alt.politics.usa.republican

In article < @ >, me wrote:
> On Oct 22, 1:10 pm, "Cameron L. Spitzer"
> wrote:
> [snip]
>> The experts who predicted the WTC towers would eventually
>> collapse from fire, before the ground was even broken for
>> their construction, didn't even need aircraft impacts.
>> The one whose lecture I sat through, thirty two years ago,
>> expected shorted out coffee makers or copiers would one day
>> bring down each of those rickety firetraps. On 9/11, his
>> chalkboard drawing came to life, right down to the "squibs."
>> (The "squibs" show the supersonic progression of the shock
>> wave that shatters the steel frame.)
> [snip]
>
> I do wonder if there aren't construction code boards all over the
> country trying to figure out what to do about updating their
> fire protection codes.

It was a long time ago and I didn't take notes. Never expected
I'd want the name of that professor of fire protection engineering
or exact citations for the materials he put on reserve for
us in the library. But as I recall, the central objection
was that the volume of the building relative to its surface
area pretty much guaranteed that an out of control fire
would compromise the structure. As things get bigger, volume goes
up faster than surface area. And because the structures
were fundamentally impossible to fireproof, to make them safe
would have required special fire suppression equipment on
every floor, which didn't happen. The safety people also wanted
external fire escapes, which didn't happen because they would
have taken valuable window office space.




> IIUC, the fire protection in the towers
> failed pretty quickly after impact.

The "fire protection" was a joke. Blown-on lightweight grout.
Buildings like that really need solid concrete jackets poured
around the steel. But the extra weight would have limited those
towers to about eighty stories. It was a classic case of
marketing guys overriding engineers. The engineers said
you can either have that open-plan floor space or 110 stories,
but not both, and the marketing guys said sorry, find a way
to give us both. The way was to make the buildings unsafe.

Lightweight grout was the reason the floor decks pulverized, too.
That stuff was so soft it had to be protected from spike heels.



> I'm also curious what is going on in emergency planning
> around the country. One of the things that happened,
> both in NYC and New Orleans, was that the very infrastructure
> that was expected to be used to respond to emergencies,
> was compromised. Preparing for those kind of situations
> can't be easy, or cheap.

Well that was what the lecture was really about, the
responsibility of engineers and scientists to raise hell
about risks to public safety. Unfortunately, our whole
society is structured to prevent science from informing
public policy. We have a handful of doddering old fools
who once worked in climate science, sponsored by oil and
coal companies, being allowed to drown out the consensus of
practically everyone working in that field today, and the
result is that public policy worldwide essentially ignores
anthropogenic climate change, risking the collapse of the
whole biosphere. Which was the other example the old man
used of things we had a duty to speak out about. It's
insane. But the money men are firmly in charge, and
they've got the men with guns, and we're going to keep
right on building unsafe structures and poisoning the
atmosphere and the oceans and the groundwater and ignoring
any risks whose mitigation might cut into profits.
There isn't the political will to prepare for "those
kind of situations." It's easier to deny they exist.


Cameron