Why do 9/11 conspiracy theorists focus so much on the melting point of steel? Wouldn't the structural damage be enough for the towers to collapse?

That’s an excellent question! The melting point of steel is an issue because the government has not explained the melted steel that was reported by 8 PhDs and FDNY Captain Philip Ruvolo. Steel melts at 2800 F. Jet fuel under ideal conditions burns at about 1800 F. Smoky fires indicate that the combustion at the WTC was far from ideal. The government tells us that the jet fuel burned off in less than ten minutes, and that after that we had just an ordinary office fire.

Obviously the structural damage was NOT enough to cause the towers to collapse, because they stood as much as 102 minutes after the plane impacts. Most structural engineers were surprised when the towers collapsed, said NOVA. The towers’ engineers had claimed in a 1964 white paper that the design would withstand the impact of a 4-engine 707 jetliner flying at 600 mph. The chief engineer, John Skilling, told the Seattle Times in 1993 that the towers would not only survive the impact, but also the fires.

The self-styled “debunkers” have a set of plausible-sounding but toothless talking points.

They’ll claim that the steel didn’t have to melt, but only needed to be weakened. The problem with this argument is that it obscures two important truths — there was unexplained melted steel, and the government’s (NIST’s) core steel samples taken from the wreckage only show heating to 480 F, not hot enough to weaken it.

They’ll claim that no assays were done to confirm that the melted material was steel. That’s a bald-faced lie. FEMA’s report includes in Appendix C a report by 3 PhDs that discusses the intragranular melting of WTC steel. It was steel, and it melted. (The New York Times claimed in two separate articles that the steel “vaporized.”) A professor of structural engineering at Berkeley, Dr. Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, told PBS TV “I saw melting of girders at WTC.” Unless the “debunkers” think there were aluminum girders in the WTC, a melted girder is melted steel. Dr. Asteneh-Asl even took pictures.

FEMA took pictures too —

It’s steel. It vaporized. Face facts. We need answers.

Commentary on other answers.

Mr. Furusang points out that steel doesn’t have to melt to weaken — but doesn’t acknowledge that melted steel was documented and that NIST’s core steel samples only show heating to 480 F — not hot enough to weaken them.

Mr. Friend claims that the fact of the melted steel is “irrelevant,” but provides no justification for that opinion. He also claims that NORAD failed to detect the hijacked planes because their radars looked outward and not domestically. This claim is contradicted by NORAD’s Major Kevin Nasypany, who claimed in a Vanity Fair article that NORAD’s inability to track the airliners was because they had a green sea of radar blips that showed every airplane in the sky. Mr. Friend seeks to shrug off the fact that 600-mph airliners were bumbling around the skies off course for a total period of almost 2 hours with (authorities claim) no interference from NORAD’s 1800-mph F-15s — even though al Qaeda’s plot to fly hijacked airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center and other landmark buildings had been known to US authorities since 1995.

Mr. Monteiro tells us that steel turns into cooked spaghetti long before it melts. True enough — but again, NIST’s core steel samples do not show heating sufficient to soften the steel.

Mr. Monteiro’s invocation of the blacksmith video is very peculiar.

First off, the blacksmith has to heat up his steel in a furnace. There was no furnace at the WTC. The jet fuel burned off in ten minutes. It was an office fire. For a more realistic demonstration, the smith would need to heat his steel using a bit of lighter fluid and a bunch of paper.

Second, the blacksmith heated the bottom part of the steel, not the top. The towers were heated at the top.

Third, the blacksmith exerts enormous leverage on the heated steel. There was no “Finger of God” pushing laterally on the top of the twin towers to bend the bottom. For a more realistic demonstration, the blacksmith would need to push the steel axially (straight down) and not laterally with enormous leverage. What would happen if he pushed straight down? NOTHING!

The blacksmith’s demonstration is a joke. Frankly, I suspect that the video may have been a very clever prank by a 9/11 truther because it very effectively disproves its own claims.

Of course the structural damage from the impact and from the fires was enough to seriously weaken the buildings and cause their collapse. But that is a very simple explanation backed by actual hard science. Not good enough for these nuts. So instead, they ignore it and focus on a single irrelevant fact to “prove” their point. Basically all of 9/11 conspiracy theory is based on this tactic. Edit:Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report - The World Trade Center

For instance, one of their “proofs” that it was some super secret-squirrel government setup is that NORAD didn’t manage to get any fighters to the hijacked planes in time. This essentially ignores what NORAD was, and the realities of what it would have taken. NORAD’s radars looked outward, because they were designed to detect Soviet bombers. They didn’t track domestic flights. They didn’t really communicate with the FAA. They don’t keep fighters on standby at every base in the country, or many of them at all. But no, you listen to these lunatics, and “NORAD didn’t get fighters there” is proof positive that it was the government.

