collapse in this fashion because there has never been an incident like it before. There is nothing to compare this failure to past failures.

The reason the office fires are important to the failure of the structure is because the fire protection systems designed into office building were compromised by the impacts. There is a reason office building are fireproofed and typically sprinklered. Here is an AMAZING FACT for you Dave. Buildings are fireproofed exactly because a normal office fire will compromise the steel. It is fireproofed to help stop the spread of fire. It is sprinklered to help contain, mitigate the spread, and cool the building.

The WTC fire protection systems were seriously damaged, The jet fuel created multiple office fires over large areas of the building. There was nothing or very little to mitigate those fires.

To make the claim that office fires like this happen all the time, highlights your ignorance or your purposeful spread propaganda.

[DeadBroke]

9. "Fires like this"

While the fires have received a lot of attention in these threads I feel that they have been underestimated, especially when compared to other notable high rise fires in history, such as the often mentioned one in Philadelphia. I think it's comparing apples to oranges.

Even though they were once record setting in height and had other unique characteristics, the towers of the WTC were still typical modern office buildings; sealed buildings with inoperable windows, where inside air was mechanically exchanged with the outside.

Despite receiving past criticism I will state that from my own firefighting experiences I know that fires in these types of buildings normally lack sufficent air to really get rolling. Fire is fuel, heat, and air. Firefighting, by the application of cool water, removes one or more of the legs of that triangle for extinguishment. Fires, for me, were more easily controlled in sealed buildings due to the limited quanities of air.

It's obvious that the walls of the towers were breached and that these fires fed off an abundant quanity of air. Those breached walls ALONE make the fires at the 911 WTC incident totally different from any other high rise fire in history.

Also: LARED makes an excellent point about the mitigation of the fires. A modern office building usually has three things working for it during a fire. First and foremost is the fire detection and protection systems - sprinklers, fire pumps, automatic alarm systems, pressurized stairwells, etc. The second is the firefighters that will arrive. Third and last is the building itself; what it's made of, and how it is constructed. Considering those three factors I again don't see how these fires compare to any others.

[BassettWilliams]

5. Need help here please

1) Does anyone know if the fire sprinklers were activated on 9/11? It's been my understanding that they were supplied by a 10,000 gallon water tank somewhere near the top floors.

2) Do these "recreations" use an activated sprinkler system or are they assuming it did not work or was immobilized?

[Dancing_Dave]

6. You could try checking out NIST

I don't know if this is the best study on the planet of that issue, but it's latest U.S. Goverment sponsored study of the WTC fires.
http://wtc.nist.gov/

[plaguepuppy]

7. About the NIST study

As they say, a NIST is as good as a Nile to a blind horse that can't swim, nudge nudge wink wink...

But in reality NIST is the closest thing to an in-depth study that we have at this point, and two years after the event it is still at the data-gathering stage. At about the half-way point of their proposed 24 month study, their May 2003 Progress Report (http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/MediaUpdate%20_FINAL_ProgressReport051303.pdf) offers:

"{the} outline of an approach to assess the most probable structural collapse sequence that integrates impact damage, fire dynamics, thermal-structural response, and collapse initiation analyses
using a combination of physics-based mathematical modeling, statistical, and probabilistic methods..."

They are basically starting from scratch by looking at everything (except of course for explosives) that might have contributed to the collapse and seeing what kind of model they can construct that will (roughly) fit the data. As they make clear in their mission statement they do not take any of the collapse mechanisms proposed in the FEMA/ASCE report or elsewhere as a starting point.

As for the fire modelling, the only publication to date is the Initial Model for Fires in the World Trade Center Towers, published May 2002:
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/WTC_total__rept.pdf

It is little more than an initial model that tries to estimate total heat output from the north tower based on the behavior of the smoke plume, and doesn't make any attempt to estimate temperatures reached at various points in the building. And that after all is what we must know before we can say that metal softening from the fires caused the collapses, a theory that remains unproven at this point.