My favorite is the Pentagon. These fools claim it was hit by a cruise missile. You ask them what ship fired it, they can’t tell you, or they claim it was in Israeli ship despite the Israelis not having a blue-water navy or being stupid enough to attack their only ally in the world, but again, facts don’t matter to these guys. Their proof it was a cruise missile, in spite of clear photographs of airliner wreckage and video showing the plane impacting, is that “an airliner can’t fly that low”. I guess they never heard of landing.

The amount of evidence you have to ignore to believe in these 9/11 conspiracy theories is truly staggering. The amount you have to make up to explain away the events while ignoring the actual evidence is even more ridiculous, and goes into the realm of the truly bizarre when they talk about idiocy like how no planes crashed into the WTC, and we were shown elaborate holograms to make us think that they did, government managing to mysteriously disappear anywhere from 1–4 airliners (depending on the version of the idiocy) full of people, etc. This is all tinfoil hat stuff, and if someone says they’re a 9/11 truther, that’s a good point to stop taking anything they have to say seriously.

TL/DR - there is no clear evidence of molten steel. Thermite could never have created molten steel weeks after collapse.

They focus on this because they point to eye witness testimony of molten steel weeks after collapse and say there is no way standard fire could have created this. They then make the claim that their theory of collapse, that thermite brought the towers down, is therefore far more credible because thermite burns hit enough to melt steel - this view has two gigantic flaws though.

1. you cannot have an eye witness to ‘‘molten steel” - molten metal yes, steel no. The reason for this is it’s impossible to define the metallurgical make up of a molten metal merely by looking at it. It’s the equivalent of placing two bottles of clear liquid in front of you and asking you to identify which is poison and which is water merely by looking at them. To actually identify molten steel you would need to find metal that had solidified and then test it to confirm it was steel - no solidified pools of steel were reported as being found at ground zero. The most likely explanation for the eye witness testimony is a) they saw metal glowing, this is not ‘molten’ and can easily be achieved by normal fires b) they saw other molten metals such as aluminium (which will glow orange at around 900c if not in direct sunlight) or c) eye witness testimony is sadly notoriously unreliable.
2. Lets say molten steel was seen though - does this prove the use of thermite? No, in fact the exact opposite. Thermite burns incredibly quick, even in low oxygen environments as it produces its own oxygen, thermite burns incredibly aggressively, it’s one of the reasons it burns so hot - it also means it burns quickly. As I mentioned many of the reports of molten steel are days and weeks after collapse, which is days and weeks after any thermite would have burnt up (it cannot even be argued that piles of unburnt thermite was ignited weeks after because thermite is so hard to ignite standard fires would not achieve this). It’s the equivalent of starting a small wood fire, placing a pan on it, throwing a steak in the pan and then coming back three weeks later and expecting your steak to be nice and warm. To claim that there was molten steel weeks after collapse means you need a fuel source that burns for weeks on end and ata temperature hotter than the melting point of steel - thermite in any form cannot do that so you would rule it out straight away. You cannot even argue that molten steel was insulated as the majority of the debris pile was steel and concrete - both of which are terrible insulators.

So there you have it - truthers focus on molten steel because they say it doesn’t fit the official story - whilst forgetting it in no way fits their story either. The truth of the matter is that there was likely no molten steel at ground zero - what there was was heavily eroded steel, the cause of which has been investigated and Professor Sissons, one of the worlds leading metallurgists on steel erosion has put forward the view that the metal was attacked by a liquid slag.

Because it is an easy sound bite. People relate to it very easily. They have seen ice melt and think steel is the same.

They know ice melts at 0 C (32 F), and ice turns into water, solid into liquid. So when someone tells them that steel melts at a higher temperature than the fire at 9/11, they instantly make the connection with ice and think “wait a minute, this can’t be, we are being fooled!”.

The reality is that steel does not melt like ice. If you want to make a closer comparison, take candle wax, as candle wax warms, it becomes softer. It gets to a point where its not liquid yet, but you can mold it very easily. Steel is similar, as it warms up, it becomes malleable. Long before it melts, it has the resistance of overcooked spaghetti.

This guy shows it perfectly:

You miss the speed of collapse. NIST, a federal agency, admitted that WTC 1 and 2 came down in 9 seconds and 11 seconds.

Let me ask it a different way. The floors under where the planes hit were no hotter than the rest of NYC until collapse initiation. They had stood since the 70’s. Why didn’t those undamaged offer more resistance?

Because we’re apparently we’re supposed to believe everything Donald Trump says. [1] That was obviously sarcastic however there is a video of him explaining he believed there was an initial explosion before the crashing of planes.

Footnotes

[1] https://ultramodern.shop/blogs/n...

Probably because the melting point of steel is easy to relate to. What they fail to understand is that metals lose their strength progressively untill melting temperature is achieved, and that thermal expansion may give rise to 2. order effects as well.

There is a wealth of information available about all aspects of what happened on 9/11. While I consider the President a serial liar, it is interesting to look up the video where he is saying that the WTC towers were so tough, and built with so much steel, that no plane could bring them down. Rather, Trump said, there were bombs inside! Look it up!